PROPUESTA DE UN MODELO EMPRESA DEL SECTOR

The picture of Jain activity in Rāṣṭrakūṭa King Amōghavarṣa’s court developed in the previous chapter captures the ways in which ninth-century Jains began to actively cultivate Sanskrit as an avenue of cosmopolitan belonging. With a focus on the king, Jains penetrated into the upper echelons of the court by producing texts as much invested in the reproduction of political power as in the reproduction of Jainism itself or, perhaps more accurately, a hybrid of the two. It should not surprise us that Jains mobilized literature for political and religious ends. Sheldon Pollock, for instance, has brought to life the ways in which arcana grammatical knowledge underpinned premodern South Asian modes of political self-fashioning.129 In the case of Amōghavarṣa’s court, all

knowledge—be it of grammar, math, or medicine—was rooted in Jain forms of worldly understanding (this was, after all, specifically Jainēndra forms of grammar, math, and medicine). Read in this way, Amōghavarṣa’s court was a moment in which Jainism itself exceeded containment as a merely religious phenomena and became legible as a larger cultural force. Jainism was part of a broader landscape of elite cultural production. While Jain literati desired to convert or, at the very minimum, imagine Amōghavarṣa as an ideal Jain king, the novelty of their collective project was in demonstrating that religious belief and sensibility does not necessarily adhere in a single individual or community. Rather, such beliefs and feelings can become a worlded and entrenched feature of an institution

129 _{Sheldon Pollock, Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and}

or culture, as reflected in Śrīvijaya’s Kavirājamārgaṃ. In this way, the ninth-century Deccan witnessed a Jain ascendancy that registered far beyond the purely theological.

Scholars of medieval South Asia have typically read medieval texts either as expressions of an autonomous religious and theological domain or as the embodiment of cosmopolitan and courtly self-referentiality.130 The upshot of this binary mapping is that

few have considered the central role that literary practice and literate classes played in mediating between the different institutional worlds of temple and court.As we will see, the Jain literati of Amōghavarṣa’s court and beyond held complex and overlapping social positions ranging from Jain layman to military general; much like their literary texts, they circulated within broader networks of individuals and across heterogeneous institutions. Within this same vein, scholarship has equally ignored the ways in which the nested character of medieval South Asian polities facilitated the flow of these individuals and their texts in ways that reproduced the cultural production of the imperial at its

peripheries. Jain literati and their texts were the connective tissue that scaled across political units from the imperial to the feudatory, from the translocal to the local, and from the center to the periphery.

Taking into account these scholarly lacunas, I examine the enduring afterlife of the literary and religious developments of Amōghavarṣa’s court. I begin by thinking about the Rāṣṭrakūṭa imperial formation and its constitutive political parts, specifically the Eastern Cāḷukya and Western Gaṅga dynasties. I argue that while historians have productively shown how such alliances functioned as avenues of political-ideological

130 _{Both Daud Ali and Sheldon Pollock have tended to approach the court and its cultural}

production from this angle. Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sheldon Pollock,

circulation (of vocabularies of power, symbols of sovereignty, royal titulature, and so on), they have ignored the importance of political relationships as conduits of artistic, cultural, and religious exchange and connectivity—or, vice versa, the critical ways in which broader cultural and religious connectivity facilitated political stability. Moving in both directions, it is through such connected networks that linguistic and literary styles and tastes crystalized and took hold and were mobilized for political expression. In making this argument, one of the main themes of this dissertation comes to the fore: beyond military engagement and taxation, political power was most robustly performed in and through art and culture. Plainly put, cultural power was central to the reproduction of political power. In making this claim, I am not suggesting that culture worked to legitimate any given political order. The structure of feudal empire and the ideology of imperial kingship discounted “legitimacy” as a political problematic. Instead, culture reproduced political power to the extent that it provided political elites an occasion to reflect upon their own power. Here I follow James Scott, who wryly observes of a modern Laotian liberation day parade, “virtually no one comes to see it save those on the reviewing stand and those marching past.”131 Such instances attest to the fact that

symbolic cultural power—in military parades, Sanskrit kāvya, or Italian opera—did not produce real power in a coercive or violent sense. Rather, this type of enactment of power enabled elites to accumulate power within their own class as the court with the best poetry, the most beautiful art, and so on. Pierre Bourdieu comes closest to giving us an account of the dynamics symbolic power in which distinctions occur within a class and

131 _{James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New}

not necessarily vertically across class sections.132 What Scott observes and Bourdieu

captures is similarly present in the courtly productions of the early medieval Deccan: power required no audience beyond power. This point is made even clearer by the fact that elite courtly literature and even royal inscriptions were functionally illegible to the vast majority of people in the medieval period. For a broader, plebeian public, the power of elite cultural production was irreducible to the semantic content of any work or inscription; rather, the power of this work was generated by the non-semantic, material fact of its existence.133 For a certain class of people, then, the experience of symbolic

cultural power may simply have been graphic.

In attending to these concomitant political, cultural, and even religious vectors in the ninth- and tenth-century western Deccan, one trend stands out. At multiple sites within these nested scales of political authority, the Jain genre of the Ādipurāṇa was produced and reproduced in different languages and literary styles. Following Deven Patel, I call this the Ādipurāṇa tradition. Patel defines a literary tradition as “sets of textual and scholarly practices that grow up around a root or source text (mūla-grantha in Sanskrit). Tradition, thus, explains an ongoing set of self-aware text-critical and aesthetic engagements with a powerful literary object that span centuries.”134 _{The concept of a}

literary tradition enables us to think about the literary, social, and political connections

132 _{Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Harvard University}

Press, 1991), 122-123.

133 _{References to Jain texts—including Jinasēna’s Ādipurāṇa and the Dhavaḷā and}

Jayadhavaḷā manuscripts held at the Mūḍbidrī maṭha—as objects to be worshipped rather than read permeate premodern and early modern Deccani archives. Similarly, the placement of inscriptions often high up and out of sight—as with many Āśōkan

inscriptions—indicates that their intended purpose was unrelated to legibility or readability.

134 _{Deven Patel, Text to Tradition: The Naiṣadhīyacarita and Literary Community in}

that constitute it, including the relationship between Sanskrit and Kannada Jain poetry, monastic versus lay texts, literary genealogies, and vectors of transmission and

circulation. In turning to the Ādipurāṇa tradition, I am less concerned in this chapter with the mediating work of these texts—the focus of the remainder of the dissertation—but with their authors: the Rāṣṭrakūṭa poet Jinasēna, the Eastern Cāḷukya poet Pampa, and the Western Gaṅga poet Cāvuṇḍarāya and the role of the author function that they inhabit.

To be clear, empirically verifiable facts surrounding a group of authors from the ninth and tenth century are difficult to come by. Rather, I approach Jinasēna, Pampa, and Cāvuṇḍarāya as figures mediated by religious institutions, neatly narrativized literary and religious histories, and ideologically saturated forms of discourse found in inscriptions, the authors’ own self-fashioning, and their individual and over-lapping reception histories. All three of these authors are remembered as fulfilling particular roles and relationships within the institutionalized worlds they inhabited; their texts and the reception of their texts reflect these different investments. However, it is also clear that these authors negotiated and accumulated power vis-à-vis the court in ways that affected and shaped the transmission and circulation of their texts. By tracking these authors through various spheres of cultural production, we can trouble historical assumptions about political cohesion as militarily based and instead begin to unfold a world of cultural attachments, connections, and relationships that equally constituted political stability.