Jan Houben – författare

In the course of millennia of dealing with problems of violence, South Asia has not only elaborated the ideal of total avoidance of violence in a unique manner, it also developed arguments justifying and rationalizing its employment under certain circumstances. Some of these arguments seemingly transform all sorts of ‘violence’ into ‘non-violence’. Historical and cultural aspects of the tensions between violence and its denial and rationalization in South Asia are taken up in the contributions of this volume which deal with topics ranging from the origins of the concept of ahiṃsā, to the iconography and interpretation of a self-beheading goddess, and violent heroines in Ajñeya’s Hindi short stories.

In the history of the Indian grammatical tradition, Bhartrhari (about fifth century C.E.) is the fourth great grammarian - after Panini, Katyayana and Patanjali - and the first to make the philosophical aspects of language and grammar the main subject of an independent work. This work, the Vakyapadiya (VP), consists of about 2000 philosophical couplets or karikas.Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, the VP has been known to Western Sanskritists, but its language-philosophical contents have started to receive serious attention only in the last few decennia. The subject matter of the VP resonates strongly with crucial themes in twentieth-century Western thought, although the background and the way the issues are elaborated are quite different. Scholars have compared and contrasted Bhartrhari's ideas with those of de Saussure, Wittgenstein and Derrida. A theme which, as a leitmotiv, pervades the entire VP is the relation between language, thought and reality. In several Indian traditions, a proper insight into this relation was (and still is) held to be of importance for attaining 'liberation'.