Early Modern India and the Role of Sanskrit Literati

This project is designed to bring about the completion of a book project. The book is about an Indian intellectual called Nilakantha Caturdhara. Nilakantha lived in Banaras in the late seventeenth century. He wrote many works in Sanskrit, the principle medium of educated discourse in India in those days. His most famous work was a commentary on the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. This is the principle commentary on the epic that is still in use by scholars to this day. No intellectual figure of this period who wrote in Sanskrit has had an intellectual biography written about him.

The aim of the book is not just to provide an intellectual biography of Nilakantha, but through studying him to shed light on the intellectual scene in Banaras in the period from 1600-1700. This was a period of tremendous dynamism in Indian intellectual activity. Many of the great works of Indian legal, political and moral discourse, and of the other learned arts and sciences in Sanskrit that modern scholars have been so interested in since the end of the eighteenth century were written in Banaras during this flourishing moment.

What were the circumstances that brought this moment about? How did Banaras become the centre for a continent-wide network of intellectual activity? What were the settings in which so many ideas were developed, revised, and argued over? How did scholars communicate with each other so quickly over long distances? How did they support themselves? How did they maintain their intellectual freedom from rulers and from religious organizations? Why did they continue to communicate in Sanskrit?

These questions and others about Indian intellectuals of the period make the study of Nilakantha and other Sanskrit scholars of his day a part of what is now referred to as the 'early modern' history of India and South Asia. How India arrived at the modern experience that it enjoys today is not very well explained by the old story, that is, that colonial rulers forced a distinctively European modern transformation onto a supposedly backward and benighted Indian populace. In fact many transformations to a form of modernity were already under way in India before the British and the French took power over any part of the subcontinent. The role in this transformation of scholars, scribes, bureaucrats and intellectuals who used Persian and Urdu has been studied already, but the role of the Sanskrit intellectuals, by which is mostly meant the Brahmins, has not.

Until recently modern Orientalist scholarship about Sanskrit authors has not been interested in authors of the early modern period, despite their importance. Nor has there been much attempt to connect their literary activities with the historical setting in which they worked. This project will be one of the first contributions to writing the larger history of early modern India, and to including figures like Nilakantha within it.