Saving Sanskrit

IT WAS IN 1897 THAT Mark Twain, besieged by rumours of ill health on a trip to London, told an American journalist: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” It is a comeback Sanskrit could have first done with in 1857 when the poet Dalpatram Dahyabhai wrote about how ‘the language of the gods had died’. Ironically, even the poem was brought to light only in 2001 in a now famous paper by Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock, titled ‘The Death of Sanskrit’. To be a classical language is to shoulder a great burden, to provide a link between what was and is, to anchor the present in a past which is at once distant yet present. To do so while continually battling for prominence is a burden not to be wished upon any, least of all in a country where linguistic politics is intertwined with issues of faith and identity. But this is where Sanskrit, one of the world’s oldest languages, has found itself
for the better part of the seven decades since Independence.

This is not to say that prior to Independence Sanskrit enjoyed a position of eminence. For almost two millennia, Sanskrit, the origins of which in the written form are traced back to 2nd millennium BCE (this form is known as Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the Rig Veda), exerted a great influence over vast parts of Asia, ‘clear from place names dotting the map all the way from Kandahar (Sanskrit: Gandhara) to Singapore (Sanskrit: Singhapura) and such fabled Indic monuments as Angkor Wat and Borobudur’, wrote author William Dalrymple in The Spectator earlier this month. But then ‘the language of the gods’, as it was referred to, from the 12th century onwards slowly started receding from public life. In his 2001 paper, Pollock observes the changes in the use of Sanskrit across centuries and kingdoms (12th century Kashmir, 16th century Vijayanagara and 17th century Varanasi) to find out why ‘Sanskrit culture ceased to make history’. From imperialism to competition from vernacular languages to the fall of courtly patronage, many reasons have been suggested though Sanskrit continues to be far more ‘alive’ than ancient Greek and Latin.

But that still hasn’t hampered the language’s ability to stir up passions time and again. Be it speculation on the motives behind the declarations of the year of Sanskrit (1999-2000) or the Sanskrit week (August 7th-14th, 2014), its re-introduction in school syllabi (2014) or controversy over the religion of who gets to teach certain aspects of the language, Sanskrit has never been far away from the eye of the storm. This is not taking into account the rumble in academia where Sanskritists clash over what the language represents.

In 1956, the first Sanskrit Commission was set up under the aegis of linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji. One of its mandates was to examine the traditional system of Sanskrit education to see what ‘features of it could be usefully incorporated into the modern system’. This has remained the guiding principle behind the state policy on Sanskrit since then—but with little or no impact on the ground. Sure, there are the mandatory inscription on currency notes, the Sanskrit bulletin on Doordarshan and institutions galore for the language. But Sanskrit remains on the periphery, being thrust centrestage only during a controversy. Uttarakhand may have declared Sanskrit as its second language in 2010 but is struggling owing to a lack of teachers.

“Sanskrit is the backbone of our indigenous knowledge system. Be it philosophical, literary, ethical, statecraft… they are all developed by the Sanskrit tradition,” says VN Jha, founder and Chairperson, Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. According to him, there is no parallel even today to Panini’s grammar. Jha comes from a family of Sanskrit vidvaans (scholars): both his grandfather and father were Sanskrit scholars. For people like him, Sanskrit is not just another language to be proficient in but also the repository of an intellectual heritage which is in danger of disappearing. “There is and has been for quite some time now a perception that this is an outdated language. There are still people who are genuinely interested in learning it to access the wealth of knowledge to be found in it but there are few organised structures in places,” says Sanskrit scholar Radhavallabh Tripathi of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

The wealth of knowledge that Tripathi refers to is not to be confused with the increasingly narrow prism— of cultural and religious supremacy—Sanskrit is today being viewed from. “Few people have studied texts in the original or even translations. They rely on simpler narratives that are peddled through popular culture and indeed even word of mouth which strip the language and its achievements of all its complexities,” says Kaushal Panwar who teaches at Delhi University. There is little interest in moving beyond the Gita, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata according to her, which is doing a great disservice to the language. “There are texts on subjects as varied as geography, zoology, statecraft and environment in the language but we have reduced it to the language of Pandits,” she says.

Sanskrit is widely believed to have one of the largest bodies of literature in the world as well as one of the most complex structures. Panini who lay down the rules for classical Sanskrit formulated 3,995 sutras spread over eight chapters each of which was further divided into padas. Sir William Jones, the English philologist who first proposed the theory of a relationship among Indo-European languages, had declared Sanskrit to be ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin and more… refined than either’. It is exactly the kind of statement that rouses sentiments of cultural superiority when any deeper engagement with the language is missing. Both Tripathi and Jha point out that there were never any proper provisions made for the language in the country’s education policy. Tripathi is contemptuously dismissive of what he refers to as the ‘teach you how to speak in 15 days’ approach, while Jha says that not just the knowledge systems created in Sanskrit but also the efforts of successive scholars have not been incorporated in the mainstream. “As a result, our children have grown up thinking that all intellectual traditions are Western and they ask, ‘What is there in Sanskrit?’ And this gap is only increasing.” Like Tripathi, even Jha is of the view that Sanskrit is not a language meant for day-to-day interaction. “It is all about the knowledge system in the texts.”

EVERY FEW YEARS, public figures make tall claims about the knowledge in Sanskrit texts. Ranging from the presence of airplanes to claims of plastic surgery, their statements become a source of anguish and handwringing, especially among committed Sanskritists. Most people Open spoke to mentioned that most champions of Sanskrit remain unaware of the Susruta Samhita written in 600 BCE which describes procedures such as skin grafting. This ignorance of actual texts, they said, results in gross misinterpretations that lead to such claims of plastic surgery. Similarly, the contributions of Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta and other mathematicians and astronomers is not under debate but cherrypicking of passages from their texts and interpreting them through the lens of 21st century science make a mockery of our knowledge traditions. In 2015, the human resource development (HRD) ministry had set up a commission to ‘suggest ways… to bring qualitative change in Sanskrit education… [and] to suggest measures to integrate Sanskrit studies with… Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Medical Science & Law etc’. In its report, the commission named texts such as the Atharva Veda and the Vaisesika school of philosophy as treasure houses of scientific concepts. The then HRD Minister Smriti Irani had told the Lok Sabha that the IITs had been requested to teach Sanskrit ‘with reference to study of works’.

She later had to clarify that the language was to be offered as an elective. Lost in the furore and mockery that followed the first announcement was the fact that there may be some merit in offering a classical language, renowned for its codified nature, in engineering institutes. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, a professor at IIT Delhi, had written for an online news portal that teaching Sanskrit at IITs may not be such a bad idea provided certain parameters are kept in mind. She had advocated relating the study of the language in not just IITs but also ‘broader interdisciplinary fields such as translation studies, including machine translation, cognitive linguistics and so forth’.

For true Sanskrit scholarship to flourish in the country, the emphasis has to move from nationalism to academics. In Census 2011, 24,821 people identified Sanskrit as their mother tongue, an increase of almost 14,000 from the 2001 Census. Much has been made of Mattur, a village in Shimoga district of Karnataka where people reportedly speak only Sanskrit. Sanskritists say there is doubt as to whether Sanskrit ever really was the language of communication even among the rarefied elite who wrote in it. “The first step is to free Sanskrit from the shackles of religion and caste,” says Panwar who had to battle considerable odds to study the language (she is a Valmiki, a Scheduled Caste). The second step, according to her, is to teach texts in a contemporary manner rather than the straightforward exam-based approach. “For instance, there are texts that deal with environmental issues. Why don’t we engage with them through the lens of the pollution crisis we are dealing with right now?” she says. To study a classical language, even if it is to access texts pertaining to a particular discipline, in the original is also to study the influence of these languages on our lives today. “Philosophers and others writing in Sanskrit were concerned with a broad range of topics: politics and statecraft, religion, knowledge, aesthetics and literature, love and desire and so much more. Sanskrit is a language which opens up this whole world of thought, ranging for thousands of years,” says Malcolm Keating who teaches philosophy at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Keating was himself drawn to the language when he was introduced to Indian/South Asian philosophy during his graduate studies in philosophy in the US. “I wanted to engage with the ideas themselves and not just the ideas through translation or secondary writings,” he tells Open.

There are attempts being made to carry forward Sanskrit, be it by preservation through digitised texts or institutes putting out multiple interpretations of different texts. But there is still a long way to go. According to Keating, funding is of paramount importance when it comes sustaining interest and expertise in classical languages. “Collaboration is also important. We need to digitise palm leaves before they crumble, we need editions which present the texts to us, we need translations which make the contents widely available and we need research on what the texts are saying.” Such projects do happen, he says, but mostly in isolation from one another. At their level, committed Sanskritists do all they can to push the language. Jha’, for instance, runs a website, Vidya Vatika, which aims to apply lessons from Indian knowledge systems to today’s life. Language programmes at the institutional level are paramount—and not just Sanskrit but also other ancient Indian languages such as Prakrit and Pali.

But before reform from outside can be advocated, the Sanskrit community in India too needs to take a deep hard look at itself. Even today, the world of Sanskrit academia remains rife with both caste and gender discriminations. At the 17th World Sanskrit Conference in Vancouver, Canada, in 2018, a panel on ‘The story of Sanskrit’ consisting of Ananya Vajpeyi of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, Kaushal Panwar and Mandakranta Bose, a Sanskritist at the University of British Columbia, Canada, reportedly led to some uncomfortable reactions from the audience as the three women spoke about their challenges of studying Sanskrit in a traditional and patriarchal system. When the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) was established in 1916, the Hindi poet Mahadevi Verma was not allowed to pursue her MA in Sanskrit. Over a century later, in 2019, Feroze Khan has been forced to shift from BHU’s Sanskrit Vidya Dharm Vigyan department to the arts faculty as students would not allow a Muslim to teach Sanskrit. “There is also the problem of the insider’s perspective, the way of seeing Sanskrit as not just a way of life but indicative of how I should live my life. One should respect the language and the text but you also need to approach it as a subject of critical study,” says Devasia M Antony of Delhi University.

In a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious society like India, language becomes a principal marker of identity. It is a question the nation has grappled with right from the start: in the Constituent Assembly, when the issue of a national language had first come up. Sanskrit was never the language of the common man and even though BR Ambedkar did support its selection as the national language, it was and is viewed through the prism of its own elitism. But, apart from knowledge, ancient languages and the texts written in them also provide the reader with a sense of self within the larger framework of history. To that end, the study of ancient languages will require more than just attempts to shoehorn it into syllabi.

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