The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

describe the way that Vedic social values, Vedic ritual forms, and Sanskrit learning seep intolocal popular traditions of ritual and ideology (in part through people who hope to be upwardlymobile, to rise by imitating the manners and habits, particularly food taboos, of Brahmins, and inparticular avoiding violence to animals). 8 Indian society, in this view, is a permanent floatinggame of snakes and ladders (or, perhaps, snakes and ropes, recalling that Vedantic philosophersmistake snakes for ropes and that you can climb up on ropes in the Indian rope trick), which youenter in a state of impurity, gradually advancing over the generations toward the goal ofBrahminical purity, trying to avoid the many pitfalls along the way. 9 Tribal groups (Bhils,Gonds, etc.) might undergo Sanskritization in order to claim to be a caste, and therefore, Hindu. 10But the opposite of Sanskritization, the process by which the Sanskritic traditionsimultaneously absorbs and transforms those same popular traditions, is equally important, andthat process might be called oralization, or popularization, or even, perhaps, Deshification (fromthe “local” or deshi traditions) or Laukification, from what Sanskrit calls laukika (“of the people”[loka]). Let’s settle on Deshification. The two processes of Sanskritization and Deshificationbeget each other. Similarly, through a kind of identificatio brahmanica, 11 local gods take on thenames of gods in Sanskrit texts: Murukan becomes Skanda, a kind of Sanskritization, while atthe same time there is an identificatio deshika, by which Sanskrit gods take on the characteristicsof local gods, and to the people who worship Murukan, it is Murukan who is absorbing Skanda,not the reverse. “Cross-fertilization” might be a good, equalizing term for the combination of thetwo processes.“Written” does not necessarily mean “written in Sanskrit,” nor are oral texts always in thevernacular (the Rig Veda, after all, was preserved orally in Sanskrit for many centuries before itwas consigned to writing). We cannot equate vernacular with oral, for people both write andspeak both Sanskrit and the vernacular languages of India, though Sanskrit is written more oftenthan spoken. The distinction between Sanskrit and the vernacular literatures is basicallygeographical: Though there are regional Sanskrits, the vernaculars, unlike Sanskrit, are definedand named by their place of origin (Bangla from Bengal, Oriya from Orissa, and so forth), whilethe script in which Sanskrit is most often written allegedly has no particular earthly place oforigin (it is called “the [script of the] city of the gods [deva-nagari]”). Once people departedfrom the royal road of Sanskrit literary texts, there were thousands of vernacular paths that theycould take, often still keeping one foot on the high road of Sanskrit.The constant, gradual, unofficial mutual exchange between Sanskrit and the vernacularlanguages, the cross-fertilization, underwent a dramatic transformation toward the middle of thesecond millennium: Local languages were now promoted officially, politically, and artistically, 12replacing the previously fashionable cosmopolitan and translocal language, Sanskrit. Instead ofnourishing and supplementing Sanskrit, the vernacular languages as literary languages began tocompete with Sanskrit as the language of literary production. This process has been called, inimitation of Srinivas’s “Sanskritization” (and in contrast with both Deshification and the moremutually nourishing, two-way process of cross-fertilization) vernacularization, “the historicalprocess of choosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a politicaldiscourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usuallycosmopolitan, literary culture,” 13 or “a process of change by which the universalistic orders,formations, and practices of the preceding millennium were supplemented and graduallyreplaced by localized forms.” 14The great divide is between written and nonwritten, not between Sanskrit and thevernaculars, particularly as the Sanskrit corpus comes to be Deshified and the vernaculars