Early Modern India and the Role of Sanskrit Literati

这个项目的目的是完成一个图书项目。这本书是关于一位名叫Nilakantha Caturdhara的印度知识分子的。Nilakantha生活在17世纪晚期的巴纳拉斯。他用梵语写了许多作品，梵语是当时印度教育话语的主要媒介。他最著名的作品是对伟大的梵文史诗《摩诃婆罗多》的评论。这是对史诗的主要评论，至今仍被学者们使用。这一时期用梵语写作的知识分子中，没有人为他写过一本知识分子传记。这本书的目的不仅仅是提供一本尼拉干塔的知识分子传记，而是通过研究他来揭示1600-1700年间巴纳拉斯的知识分子场景。这是印度智力活动极为活跃的时期。许多伟大的印度法律、政治和道德论述著作，以及自18世纪末以来现代学者一直感兴趣的其他梵文艺术和科学著作，都是在这一繁荣时期用巴那拉斯语写成的。是什么情况导致了这一时刻？巴纳拉斯是如何成为一个遍及整个大陆的智力活动网络的中心的？在什么样的背景下，如此多的思想得以发展、修改和争论？学者们是如何在如此遥远的距离上如此迅速地交流的？他们是如何养活自己的？他们如何从统治者和宗教组织中保持思想自由？为什么他们继续用梵语交流？这些问题以及其他关于那个时期印度知识分子的问题，使得对Nilakantha和他那个时代的其他梵语学者的研究成为现在被称为印度和南亚“早期现代”历史的一部分。古老的故事并不能很好地解释印度是如何获得它今天所享受的现代经验的，也就是说，殖民统治者将一种独特的欧洲现代转型强加给了被认为是落后和愚昧的印度民众。事实上，在英国和法国统治印度次大陆的任何地方之前，印度就已经开始了许多向现代化形式的转变。使用波斯语和乌尔都语的学者、文士、官僚和知识分子在这种转变中的作用已经被研究过，但梵语知识分子的作用，主要是指婆罗门，还没有研究过。直到最近，关于梵语作家的现代东方学者才对早期现代时期的作家感兴趣，尽管他们很重要。也没有多少人试图将他们的文学活动与他们工作的历史背景联系起来。这个项目将成为撰写早期现代印度历史的首批贡献之一，并将Nilakantha等人物纳入其中。

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.