| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Sheldon Pollock. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 684. $75.00.

This is a tour de force, examining in detail the cultural and political worlds of Sanskrit and its related languages over two millennia. The book emerges from Sheldon Pollock's long-standing interests in the evolution of Sanskrit as an intellectual enterprise, its links to South Asian cultural forms and social and political power, as well as Sanskrit's relationships to the emergence of alternative, vernacular, modes of communication and culture. Pollock has written widely on these issues, editing books most recently on cosmopolitanism and the vernacular. He has also been at the forefront of an international, cooperative project entitled "Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism" (SKSEC), which aims to delineate the "structure and social context of Sanskrit science and knowledge" in the "pre-modern" era before direct European intervention. While this project has produced some controversy by virtue of its inherent claim (substantiated by Pollock in 2001) that Sanskrit effectively "died" as an important medium of thought at the advent of British imperial rule, it has nevertheless served to elucidate very effectively the last intellectual "flowering" of Sanskrit ca. 1550–1750.

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