A Vernacular Manifesto

Discusses the rationale that Jnandev gives in his text for the innovative use of Marathi rather than Sanskrit as his medium. Jnandev claims that he uses Marathi for the sake of “women, low castes, and others,” which is the constituency he believes the Bhagavad Gītā also exists to serve. While it may seem like a description of the “downtrodden” this phrase was in fact a description of the vast majority of the population. I observe how the Jñāneśvarī serves as a manifesto for a very particular ethics around society and literature.

Traces of a Medieval Public

Uses the inscriptional record left by the Yadavas to counter a common assumption made by historians that Marathi vernacularization was underwritten by Yadava political support. I find no evidence for this widely held claim, but instead show how the royal court did appear to regard Marathi as a language of significant utility in accessing the vast quotidian “public” that surrounded and populated the Yadava realm. This allowed greater freedom for new religious communities to adopt Marathi as a means to reach a nonelite population. At the same time, the social value of literacy, a feature of the Brahminic ecumene, led the Brahmin figures at the center of literary vernacularization (Chakradhar, the early Mahanubhavs, Jnandev) to compose a new literature in Marathi.

The Yadava Century

Explores the sociopolitical world of the Yadava century that served as the context for Marathi literary vernacularization. The Yadavas, also called the Sevunas, were a non-Brahmin dynasty that stabilized their political territory by creating a clientelist Brahminical ecumene. As a system this Brahminical ecumene served the political aims of the non-Brahmin Yadava state. This chapter outlines the social order in which vernacularization would emerge.

The Mahanubhav Ethic

Tracks how this rejection of social inequity inspired the use of Marathi as the medium of communication for the early Mahanubhav community. In writing a historical text, the early Mahanubhavs wished to preserve the language their founder was remembered to have used, which was Marathi. This was a language understood as feminine and “imperfect” in the taxonomies of Sanskritic linguistic hierarchy, yet it perfectly suited his audience, especially the female followers whom the early Mahanubhavs wished not to alienate—in particular the “old ladies,” as one prominent Mahanubhav said.

Sonic Equality

Draws out the contours of this social ethics in the Jñāneśvarī by tracking the relationship between statements about social equality and idioms of social inequality that were endemic to thirteenth-century Marathi. The Jñāneśvarī reveals a paradox, for the radical nature of putting this classic Sanskrit text in Marathi for all to access also means importing the language, colloquialisms, idioms, and other registers of social inequity that mark all languages. Vernacularization, located within the field of everyday life, simultaneously presses for greater social equity and reinforces other means of social difference. The Jñāneśvarī reveals a sonic equality that existed in a world of deep social inequality.

The Vernacular Moment

Observes the attention to historical detail in the Līḷācaritra and this allows us some access to the social conditions that were arrayed around vernacularization in the decades just before the full advent of Marathi literature. This chapter studies the cultural practices of caste and gender that pervaded everyday life in the mid-thirteenth century and were recorded by the early Mahanubhavs in the Līḷācaritra. Attention to these questions of social ethics is vital for understanding the cultural politics at work at the core of a new literary world in Marathi.

Introduction

Provides a historical context for the book and presents the argument of the work. This chapter gives keywords for the book and discusses how these ideas are used in the book.

The Vernacular Millennium and the Quotidian Revolution

Reflects on the quotidian politics of vernacularization in the centuries that followed the narrow band of decades that consumes the majority of the book. From the fourteenth century onwards, Jnandev’s sonic equality was transformed into a vision of social equality and a champion of the figure of the everyday life. Conversely, I discuss how the Mahanubhavs receded into obscurity in the centuries after their founding, precisely because they increasingly rejected the quotidian world to become a secretive and secluded ascetical sect, a kind of antivernacularization. The book ends with a reflection on how these ideas, formulated with materials from the thirteenth century, might accompany an analysis of the vernacularization of democracy and of the public sphere in India today.

The Biography of Literary Vernacularization

Supplies the remembered biographical data and likely public memory of Chakradhar and Jnandev that help shape the context of the four chapters that follow. The chapter also argues that meaning coheres around these received biographies in a way that stabilizes their “value” in a particular kind of spiritual economy of the age. The lives of these two emblematic figures are engaged as metonymic biographies, indexes for a much broader social change.