pāṣaṇḍin, vaitaṇḍika, vedanindaka and nāstika: On Criticism, Dissenters and Polemics and the South Asian Struggle for the Semiotic Primacy of Veridiction

Abstract

By reconsidering the epistemic implications underlying the marginal status to which the materials produced by South Asian exponents of various forms of 'dissenting' or 'anti-traditional' intellectual activity have been consigned, in this essay I propose revisiting our understanding of why many South Asian traditions that do not adhere to a dominant doxa have been omitted or given a permanent status of subordination. From this perspective I here argue the paucity of textual materials produced by the 'dissenters' -which now survive only in fragments -is the most striking proof that over the centuries these elements have not been considered as what they really are.

A Political Satire for All Times: Reading Hāsyārṇava-prahasanaṁ or the Ocean of Mirth of Jagadēśvara Bhaṭṭāchārya

“…There is one question that still remains unanswered; what makes Hāsyārṇava stand apart as a text, with celebration of disorder, chaos and transgression at its core? It has been argued that ‘necessary but threatening disorder’ (Shulman, 1984, p. 17–18; Squarcini, 2011, pp. 101–115) is an integral dimension of the Brahminical Hindu idea of order.…”

Selling tolerance by the pound: On ideal types’ fragility, Aśoka’s edicts and the political theology of toleration in and beyond South Asia

“…25 Now, leaving the fragile soil of the vulgata and venturing into less travelled roads, those seriously interested in the evaluation of the standardized depictions of the 'magnanimous and tolerant Emperor Aśoka' have to expand the limits of their approach to royal policy and governance: by consulting and synoptically employing recent scholarship on semiotics of kingship, topology of governance, normative speech acts, and on ancient systems of communication and trading networks, serious inquirers can profitably go back to question the large amount of materials available on the political and economic history of precolonial South Asia. 26 Looking through these new lenses at the systemic scenario in which the Maurya ruler carried on his policy would be enough to overturn Wells' romantic image of the 'Great Monarch Aśoka' as well as to exhibit the futility of the fragile portrait of Aśoka as the 'champion of tolerance'. 27 By doing so, a newly disposed political scenario will be visible and its febrile interactivity would be enough to rapidly dissolve many of the still diffuse archaic prejudices and naïve contrapositions that will thus result groundless and off-track: indeed, when exposed to specialized and critical academic literature, most of the prejudices and dichotomies regarding the separation between 'politics and religion' 28 -or between 'religion and violence' - 29 will appear clearly untenable as well as logically obsolete.…”