with four arms with glittering terrible weapons". To Pollock, Ramayana offers "special imaginative resources", of divinization and demonization. Valmiki's solution to the political paradox of epic India is the "divinized king" who combats evil in the form of a 'demonized others'. Later medieval commentaries of Valmiki's Ramayana include instances where the Muslim outsiders are cast as rakshasas and asuras, and in the case of a Mughal translation of the epic, of Akbar being projected as the divine king, Rama and divs as the rakshasas. Pollock conjectures that this recurrent "mythopolitical strategy" of using the Ramayana as a political instrument has also found favour in modern India in the Ayodhya dispute. This, he posits, is clear not only in the choice of Ayodhya, the traditional birthplace of Rama, but also in the attempts by the BJP and VHP to portray Muslims as demonic. The Death of Sanskrit (2001) and Rajiv Malhotra Pollock begins his 2001 paper The Death of Sanskrit by associating Sanskrit with Hindutva (Hindu identity politics), the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Pollock writes, "...most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead", and postulates how Sanskrit might have reached such an impasse. Observing changes in the use of Sanskrit in 12th-century Kashmir, 16th-century Vijayanagara, and 17th-century Varanasi, Pollock argued that Sanskrit came to serve the purposes of "reinscription and restatement", while truly creative energies were directed elsewhere. According to Indian-American Hindu revivalist author Rajiv Malhotra, Pollock devised a novel idea about the "literarization" of Sanskrit, wherein the language "gets endowed with certain structures that make it an elite language of power over the masses". Moreover, in his book The Battle for Sanskrit, Malhotra suggests that Pollock makes deliberate, Hinduphobic attempts to de-sanctify Sanskrit. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006) The Sanskrit Cosmopolis In his 2006 book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, Pollock posits "the scholarly cultivation of language in premodern India" should be seen in terms of "its relationship to political power". Although Sanskrit was a language of Vedic ritual, it was adopted by royal courts, and by the fifth century "power in India now had a Sanskrit voice". According to Pollock, "Sanskrit become the premier vehicle for the expression of royal will, displacing all other codes" and "Sanskrit learning itself became an essential component of power." Pollock believes that grammar was