[INDOLOGY] Imagining Sanskritland Book Announcement

[patrick mccartney]

Dear Friends,

I'm pleased to announce the forthcoming (July) publication of my next
monograph,
which is part of the Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics.

 It is titled:

*‘Sanskrit-speaking’ Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of
Development: Imagining Sanskritland'*

*Description:*

This book is a recollection of McCartney’s journey across ‘Sanskritland,’
which is the term coined to refer to the utopian landscape within which the
‘Language of the Gods’ is thought to be spoken.

There are three destinations on the author’s journey. The first includes
understanding how Sanskrit narratives are woven into yoga-inflected
‘lifestyles,’ forming biographies operationalised toward soft-power
purposes. Next, the historical sociolinguistic contexts that have shaped
Sanskritland are discussed, framed by application in sustainable
development narratives. Finally, comprehensive demographic and linguistic
analyses of Sanskrit across all of India’s census enumerations (from 1872
to 2011) shows the ‘shifting sands’ of Sanskrit’s ‘speakers’ and how the
‘Sanskrit-speaking’ village data show that most people who identify as
speakers of Sanskrit live in urban areas and ‘speak’ Sanskrit as a third
language. All of these together shed light on how, why, and where Sanskrit
is spoken in the twenty-first century, the complex and dynamic historical
and contemporary that have allowed this, and how both yoga and Sanskrit are
instruments for development and soft-power projects.

This book is an essential read for scholars and students of linguistic
anthropology, Indology, and sustainable development.


*Contents *

List of Figures List of Tables Preface Acknowledgements Fundings Primary
Texts Mentioned A Brief Outline of this Book *Part 1. Journeying into the
Vedic *Chapter 1. En Route Chapter 2. The Eternal Aspiration Chapter 3. The
Myth and Making of the ‘Vedic’ Chapter 4. Exploring the Concept of a ‘Vedic
Village’ *Part 2: Imagining Sanskritic Futures *Chapter 5. Using One’s
Imagination Chapter 6. Indian Knowledge Systems and Transformational
Narratives Chapter 7. Sanskrit’s Faith-based Development Narratives *Part
3. The Sociolinguistics of Sanskritland *Chapter 8. Spoken Sanskrit’s
Revivalism Chapter 9. Sanskritic Sociolinguistics Chapter 10. The Complex
Landscape of Sanskrit Revival *Part 4: Sanskrit and the Census *Chapter 11.
Visualising Sanskrit’s Census Tokens Chapter 12. Analysis and Mapping of
Sanskritland *Conclusion: Homeward Bound **Index*


Best,

Patrick
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