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Manan Ahmed Asif, Christian Lee Novetzke. The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 201–202, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.201
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Christian Lee Novetzke’s task in The Quotidian Revolution is to explain two intertwined aspects of the medieval western Indian past: first, how did Marathi rise as a language of expression—public, sacral, and political—and, second, how did the concerns of everyday life, and of the common person, permeate the literary and religious imagination? This emergence of a new language of everyday sacrality and everyday politics in the thirteenth century, Novetzke offers, eventually gave shape to a pivotal geography for early modern and modern India: that of Maharashtra. Excavating the birth of newness is a challenge for any historian of India and, in the case of origins of languages and polities, this challenge is considerably magnified due to contemporary religious and ethnic politics. Novetzke’s careful study provides a model for how issues of considerable scholarly importance as well as cultural sensitivity can be addressed in the same monograph.
The Quotidian Revolution is divided into three parts. Overall it focuses on two texts written in Marathi (or Old Marathi), on their political and cultural worlds, and on their ethical domains: the Līḷacaritra (ca. 1278 c.e.) and the Jñāneśvarī (ca. 1290 c.e.), associated with Chakradhar (ca. 1194 c.e.) and Jnandev (ca. 1271 c.e.) respectively. These texts are the sacral foundations for, and inheritance of, major Vaishnav sects in contemporary India—the Varkaris and the Mahanubhavs. These texts, alongside others such as Hemadri’s Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi, have long been studied as sources for the Yadava (or Sevuna) polity which ruled from 1189 to 1317 c.e. In part I of The Quotidian Revolution, chapters 1 and 2 focus on the Yadava polity (roughly analogous to the contemporary region of Maharashtra) centered at Devgiri (now Daulatabad, Maharashtra). The Yadava were a non-Brahminic west Indian polity that participated in, per Novetzke, the Brahminic ecumene, wherein the uppermost caste—the Brahmin—were engaged with the state in various capacities such as instruction in or composition of religious texts in Sanskrit, production of rituals, maintenance of royal genealogies, running of temples and monasteries, patronage of schools of theory, instruction in sciences and arts, and the training of bureaucratic and literary classes (58). Novetzke argues that the relative stability of the Yadava polity, as well as this concern of the few with the few, opened up spaces for spiritual and literary entrepreneurs. Chakradhar and Jnandev were two such entrepreneurs who (as Brahmins) critiqued social inequality and argued for the production of sacral texts in Marathi. Chapter 3 turns to the received biographies of Chakradhar and Jnandev and presents them as “authors” of radical everydayness outside the later hagiographies.
