Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India (Rocher Indology)

How did languages relate to one another and to intellectual agendas in a highly multilingual milieu like premodern India?Surrender to God Across Languages explores this question through the intellectual history of self-surrender, a main soteriological doctrine of the Srivaisnavas, a South Indian religious community that worshiped Visnu-Narayana as the Supreme God.Author Manasicha Akepiyapornchai studies six theological treatises from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries composed in Sanskrit and Manipravalam.Each is written by one of five key intellectuals of the community: Vatsya Varadaguru, Periyavaccan Pillai, Meghanadari Suri, Pillai Lokacarya, and Vedantadesika.Akepiyapornchai argues that there was a complex interplay between interlinguistic changes and doctrinal developments, in such a way that it is impossible to fully account for one without the other: languages shaped self-surrender by providing distinctive conditioning factors both scripturally and theologically at each point i