Is vernacularisation a process that begins with a court that sponsors production in the local language by adopting existing cosmopolitan models, as Sheldon Pollock has argued, or does it begin from ‘below’, as it were, giving voice to everyday concerns? Christian Lee Novetzke opens his book with this question, although he makes it clear that he does not view it as an either-or one. Instead, he documents and brilliantly explores the entrance of Marathi into the literary sphere in the thirteenth century as a corrective to Pollock's powerful but not universal narrative. Indeed, he demonstrates without doubt that the pair of first extant works in Marathi, both dated to the last decades of the century, were composed while the ruling Yadava dynasty ‘directed state resources to supporting a single language: Sanskrit’ (p. 44) and was ‘quite indifferent to Marathi’ (p. 74). Thus the argument is that Marathi became a literary idiom not because it represented the concerns of the ruling dynasty and the elite literati it sponsored but as a ‘disruption [that] occurs as the quotidian enters, in whatever small manner initially, the larger discursive field of the Yadava century’ (p. 46).

After an introduction that presents the basic problematics, the book is divided into three parts: the first supplies the historical context, whereas the second and third are devoted to the two earliest extant Marathi works, the Līḷācarita and the Jñāneśvarī, respectively. The three chapters of Part 1 provide a clear panoramic view of the ‘Yadava century’ with its language and caste politics (chapter 1), an analysis of the inscriptional record of the Yadavas (chapter 2), and a basic biography of the two key figures associated with the two works: Chakradhar, the main agent and protagonist of the Līḷācarita, and Jnandev, the primary expounder of the Jñāneśvarī (chapter 3). Here I would like to highlight the discussion of the public records of the Yadavas. Novetzke sensitively juxtaposes two types of inscriptions: those in Marathi that typically culminate in vulgar threats to disobeyers (the ‘donkey curse’) and thus betray an elite fear of the public, and those in Sanskrit that project a confident and more inclusive community: ‘a devotional social sphere of elites and non-elites alike who shared devotion to Vitthal’ (p. 95). Positing these tensely and tenuously interacting visions of the public, Novetzke neatly foregrounds Marathi vernacularisation as an eruption that takes place ‘when the exclusive link between the Brahminic ecumene and literacy is broken’, and ‘when the social practice of literature shifts into the vernacular idiom and everyday life’ (p. 67).

The following chapters are the heart of the book: a close reading of the two Marathi works in question. Chapter 4 studies the Līḷācarita as a ‘veritable ethnology of caste and caste practices’ (p. 133): many of the work's episodes portray Brahmins, whose obsession with purity it mocks, even if from a ‘Brahminic point of view’ (p. 132), but also Kayasthas, Guravs, Chamars, Mahars, and other communities, with their rivalries and interrelations. From these short realistic snippets, Novetzke repeatedly teases out an underlying tension in the group that formed around Chakradhar (the early Mahanubhavs): it aspired to a radical gender and caste egalitarianism within, while outwardly espousing ‘politeness’ to the prevailing social norms. This tension is related to Novetzke's intriguing claim that ‘the “vernacularization” [the early Mahanubhavs] represented was not about literature but about place’; it involved an attempt to ‘decenter the prominence of the temple’ with its existing structures of power, caste and gender restrictions, and language practices, by ‘emphasizing the importance of the localized holy figure, like Chakradhar … who taught out in the open public’, and ‘in the public discourse of Marathi’ (p. 167).

Still, why Marathi? Novetzke comes back to this question in chapter 5, where he mainly explains it as a practical choice, given that most of Chakradhar's immediate followers were women, that he wanted to reach out to non-Brahmins, and that Marathi was ‘the dominant language of everyday life in the regions around Devgiri, where most of his life and teaching took place’ (p. 185). Indeed, despite occasional jabs at Sanskrit with its ‘“hences” (asmāt) and “whences” (kasmāt)’ (p. 182) and rare clever bilingual puns (p. 201), vernacularity is markedly unsung in the Līḷācarita, where no pledges of pride in Marathi as an expressive or aesthetic medium are found. But perhaps it is this down-to-earth pragmatism that best characterises the quotidian revolution and vernacular turn studied in this chapter, which ends with a sensitive reading of Chakradhar's collision with powerful Brahmin insiders, the fascinating contested story of his trial and maiming, and his eventual departure from Maharashtra. Here, too, a variety of social and cultural values are foregrounded in the frontlines forming around the early Mahanubhavs, but rarely language itself.

The choice of Marathi is more thematised in the Jñāneśvarī, the topic of chapters 6 and 7. This fascinatingly complex work—presented as an oral dialogue between Jnandev and his guru (Nivritti) that was then recorded by a scribe (Satchidananda Baba), only to be repeatedly re-edited, most famously by Eknath in the sixteenth century—sets out to render Krishna's (Sanskrit) sermon in the Bhagavad Gītā into Marathi. Here, in addition to the social-pragmatic need of giving women, low-castes, and others access to salvation as taught in the Gītā, importing the ‘knowledge of Brahman’ to the ‘city of Marathi’ (p. 229) openly presumes an intricate linguistic economy. On the one hand, Jnandev compares himself to a mere firefly next to the sun of the Gītā (p. 227), but on the other, he presents Marathi as affectionate and sweeter than divine nectar (p. 232), and as a beautiful, well-ornamented young woman, presumably taking the place of an ageing Sanskrit (p. 233). As Novetzke convincingly shows, the transformation from the older to a younger medium also means its translation to the everyday social landscape of Maharashtra in the late-thirteenth century, with its local caste politics and even occasional casteist joke.

Jnandev walks a fine line between his egalitarian ideals and the nonegalitarian context of his audience, and this tension is key to his vernacular project. ‘In the Jñāneśvarī, vernacularization has a double valence: it is radical in challenging a perceived Sanskrit hegemony over a salvational text like the Bhagavad Gītā, and yet it must embrace the “ordinary” as it returns to the cultural and literary field of everyday life where social distinction is endemic and deeply rooted’ (p. 282). This inherent dialectic notwithstanding, the Jñāneśvarī does insist on entering every ear, and this “sonic equality” plants the seed that in later centuries will turn Jnandev into the champion of “full social egalitarianism” (p. 283; the Conclusion gives a preview of this later discourse).

In the end, Novetzke's book teaches us not only about vernacularisation in Marathi, which he shows to be quite different than that of Pollock's model. His close reading of the Līḷācarita and the Jñāneśvarī also offers us a unique viewpoint into the quotidian world of Maharashtra during the Yadava century—the social landscape that these first Marathi works anticipate and begin to empower. It is this combination that makes the book one of the best regional histories of premodern India out there.