New intellectuals in seventeenth-century India

Pollock examines the changes in the lives of South Asian intellectuals in the last centuries before colonialism. The article is concerned with the class of literati who expressed themselves through the medium of Sanskrit. Pollock is particularly interested in the fact that throughout the 17th century, intellectuals began to use the term new scholar, which appears to signify a different relationship to the past & a different way of thinking in general. Pollack concludes that Sanskrit intellectuals never directly confronted colonialism but chose, instead, to reinvigorate & sustain their cultural order. J. Backman