The University Seminar on South Asia
Seminar Chair, Carla Bellamy ([email protected])
Seminar Rapporteur, Kamini Masood ([email protected])
A Fatal Policy: War-Time in the Astral State
by Marko Geslani, Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of South Carolina
Monday, February 12, 2024
6:00pm Eastern Time, Faculty House and Zoom
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ABSTRACT Upinder Singh’s recent synthesis of the formation of Brahmanical politics in early South Asia reminds us of two concurrent themes: the aestheticization of political violence in the medieval state, and the atemporal insulation of Varṇāśramadharma from wider Asian political history. We might understand these tendencies as presenting the “romance” of the Brahmanical state. Not surprisingly, Singh’s account, like others, draws from a textual nexus of Dharmaśāstra, Arthaśāstra, Praśasti and Kāvya. My project explores the crucial role of the tradition of Jyotiḥśāstra (astral science) in the formation of the Brahmanical political imaginary. The corpus of Varāhamihira, the sixth century polymath who canonized jyotiṣa as a Sanskrit śāstra, discloses an agenda to rationalize the astral sciences with various components of Brahmanism: Vedic ritual, Dharmaśāstra, and Arthaśāstra. I focus especially on the latter, reading Varāhamihira’s Yogayātrā as an apology to Brahmanical political theory. It argues that the analysis of fate is crucial to the timing of the military campaign—that most paradigmatic of royal political acts. If early Brahmanism shunned the predictive arts (astronomy, astrology, divination), Varāhamihira taught an appreciation of them as means to represent the moral consensus of monarchy. The convergence of Jyotiḥśāstra and Arthaśāstra would have broad repercussions for the aesthetics of the Brahmanical state and for the coordinates of Brahmanical action and personhood.
For any questions, please contact Seminar Chair, Carla Bellamy ([email protected])
