Newness in Scholastic Traditions

This chapter surveys previous treatments of innovation in South Asian cultural studies and shows the strong resistance among scholars to the very possibility of meaningful innovation in this world. In recent decades, this resistance has begun to erode, and several scholars have identified the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an era of heightened creativity. However, the main voices in recent scholarship still find serious restraints holding back full-throated novelty, characterized by Sheldon Pollock as a situation wherein the “newness of the intellect” is constrained by the “oldness of the will.” This chapter argues that the controversy over the role of sequence in scriptural interpretation charted here in fact shows radical changes disguised by a thin veneer of traditionalism. It also sets this controversy against the background of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic hermeneutic approaches to “early” and “late” in scripture.