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Synopsis The Language of the Gods in the World of Men in this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle for poetry and polity by tracing the two great moments of this transformation. The first occurred around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression in the start of an amazing path that saw Sanskrit literary culture spread from Afghanistan to Java. The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms challenged and eventually replaced Sanskrit in both the literary and political arenas. Drawing striking parallels, chronologically as well as structurally, with the rise of Latin literature and the Roman empire and with the new vernacular literatures and nation-states of late-medieval Europe, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men asks whether these very different histories challenges current theories of culture and power and suggest new possibilities for practice.