SAST Colloquium: Professor Nabanjan Maitra
The Rite to Know: Vedic Subjects and Monastic Power in 14th Century Karnataka
402 Cohen Hall
249 S. 36th Street
My talk attends to one aspect of a broader project to make sense of a hermeneutic project of self-professed universal scope: the commentary on the Vedas undertaken by the matha (monastery) of Śṛṅgeri in the latter half of the 14th century, with the support of the Sangama kings of Vijayanagara. I argue that this immense interpretive undertaking was intended to formulate and project monastic power, which operated through the ethical formation of its subjects. My talk examines a central lever in this form of subjective power: the Vedic vidhi (prescription). I show that the matha formulated and deployed two meta-vidhis-the prescription to study the Veda (adhyayana vidhi) and the prescription to learn the Vedanta (śravaṇa vidhi)-to comprehend the two principal types of Vedic subjects-the ritual subject and the ascetic subject-whose normative conduct, or form of life, was governed by the prescriptive force of the Veda, albeit mediated by the maṭha's interpretive authority. I show that these two meta-prescriptions underpinned the scope and the logic of the expansive project of Vedic hermeneutics. More importantly, I demonstrate that these two meta-prescriptions powered the program of ethical formation of monastic subjects that lay at the heart of the maṭha's claims to a purportedly universal-in fact, provincial, because brahmanical-normative authority.
