"Perhaps it was much for the Sakas cultural innovations for their political domination that a new era came to be named after them. " What according to Sheldon Pollock was this 'cultural innovation'?

"Perhaps it was much for the Sakas cultural innovations for their political domination that a new era came to be named after them. " What according to Sheldon Pollock was this 'cultural innovation'? Correct Answer Use of Sanskrit for political purposes

The cultural innovation that the author here refers to is the use of Sanskrit language for political purposes.

• Sheldon Pollock, in his seminal work “The language of Gods in the World of Men”, explores the linkages between language, culture, and power in the early medieval period.  His work traces the cultural context of the use of the language in the early medieval period and the people who spoke or wrote in the language.
• He says” The Sakas ’ appropriation of Sanskrit for public political purposes at the beginning of the Common Era is an event symptomatic or causative of a radical transformation in the historical sociology of Sanskrit.
• “What is historically important is not so much that new power-seekers in the subcontinent began to participate in the prestige economy of Sanskrit—other groups had sought and found inclusion even in vaidika communities—but rather that Sakas, Kushanas, and the poets and intellectuals they patronized, often Buddhist poets and intellectuals began to expand that economy by turning Sanskrit into an instrument of polity and the mastery of Sanskrit into a source of personal charisma. If this kind of Sanskrit has a prehistory, no one has found it.” – Sheldon Pollack
• He analyses the Junagadh inscription of Rudradaman and states that the Sakas employed this practice of inscriptions in Sanskrit to celebrate the life and accomplishments of a living king and inaugurated a time and trend that continued for another 1000 years after the Sakas, the inscription was a eulogy and written in a Sanskrit which was to an extent standard, thus the cultural change brought in by the Sakas, in the context of language was exemplary.