Presenter
Fisher Elaine - Stanford University, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United StatesPanel
72 – Does faith speak only one tongue? Multilingual pathways of religious writing across South Asia and beyond, c. 1600-1850Abstract
In this talk, I survey the key multilingual genres and practices of south Indian Vīraśaivism across regions in the seventeenth century. Precolonial Vīraśaivas developed numerous multilingual textual genres including internally bilingual texts, bilingual commentary, and translation enterprises, particularly from the vernacular into Sanskrit. I focus, in particular, on two textual genres: multilingual commentaries, in which root Sanskrit texts were appended with Kannada commentaries, and translation enterprises that exported groups of Vīraśaiva texts into Marathi and Tamil. I argue, in the process, that this evidence compels us to substantively shift our understanding of the history of Vīraśaivism and to develop new models for thinking about multilingualism in precolonial south India.
