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Sheldon Pollock

Portrait of Sheldon   Pollock

Sheldon Pollock (b. 1948, USA) is an American scholar researcher, translator specializing in Sanskrit philology, Indian intellectual and literary history, comparative intellectual history, who wrote about the language and meaning of ancient inscriptions in India and Southeast Asia.

Educated at Harvard University in Classics (Greek and Latin), he earned his PhD (1975) in Sanskrit and Indian Studies with the thesis ​“Aspects of Versification in Sanskrit Lyric Poetry”. He was the George V. Bobrinskoy Distinguished Service Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago (1989−2005), the William B. Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University (2005−2011), and later the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at the same university. 

Sheldon Pollock is co-editor of the series South Asia across the Disciplines, a collaborative venture of the University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press. Having directed the international collaborative research project ​“Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism,” he is currently principal investigator of ​“SARIT: Enriching Digital Collections in Indology,” supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities/​Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Bilateral Digital Humanities Program. He also initiated the Ambedkar Sanskrit Fellowship Program at Columbia, which aims to establish an endowment to fund graduate studies in Sanskrit, and the editor of the series Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought.

A recipient of India’s President’s Award for Sanskrit in 2006, and the Padma Shri award in 2010, his approach on ​“political philology” or ​“liberation philology”, and his pronouncement of ​“the death of Sanskrit” has triggered a heated political debate in India, irking ​“Hindu nationalists”. In 2016, 132 Indian intellectuals petitioned for Pollock’s removal as fouding editor of the ​‘Murty Classic Library’ at Harvard University Press. Some Indian scholars blame his reading of the Ramayana as a metaphoric struggle between interior righteousness-exterior enemy that could apply to Aryans (Rama) against Dravidians (Ravana), and in modern times Muslims. That same year, Indologist Rajiv Malhotra issued his book The Battle for Sanskrit, centered on a harsh critic of Pollock’s work. According to Kapil Kapoor, editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ​“this book rips through the fortress of American Indology and its insinuations that Sanskrit traditions are socially abusive and are driven by the political motives of the elite. The author is devastatingly impressive in the way he exposes the prevailing hegemonic discourse of the West and the role of the large army of Indian sepoys who have been recruited as mercenaries.”

Publications

  1. Aspects of Versification in Sanskrit Lyric Poetry, New Haven, American Oriental Society, 1977.
  2. [tr.] The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, An Epic of Ancient India, Vol. II: Ayodhyākāṇḍa, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986.
  3. [tr.] The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, An Epic of Ancient India, Vol. III: Araṇyakāṇḍa, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991.
  4. “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj”, in Breckenridge, Carol A.; van der Veer, Peter (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, ISBN 978−0−8122−1436−9.
  5. “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India”, The Journal of Asian Studies, 52 (2), 1993, p. 261 – 297. 
  6. ​“The Death of Sanskrit”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43 (2), April 2001, p 392 – 426.
  7. [ed.] Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003.
  8. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India, Berkeley — London, University of California Press, 2006.
  9. [tr.] Rama’s Last Act (Uttararāmacarita) of Bhavabhūti, New York, New York University Press, 2007 (Clay Sanskrit Library).
  10. Language, Culture and Power, conference in honor of Prof. S. Pollock organized by his students, 2008.
  11. “The Real Classical Languages Debate”, The Hindu, 27 November 2008.
  12. “Towards a Political Philology: D. D. Kosambi and Sanskrit”, Economic and Political Weekly 43(30), 26 July 2008, p 52 – 59.
  13. ‘Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World’, in James Chandler and Arnold Davidson eds, The Fate of the Disciplines, special issue of Critical Inquiry vol35,-4, 2009, p 931 – 961.
  14. [tr. and ed. with I. Onians] The Bouquet of Rasa and the River of Rasa (Rasamañjarī and Rasataraṅgiṇī) of Bhānudatta, New York, New York University Press, 2009 (Clay Sanskrit Library).
  15. ‘Comparison without Hegemony’, in Barbro Klein and Hans Joas eds, The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science. Festschrift for Bjorn Wittrock on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, Leiden, Brill, 2010, pp. 185 – 204.
  16. ‘What was Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka Saying? The Hermeneutical Transformation of Indian Aesthetics’, in Sheldon Pollock ed., Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Goldman, Delhi, Manohar, 2010, pp. 143 – 184.
  17. Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500 – 1800, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.
  18. ‘Review Article: Indian Philology and India’s Philology’, Journal Asiatique 299 – 1, 2011, pp. 423 – 475.
  19. ‘From Rasa Seen to Rasa Heard.’, in Caterina Guenzi and Sylvia d’Intino eds., Aux abords de la clairière, Paris, Brepols, 2012, pp. 189 – 207.
  20. “Philology in Three Dimensions”, postmedieval 5 – 4, 2014.
  21. “Liberating Philology”, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 16 – 21.
  22. [with Benjamin Elman and Kevin Chang] World Philology, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015.
  23. [ed.] Kritische Philologie: Essays zu Literatur, Sprache und Macht in Indien und Europa, 2015.
  24. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics, Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought series, Columbia University Press, 2016.
  25. [ed. with Silvia D’Intino and Michaël Meyer] L’espace du sens. Approches de la philologie indienne. The Space of Meaning. Approaches to Indian Philology, Paris, Collège de France (ICI Fasc.84), 2018, 586 p.