Reading

and browsing through some interesting books like Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Two of the reviews are
here and here. As the reviews explain, the book is concerned with "two great moments of transformation in culture and power in premodern India. The first occurred around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language restricted to religious practice, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression... The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms were newly dignified as literary languages and began to challenge Sanskrit for the work of both poetry and polity, and in the end replaced it."
Like the reviewers above, I find the book interesting but not convincing.
P.S. Some of the issues addressed by Sheldon Pollock are discussed in an earlier essay "Literary History, Indian History, World History in a 1995 issue Social Scientist which also has interesting articles by S. Nagaraju and Velcheru Narayana Rao on the rise of vernacular languages.
P.P.S (14th February) Having more or less finished reading the book (browsed through some pages)I think that it is a wonderful book for its stupendous scholarship, critique of many existing theories and finally for the questions that it raises.