Scholastic Publics: Sanskrit Textual Practices in Gujarat, 1800-Present
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation addresses the complex negotiations of “tradition” in colonial and postcolonial modernity through a study of the Swaminarayan sampradāy, a rapidly growing transnational community founded in Gujarat at the turn of the nineteenth century. It argues that the community produced Sanskrit texts partly to engage its “scholastic publics”—imaginative and interpretive sites of debate and contestation—to consolidate, strengthen, legitimize, and even divide the sampradāy over its 200-year history. In doing so, members of the sampradāy maintain a concerted privileging of classical Sanskrit knowledge systems, long after the purported demise of these systems. Chapter 1 outlines the Swaminarayan sampradāy’s perceived interlocutors through an analysis of a nineteenth-century text chronicling the sampradāy’s public debates. These debates provide the sampradāy with a template for a scripturally-based rationale for its code of conduct, its system of Vedānta, and its very notion of sampradāy. Chapter 2 extends the historical discussion into the early twentieth century, when the sampradāy makes use of a burgeoning print culture to vocally criticize powerful opponents, democratize the scholastic through Gujarati translations and monthly magazines, and legitimate apocryphal texts. The Swaminarayan scholastic commitment remains to sampradāy: safeguarding the community at large, nourishing the community from within, and mitigating nascent sectarianism. The second half of the dissertation addresses the questions of scholasticism and sampradāy through a connected lens: Vedānta commentaries. It traces the hermeneutical and exegetical patterns that characterize three separate moments of commentarial production in the sampradāy. These patterns demonstrate a shifting commitment to the more established school of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta over two centuries in the articulation of Swaminarayan Vedānta. In the wake of the sectarian division of the sampradāy, these very technical Vedāntic debates are used to authorize one particular Swaminarayan interpretation as the Swaminarayan interpretation, within a Vedānta scholastic public.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".