Thèse--Université de Paris. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--University of London. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [321]-326) and index.

Thesis--University of London. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [321]-326) and index.

No description available.

Language of the Snakes is a biography of Prakrit, one of premodern India’s most important and most neglected literary languages. Prakrit was the language of a literary tradition that flourished roughly from the 1st to the 12th century. During this period, it served as a counterpart to Sanskrit, the preeminent language of literature and learning in India. Together, Sanskrit and Prakrit were the foundation for an enduring “language order” that governed the way that people thought of and used language. Language of the Snakes traces the history of this language order through the historical articulations of Prakrit, which are set out here for the first time: its invention and cultivation among the royal courts of central India around the 1st century, its representation in classical Sanskrit and Prakrit texts, the ways it is made into an object of systematic knowledge, and ultimately its displacement from the language practices of literature. Prakrit is shown to have played a critical role in the establishment of the cultural-political formation now called the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” as shown through a genealogy of its two key practices, courtly literature (kāvya-) and royal eulogy (praśasti-). It played a similarly critical role in the emergence of vernacular textuality, as it provided a model for language practices that diverged from Sanskrit but nevertheless possessed an identity and regularity of their own. Language of the Snakes thus offers a cultural history of Prakrit in contrast to the natural-history framework of previous studies of the language. It uses Prakrit to formulate a theory of literary language as embedded in an ordered set of cultural practices rather than by contrast to spoken language.

Cette étude se fonde sur l’analyse et la traduction française de nombreux passages de deux textes appartenant à la même tradition jaina digambara. Le premier, le Gaṇitasārasaṃgraha (9ème siècle), s’inscrit dans la lignée des textes versifiés de mathématiques en sanskrit et y tient une place prépondérante. Comme les ouvrages de la même famille, il donne un grand nombre de prescriptions algorithmiques de calcul utiles à la résolution de problèmes liés aux « affaires du monde », tout en se démarquant par certaines particularités de structure qui n’ont pas encore été expliquées. Le deuxième, la Tiloyapaṇṇattī (6ème – 9ème siècle), est versifié en prakrit śauraseṇī jaina. C’est un texte semi-religieux de nature encyclopédique qui expose des informations détaillées, la plupart de nature mathématique, sur tout ce qui existe dans les trois mondes du cosmos jaina. Le but de cette thèse est de tisser des liens entre les deux textes pour tenter d’apprécier dans quelle mesure les procédures mathématiques de l’un entrent en résonance avec celles de l’autre, et surtout, de déterminer comment les éclairages apportés par le texte de cosmologie peuvent aider à mieux comprendre certains points obscurs de celui de mathématiques. / This study is based on an analysis and translation into French of numerous excerpts from two texts belonging to the same Jaina Digambara tradition. The first text, the Gaṇitasārasaṃgraha (850 A.D.), is a significant work in the group of versified Sanskrit mathematical texts to which it belongs. Like works of the same lineage, it expounds many computational algorithms aimed at solving problems of the “worldly mathematics” category. However, there are some idiosyncrasies in its structure which have not yet been explained. The second text, the Tiloyapaṇṇattī (ca. 500-800 A.D.) is versified in Jaina Śauraseni Prakrit. This semi-religious work provides much mathematical information on everything that exists in the three worlds of the Jaina Cosmos. This thesis seeks to make connections between the mathematical procedures of the two texts and, specifically, to see how the content of the second, the cosmology text, could enhance our understanding of the mathematical text, and help to clarify some of the unanswered questions the latter raises.