Andrew Ollett

I study the literary and intellectual traditions of South Asia, including works composed in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Kannada, and Chinese, mostly falling within the first millennium of the common era. My research has focused on the “question of language”: the availability and choice of certain languages for certain purposes, and the role of language in cultural production and change. 

Current projects include:

• With Sarah Pierce Taylor, an edition and translation The Way of the Poet-King (Kavirājamārgaṁ), a manual for composing literature in Kannada, one of the regional languages of South India. It was written in the 870s and hence is the oldest Kannada text to survive, apart from inscriptions. This project has been supported by an NEH “Scholarly Editions and Translations” grant.
• With Naresh Keerthi, an edition and translation of two plays composed by the 8th-century poet Māyurāja, namely Udayana the Ascetic (Tāpasavatsarāja) and Raghu’s Exalted Descendants (Udāttarāghava).
• A monograph on theories of memory in South Asia, focusing on concepts such as the trace (saṁskāra), decay (pramōṣa), retention (dhāraṇa), and the role of memory in debates about mindfulness, the existence of the self, and epistomology.
• A monograph on theories of context in Indian philosophy of language, focusing on concepts such as information structure (given vs. new information) and relational meaning. Sources include primarily Mīmāṁsā authors (Śabara, Kumārila, Prabhākara, and Śālikanātha) as well as Alaṅkāraśāstra authors (Mahimabhaṭṭa and Mammaṭa).

Other areas of interest: verse and meter (especially in Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Kannada, and Javanese); poetics and alaṅkāraśāstra; pragmatics; philosophy of language; Mīmāṁsā; literary history; intellectual history; philology.

• The Mirror of Ornaments (Alaṅkāradappaṇō): A Prakrit Work of Poetics. Naples: Unior Press, 2025. (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” Series Minor) Open access and available for free from the publisher.
• Lilavai (edition and translation). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021. (Murty Classical Library of India) Available from the publisher.
• Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Open access and available for free from the publisher.

• “Early Memorial Stones from the Deccan (up to 300 CE).” (With Vincent Tournier and Arlo Griffiths.) In Arlo Griffiths, Vincent Tournier, and Akira Shimada (eds.), Early Āndhradeśa: Historical Studies around the Epigraphic Corpus, volume 2, 162–333. Leiden: Brill, 2026 (Gonda Indological Series vol. 25).  DOI 10.1163/9789004744097_009.
• “Abdul Rahman’s Pretexts.” In Yigal Bronner and David Shulman (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Courier Poetry, 104–116. Routledge: Abingdon, 2026. DOI 10.4324/9781003639244-6.
• “Mudgara the Messenger.” In Yigal Bronner and David Shulman (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Courier Poetry, 283–301. DOI 10.4324/9781003639244-15.
• “Of Monks and Books: Manuscripts in Early Jainism.” In Jérôme Petit and Georges‐Jean Pinault (eds.), Praśasti: Studies in Indology Presented to Nalini Balbir by Colleagues, Students and Friends, 431–448. Halle: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 2025.
• “The First Hundred Light Years: The Wave of Twelfth-Century Responses to the Kāvyaprakāśa.” (with Yigal Bronner) Journal of the American Oriental Society 144.4 (2024): 807–831. DOI 10.7817/jaos.144.4.2024.ar029.
• “Double South Asian Studies!” History of Humanities 9.1 (2024): 179–191. DOI 10.1086/729082.
• “Final Syllable Reduction in Middle Indic and Iranic.” Bhāṣā: Journal of South Asian Linguistics, Philology and Grammatical Traditions 3.1 (2024): 54–106. DOI 10.30687/bhasha/2785-5953/2024/01/004.
• “A Revisionist Account of the Campū.” Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 6.1 (2024): 128–162. DOI 10.1163/25425552-20240006.
• “‘A Mirror and a Handlamp’: The Way of the Poet-King and the Afterlife of the Mirror In the World of Kannada Literature.” (edited by me, with contributions by Sarah Pierce
  Taylor, Gil Ben-Herut, and myself) Chapter 3 in Yigal Bronner (ed.), A Lasting Vision: Daṇḍin’s Mirror in the World of Asian Literature, 92–140. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2023. DOI
  10.1093/oso/9780197642924.003.0003.
• “Poetics Before Dandin” (with Yigal Bronner). Chapter 5, section 2 in Yigal Bronner (ed.), A Lasting Vision: Daṇḍin’s Mirror in the World of Asian Literature, 255–258. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2023. DOI 10.1093/oso/9780197642924.003.0006.
• “The Application of Mīmāṁsā Interpretive Concepts on Commentaries in Plays.” Asiatische Studien / Études asiatiques 76.3 (2022): 559–580. DOI 10.1515/asia-2022-0029.
• “Attempted Iconoclasm: Mahmud of Ghazna, King Yoga, and the Poet Dhanapāla.” 
  Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 42.2 (2022): 309–324 (a special issue edited by Manan Ahmed in memory of Allison Busch). DOI 10.1215/1089201X-9987762.
• “This Globe Where Man Is Nothing.” (Part of a symposium in response to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age). Review of Politics 84.4 (2022): 593–597. DOI 10.1017/S0034670522000687.
• “Non-canonical Subjects in the Prakrit of Kōūhala’s Līlāvaī.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.2 (2022): 273–292.
• “Plumbing the depths: reading Bhavabhūti in seventeenth-century Kerala.” (with Anand Venkatkrishnan) Asiatische Studien / Études asiatiques, 76.3 (2022): 581–622. DOI 10.1515/asia-2021-0036.
• “Images of Language Mixture in Early Kannada Literature.” In Chenna Reddy (ed.), Nagabharanam (festschrift for Hampa Nagarajaiah), 2022. (Note that I have
  never seen proofs or the final result of this article!)
• “Two Stories about the Transmission of Knowledge.” In Nida Ghouse and Brooke Holmes (eds.), Coming to Know (Volume 2 of the series An Archaeology of Listening, edited by Nida Ghouse and Brooke Holmes). Truccazano, Milan, Italy: Archive Books, pp. 92-104, 119-120. 2022.
• “Taking the Measure of A Hundred Measures.” In Yigal Bronner and Charles Hallisey (eds.), Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation, pp. 229–233. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022.
• “Śālikanātha’s Fundamentals of Sentence-Meaning.” In Alessandro Graheli (ed.), The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
• “Rasa as Sentence-Meaning.” In Alessandro Graheli (ed.), The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
• “Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s Explanation in Verse, Prabhākara’s Long Explanation, and
  Śālikanātha’s Straightforward and Lucid Gloss and Comprehensive Survey of the
  Epistemic Instruments.” (with Elisa Freschi) Three chapters of annotated translations about arthāpatti. In C. Malcolm Keating (ed.), Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy: Major Texts and Arguments on Arthāpatti. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
• “The Prakrit Mirror of Ornaments and Bhāmaha’s Ornament of Literature.” In Jayandra Soni and Hampa Nagarajaiah (eds.), Cāruśrī: Essays in Honor of Bhaṭṭāraka Cārukīrti, 163–174. Bangalore: Sapna Book House, 2019.
• “Duty and Sacrifice: A Logical Analysis of the Mīmāṃsā Theory of Vedic Injunctions.” [With Elisa Freschi and Matteo Pascucci.] History and Philosophy of Logic 40 [4]: 323–354, 2019. Open access and available for free from the publisher.
• “The Prakrit Mirror of Ornaments and Bhāmaha’s Ornament of Literature.” In Jayandra Soni and Hampa Nagarajaiah (eds.), Cāruśrī: Essays in Honor of Bhaṭṭāraka Cārukīrti, 163–174. Bangalore: Sapna Book House, 2019.
• “Making it Nice: Kāvya in the Second Century.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 47 [2]: 269–287, 2019.
• Sātavāhana and Nāgārjuna: Religion and the Sātavāhana State.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 41: 421–472, 201
• “Explaining Prakrit Poetry in the 18^th Century: Vrajarāja Dīkṣita’s Commentary on Hāla’s Seven Centuries.” Bulletin de l’école française d’extrême-orient 103: 11–41, 2018.
• “Pālitta and the History of Prakrit Literature.” In Peter Flügel and Nalini Balbir (eds.), Jain Studies: Select Papers at Bangkok and Kyoto. Delhi: DK Publishers Distributors, 2018.
• “High-Density Expressions in The Way of the Poet-King.” Rivista degli Studi Orientali N.S. 90: 93–105, 2017.

• Readings in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Pali
• Orientalism
• South Asian Civilizations I
• Memory, Text, Tradition
• Classical Literature of South Asia, 0-1000 CE
• South Asian Theatre: The First Thousand Years