Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India, 1500–1700 C.E.
SAMUEL WRIGHT
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wright, Samuel (historian of South Asia), author.
Title: A time of novelty : logic, emotion, and intellectual life in early modern India, 1500-1700 C.E. / Samuel Wright.
Description: 1. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050208 (print) | LCCN 2020050209 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197568163 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197568187 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Navya Nyāya—Early works to 1800. | India—Intellectual life—16th century. | India—Intellectual life—17th century. | Fallacies (Logic)—Early works to 1800. | Hindu logic. | Emotional intelligence.
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050208
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050209
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568163.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To Shweta, Mira, and my mum, Frances
List
Maps
0.1. Early Modern South Asia: Select Towns and Cities xix
5.1. Manuscript Economy: Northern View 169
5.2. Manuscript Economy: Southern View 170
I.1. Sanskrit Logicians by Region and Date
A.1. Data for Map 5.1: Manuscript Economy: Northern View
A.2. Data for Map 5.2: Manuscript Economy: Southern View 228
Preface and Acknowledgments
This book attempts to expand the ways in which we study philosophical thought by considering it to be deeply immersed in the felt experiences of one’s life. Such an investigation that attempts to recover a space for emotion within the activity of thinking is extremely productive in my view because it allows us to ask about ways of being that are rarely, if ever, addressed in the history of philosophy. These ways of being reveal an intellectual life, which, as this book explores, is located at the confluence of thinking and feeling, and which contains the imaginative processes that facilitate the appearance of intellectual communities.
In reflecting on the writing of this book, then, I must acknowledge the support and generosity of a number of individuals without whom, and institutions without which, my own intellectual life would have been impossible.
My initial thoughts were worked out in conversation with an exceptionally supportive dissertation committee at the University of Chicago, Gary Tubb, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Matthew Kapstein. I am privileged to have been able to explore ideas presented here that bear the imprint of their critical insights.
I thank Jonardon Ganeri, Parimal Patil, and Sheldon Pollock for their continuous support. Their ideas have deeply shaped my thinking.
Sarasvati Mohan and Sally Sutherland-Goldman introduced me to the complex world of Sanskrit and Mandira Bhaduri and Clinton Seely inaugurated my study of Bangla, teachings that remain foundational. I cherish the year spent reading Bangla literature with Jayanti Chattopadhyay. Raoul Birnbaum, S. Paul Kashap, and Ellen Suckiel taught me the true meaning of dialogue. Doug Powers introduced me to the complexities of the human mind.
Much of my research was carried out in Kolkata and Delhi. I thank the staff of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat; Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts; National Library, Kolkata; National Manuscript Mission; Nabadvip Puratattva Parishad; and Sanskrit College, Kolkata. The Committee on
Southern Asian Studies, University of Chicago, supported my research; and the American Institute of Indian Studies supported my language study.
Much of my writing took place in Toronto and Ahmedabad. In Toronto, I often worked in the picturesque Pratt Library. This would not have been possible without the support of Frances Garrett. At Ahmedabad, I discussed ideas with wonderful colleagues, particularly Sarthak Bagchi, Aparajita Basu, Mary Ann Chacko, Aditi Deo, Manomohini Dutta, Maya Jasanoff, Murari Kumar Jha, Apaar Kumar, A. P. Ashwin Kumar, Aparajith Ramnath, Karthik Rao-Cavale, Shishir Saxena, and Joseph van Weelden.
For their kindness and support, I thank my former colleagues at Nalanda University, Kashshaf Ghani, Arne Harms, Aditya Malik, Sraman Mukherjee, Ranu Roychoudhuri, Gopa Sabharwal, and Aviram Sharma.
Bill Nelson created the exquisite maps that grace the pages of the book. Thanks to Sunil Kumar, I presented an early version of Chapter 5 to the Department of History, Delhi University.
The most critical intervention I received on the ideas in this book were from two outstanding anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press. I express profound gratitude to each of them for their close readings. I am extremely grateful to Cynthia Read, my editor, who was enthusiastic and supportive of this project from the very beginning and brought the book into the light of day. Brent Matheny graciously guided me through the production of the book.
I am exceptionally grateful to the Ludo and Rosane Rocher Foundation for a subvention toward the book’s publication. Patrick Olivelle, John Nemec, and Rosane Rocher ensured a smooth process and were ever-supportive.
Jim Nye and Mary Rader opened my eyes to the world of South Asian archives. Muzaffar Alam, Daniel Arnold, and Whitney Cox saw me through various stages of my graduate program at Chicago. For their support over the years, I thank Abhijit Banerjee, Thibaut d’Hubert, Ethan Kroll, Lawrence McCrea, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Laura Ring, Alex Watson, and Dominik Wujastyk.
Small extracts of Chapter 3 are closely adapted with permission from two of my earlier articles, “From Praśasti to Political Culture: The Nadia Raj and Malla Dynasty in Seventeenth-Century Bengal,” Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 2 (May 2014): 397–418; and “The Practice and Theory of Property in Seventeenth-Century Bengal,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 54, no. 2 (April 2017): 147–182.
But what of emotion? I have been thinking about his book in some form or other for nearly the last fifteen years; and, as a result, it contains the diverse moments of my life. James, Chris, and Carla, my dear friends from school, kept me grounded in true friendship and music despite the long distances. Chrish and Ron gave us a home and many warm gatherings in Washington, DC, during our years there. Anil Uncle and Kumi Auntie always welcomed us in Delhi for extended discussions over delicious food and great stories. Prashanto, Soma, and Progya were comrades in the cold Toronto winters. Naushad-da, Shindhu-di, and Binu-di made our many moves in India easier and cared for my daughter while I wrote.
My late grandparents, Margaret and Walter, uplifted my spirits and told me stories of my past that made me feel whole. My brothers and their families—Joe, Karin, Walter, Victoriano; Thomas, Cassie, Benjamin, and Jameson—have been wellsprings of laughter and provided solace during difficult times; as was my sister, Ella, who brought much joy. Uncle Derek and Aunt Hillary made transits through London memorable; and Uncle Bill travelled long distances to visit us. Mimi-didi, Arun-da, and Basho always kept the doors open.
Anju and Sandipan (Ma and Bapi), Cuty, Aripana, and the late Mataji showed the way to exotic sojourns, gave us a roof when we needed one, and ensured the next celebration was not too far away. Ma and Bapi have been our foundation for more than a decade while we moved across cities and continents. Jethu and Jethima, ever-nurturing, saw me through my research in Kolkata. Bibi-didi, Nikhil-bhaiya, Pishi, Sunil, and Deep have been constant sources of support over the last fifteen years and created lasting memories.
My father, Paul, inspired me to take up academic life. I thank him for his endless confidence in me and for his excitement in reading my work, even though much different from his own field.
Shweta’s love sustained my writing while her criticisms made me rethink my arguments. She is the confluence of thought and emotion in my life without whom this book could never have come into being and, once emerged, would never have been completed. Mira was born and has grown up with this book, giving me the wonderful distractions that are life’s most precious moments. To both, I am indebted far beyond the horizon of my lifetime. My late mother, Frances, filled my life with love and dedicated herself to my education. She was and is the best of me. Even though she left this
Preface and Acknowledgments
world when I was young, her memory survives in each and every page of this book.
I finished this book under quarantine in Panchkula in the warm embrace of family as the coronavirus spread across India and the world. I was often reminded of the words of Anne Frank, “when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, . . . that peace and tranquility will return once more.”1 Her words evoke a hope-filled future in which, after overcoming this crisis, we practice more compassionate ways of being human together.
1 Frank 1991, 330.
English Translations of Sanskrit Titles
An Analysis of Liberation in Kashi
An Analysis of Objectivity
~ Kāśīmokṣavicāra
~ Viṣayatāvicāra
An Analysis of the Debate on Liberation ~ Muktivādavicāra
An Assemblage of Lotuses in the Form of Pilgrimage Sites ~ Tīrthakamalākara
Bouquet of Canonical Positions in Nyāya ~ Nyāyasiddhāntamañjarī
Bouquet of the Language of the Gods
~ Gīrvāṇavāṅmañjarī
Bouquet of Logic ~ Nyāyamañjarī
The Bridge to the Three Sacred Places
Chapter on Gifts
A Closely Guarded Teaching of Established
Conclusions
Compendium on Devotion
Compendium on Logic
Composition on Joy
Consideration of the Discourse on Liberation
~ Tristhalīsetu
~ Dānakāṇḍa
~ Siddhāntarahasya
~ Bhaktisandarbha
~ Tarkasaṃgraha
~ Prītisandarbha
~ Muktivādavicāra
A Crest of Moons That Are Pilgrimage Sites ~ Tīrthenduśekhara
Dictionary of Amara
Discernment of Definitions
Discourse on Vedānta
An Elaboration
~ Amarakośa
~ Bhāṣāpariccheda
~ Vedāntaparibhāṣā
~ Prasāriṇī
The Elucidation ~ Prakāśa
Elucidation of the Teaching of the Kāvyaprakāśa ~ Kāvyaprakāśarahasyaprakāśa
An Essay on Auspiciousness ~ Maṅgalavāda
An Essay on Causality ~ Kāraṇatāvāda
An Essay on Doubt ~ Saṃśayavāda
An Essay on Dying in Kashi as a Cause (of Liberation)
Kāśīmaraṇakāraṇatāvāda
An Essay on God ~ Īśvaravāda
An Essay on Heat and Its Effects ~ Pākajavāda
An Essay on Heaven ~ Svargavāda
An Essay on Joy in Viṣṇu ~ Viṣṇuprītivāda
An Essay on Laws ~ Vidhivāda
An Essay on Liberation ~ Mutkivāda
An Essay on the Negative Particle ~ Nañvāda
An Essay on Objectivity ~ Viṣayatāvāda
An Essay on Permanent Happiness ~ Nityasukhavāda
An Essay on Veridicality ~ Prāmāṇyavāda
The Essence of Logic ~ Tarkāmrta
The Essence of Nyāya Principles ~ Nyāyasiddhāntasāra
An Essay on the Production of the Property-Relation ~ Svatvajanakatāvāda
The Essence of the Puranas ~ Purāṇasāra
The Essence of the Thought-Jewel ~ Maṇisāra
The Essentials of the Bridge to the Three Sacred Places ~ Tristhalīsetusārasaṃgraha
An Examination of “Consideration” in Inferential Reasoning ~ Anumitiparāmarśavicāra
Examination of the New View ~ Navīnamatavicāra
An Exposition ~ Vyākhyā
Immortal Nectar of Krishna’s Feet ~ Krṣṇapadāmrta
An Inquiry into the True Nature of the Ontological Categories ~ Padārthatattvanirūpaṇa
Light-Ray ~ Dīdhiti
Mālatī and Mādhava ~ Mālatīmādhava
The Messenger of the Foot-Prints ~ Padāṅkadūta
New Essay on Liberation ~ Navamuktivāda
An Ocean of Codes of Traditional Law ~ Smārtavyavasthārṇava
An Offering of Ontological Categories ~ Padārthamālā
The Proof for Brahman’s Non-Duality ~ Advaitabrahmasiddhi
The Removal of Errors through Splendorous Light ~ Ālokakaṇṭakoddhara
Stream of Light ~ Kiraṇāvalī
The Thought-Jewel of Truth ~ Tattvacintāmaṇi
True Essence of Pilgrimage Sites ~ Tīrthatattva
A Vessel on the Waves of Bliss ~ Ānandalaharītari
AR ABI AN SE A
Punyastambha
Wai
Hampi
Bednur
Kathmandu N
Darbhanga
Krishnanagar
Navadvip
Bikrampur
BA Y OF BENGAL
Kancipuram
Tanjavur
IND I AN O CEA N
Map 0.1 Early Modern South Asia: Select Towns and Cities.
Banaras
Shantipur
Dhaka
Lahore
Agra
Delhi Jammu
Note on Transliteration
I do not use diacritics for names of places and rivers; nor for “Vaishnava/ism,” “zamindar,” and “majumdar,” unless part of a name. For Sanskrit, standard transliteration is used (ALA-LC 2012). My transliteration of Bengali/Bangla materials, though infrequent, requires some comment. In this case, I follow the Library of Congress (ALA-LC 2017) transliteration table, except in the case of the final inherent vowel. This is not transliterated unless a word is the first member of a compound (e.g., jalada-śarīr), when a word ends in a conjunct (e.g., grantha), when a word is a past passive participle (e.g., girata), and when a word ends in /h/ (e.g., ḍaha). The Bengali materials also may contain nonstandard spellings, and I have retained these variants in transliteration.
Introduction
“Tell me, why did your father leave Banaras and stay for so many years in Bengal?”
“He stayed there to study.”
“But, couldn’t he have studied here in Banaras?”
“Of course—but, logic is studied in Bengal.”
Dhuṇḍirāja, circa 1700
Written at the turn of the eighteenth century, this dialogue would have been inconceivable two centuries earlier.1 In the early years of the sixteenth century, the study of logic by Sanskrit scholars in Bengal was only just beginning. The most famous Sanskrit logician of Bengal, Raghunātha Śiromaṇi, was likely still writing his well-known work, An Inquiry into the True Nature of the Ontological Categories, and commentaries on seminal works in logic were just beginning to be composed.2
Still, the notion that one needed to travel in order to participate in the life of Sanskrit logic was already commonplace. Stories circulating from the sixteenth century told that Raghunātha’s teacher had secretly memorized a number of older, canonical works on logic when he was a student in the Mithila region of northern Bihar (Darbhanga), the earlier center for the study of Sanskrit logic. Then, after migrating to Bengal, he taught them to
1 A dialogue between a householder and an ascetic in Dhuṇḍirāja’s A Bouquet of the Language of the Gods, a story he composed for the teaching of Sanskrit (Shah 1960, 29): are tava pitā vārāṇasīṃ tyaktvā gauḍadeśe bahuvarṣaparyantaṃ kim arthaṃ sthitaḥ. svāminaḥ vidyābhyāsārthaṃ sthitaḥ tarhi kāśyām adhyayanaṃ na bhavati kim. na bhavati kutaḥ. bhavati parantu tatra tarke [variant: tarkam] adhītam. Though writing from Banaras, Dhuṇḍirāja is originally from Maharashtra (ibid., 5, introduction).
2 Raghunātha’s works remained on the syllabus for the study of logic into the eighteenth century (Shah 1960, 29). The chronology of Raghunātha’s works is only partially known. He wrote An Inquiry into the True Nature of the Ontological Categories after his Essay on the Negative Particle; see Raghudeva Nyāyālaṅkāra’s comments in Rajpal 2008, 4. Raghunātha’s teacher was Vāsudeva Sārvabhauma (D. Bhattcharya 2007, 36–47). Except in very few cases, I do not provide the Sanskrit title of the texts to which I refer; please see “English Translations of Sanskrit Titles.”
students in Navadvip, a small town in western Bengal and the epicenter of Sanskrit logic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Map 0.1 in the preliminary pages).3 Another story recounts that Raghunātha traveled from Navadvip to Mithila in order to complete his studies with a senior logician, but he ended up defeating his teacher in a philosophical debate witnessed by a large audience.4
Regardless of the veracity of these stories, each recasts significant intellectual and historical changes into narrative form. The story of Raghunātha’s teacher highlights the pedigree of Sanskrit logic in Bengal by drawing our attention to the fact that it had been transmitted from west to east—not dissimilar to narratives of knowledge transmission in other thought systems of Bengal such as devotionalism or bhakti 5 The story about Raghunātha casts Bengal and, specifically, Navadvip, as the emerging intellectual center for the study of Sanskrit logic.
These stories, then, speak to the fact that in the two centuries before Dhuṇḍirāja composed this dialogue, Sanskrit logic had undergone major transformations. Immediately after Raghunātha, logicians in Mithila began to assign geographic provenance to scholarly opinions from Bengal.6 A number of logicians, after training in Navadvip, migrated to Banaras, where they played an influential role in scholarly debates of the city. Manuscripts of works in Sanskrit logic circulated throughout countless towns and cities in a variety of local scripts. Sanskrit logicians after Raghunātha developed and pioneered the use of a highly technical language for philosophical writing. New genres were devised. And Sanskrit logicians increasingly referred to themselves and their arguments as “new” in distinction to other logicians and arguments they labeled “old,” suggesting that periodization was a central component of their philosophy.
Yet the importance of these two centuries in Sanskrit logic does not simply reside in what it may tell us about intellectual-historical change in a system of thought. To focus only on intellectual-historical change abstracts developments of this sort out of and away from the lives of those who
3 The Mithila region or Tirhut had its capital in this period in Darbhanga, although the capital often shifted and the historical information on this is meagre; see Choudhary 1970, 19–20, 148, 153n5, 169–171.
4 For these stories, see Ingalls 1951, 12n48, 13–15.
5 For Bengali devotionalism, see Stewart 2010, chap. 1; for Vedic knowledge in Bengal, see Eaton 1993, 6–8.
6 The terms are “belonging to Bengal” (gauḍīya) and “Bengal opinion” (gauḍa-mata), which refer to the Gauda subregion of Bengal where Navadvip is located (D. Bhattacharya 2007, 35–36). On this older geography, see Eaton 1993, 3–4.
participate in a system of thought both individually and collectively. Stated more strongly, such an approach dissociates intellection from intellectual life: Intellection is a component of intellectual life, rather than a detached domain of thought.7 Intellectual life contains the ways in which individuals undertake their thinking in parallel with the sentiments and values that underwrite their participation in intellectual activities, broadly considered, both as individual thinkers and collectively as intellectual communities.
This book argues that a philosophical community emerged in sixteenthand seventeenth-century India that crafted an intellectual life on the basis of intellectual and emotional responses to novelty in Sanskrit logic. As I demonstrate in this book, novelty was a primary concept used by Sanskrit logicians during this period to mark the boundaries of a philosophical community in both intellectual and emotional terms. By including emotion in the study of intellectual thought, I attempt to recover not only what it means to “think” novelty but also what it means to “feel” novelty. I explore the contours of what I call “intellectual novelty” and “affective novelty” in Sanskrit logic— expressions of novelty in which is contained the cognitive and emotional content that, taken together, constitute intellectual life. As these expressions of novelty are recognized and cared for, what is revealed is an imaginative process through which emerges a new philosophical community.
Sanskrit Logic and Its Contours
Before I am able to specify fully how this book attempts a new history for Sanskrit logic, I need to specify what I mean by Sanskrit logic and outline its contours as a system of thought. Only then will we be in a position to appreciate the historiographic turn I am attempting in the pages that follow.
In my opening remarks, the term “logic” (and my resulting phrase “Sanskrit logic”) is used as a gloss for the philosophical system of nyāyaśāstra. Nyāya-śāstra is a system of knowledge expressed in Sanskrit—and only Sanskrit—that deals primarily with epistemology and metaphysics set within a framework of philosophical realism. The concerns of this system of thought include, for example, how and why we are able to know and speak
7 I am influenced here by the words of Stuart Plattner, who writes, “the economy is an aspect of social life rather than a segment of society” (1989, 14) and the reflections by Martha Nussbaum (2001, 1–16).
