The scope and audacity of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s contributions to Sanskrit grammar has made him one of early-modern India’s most influential, if not controversial, intellectuals. Yet for as consequential as Bhaṭṭoji’s has been for histories of early-modern scholasticism, his extensive corpus of non-grammatical writings has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This paper examines Bhaṭṭoji’s work on Vedānta, the Tattvakaustubha, in order to gage how issues of language became an increasingly important site of inter-religious critique among early-modern Vedāntins. In the Tattvakaustubha, Bhaṭṭoji (...) reproaches Madhvācārya, the founder of the eponymous Mādhva or Dvaita Vedānta system, for his use of ungrammatical words. In extending his accusations of grammatical negligence to include Madhva’s early commentator Jayatīrtha, Bhaṭṭoji sought to undermine Mādhva claims to authoritative scriptural exegesis. Bhaṭṭoji’s provocation impelled later Mādhva scholars like Rāghavendratīrtha to bring a sharper set of grammatical tools to core commentarial works. Where others have pointed to Vyāsatīrtha as a turning point for Mādhva scholastic discourse in the areas of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Navya Nyāya, this paper suggests that it was the post-Bhaṭṭoji scholar Rāghavendratīrtha who brought a hitherto unrivaled grammatical expertise to Mādhva writings. That both Mādhva and Advaita Vedāntins wielded grammatical legitimacy as a cudgel against the other raises important socio-historical questions about the relationship between text-criticism, conceptions of scholastic legitimacy, and inter-religious contestation in early-modern South Asia. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of modern Indian philosophy. It examines three engaging articulations of the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge or brahmajñāna provided by three prominent Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, namely, Badrīnāth Śukla (1898-1988), Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (1875-1949), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975). Particular attention is paid to the existing relation between their distinctive conceptualisations of liberating knowledge and the doxastic attitudes that these authors professed towards the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia and the presence of the Western (...) Other. In the main, it argues that the profound differences to be found, on the one hand, in Śukla’s elucidation of this key Advaitic notion and, on the other, in Bhattacharyya’s and Radhakrishnan’s take on the same, betray their commitment to two radically different doxastic attitudes. Classifying these into (a) non-dialogical and (b) dialogical in relation to the Western Other as well as into (c) exegetic and (d) hermeneutic in relation to the Sanskrit intellectual past of South Asia, it contends that, in comparison to the conceptual scheme and the parameters of intelligibility that shaped and underpinned the precolonial Advaitic discourse on brahmajñāna in Sanskrit, there is a certain kind of epistemic discontinuity in the dialogical cum hermeneutic stance taken by Bhattacharyya and Radhakrishnan that is not to be found in the non-dialogical cum exegetic engagement enacted by Śukla. It suggests that this particular sort of discontinuity, absent as it is from Śukla’s elucidation of the process of knowing Brahman, reflects the far-reaching commitment of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan to appropriate the precolonial Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge hermeneutically and to conceptualise it in the face of Western modernity, that is, rendering it meaningful in terms and within the parameters of intelligibility of the Western Other in order to contest what they took to be a troublesome predicament of Western modernity. By examining their ways of engaging with the Advaitic notion of liberating knowledge, this dissertation contributes to the on-going debate about the nature and the driving forces of modern Indian philosophy. (shrink)