Speaking In Gods’ Tongue: The Grammar Of Sanskrit Scholarship Today
Dr. Rohana Seneviratne
What makes one a Sanskrit scholar today?
What areas of the Sanskrit language does one need to be good with to declare “I know Sanskrit”?
Can one become knowledgeable about Sanskrit scholarship without mastering the language?
What could Sanskrit tell us and could not?
Do we really need Sanskrit?
The questions of this sort demand clarification of a few points before being answered. First, Sanskrit scholarship has been a misnomer mainly because one cannot, justifiably, know a certain language without knowing the wealth of knowledge in it, simply because knowledge comes to us getting on a certain language, either oral, written or both, as the vehicle. “Indologist” has often been a substitute for a scholar of Sanskrit but again is debated as “Indology” primarily entails German scholarship of India as known for over a century and is still associated with the academic treatment of India – both classical and modern – in Germany. Second, Sanskrit scholarship, or rather Indology scholarship, arguably, does not have any uniform identity due to its inherent geographical and ethnic properties plus perspicuous transformations over time. This leads to the commonplace – consequently, orthodox – notion that “Sanskrit is Indian” and “Sanskrit is for the Hindu”, which is largely wrong and misleading. Third, the most significant is that Sanskrit needs to defend itself by telling us what it has in store for us today.
One must be convinced enough of the current applicability of Sanskrit, which is widely debated even within India and beyond before having a vested interest in, let alone learning and using, it. Not attempted here is defending the significance of Sanskrit or elaborating on the role of the language, which may be “divine” for some, and “not-so-divine but a useful tool in certain contexts” for some others, and again an “unpleasantly hegemonic and paradigmatic” for another group. I would also skip why on earth we learn Sanskrit here in Sri Lanka. However, I will return to Sri Lanka’s context to highlight a few points relevant to the public impression of Sanskrit scholarship today. I am attempting to present before you an overview of the principal dimensions of Sanskrit scholarship in the contemporary world with particular emphasis on contemporary India, and the countries in Europe and the west, which we generally believe do not promote but treat Sanskrit as a dead language or even an extinct language. I would also attempt to prove that such a belief is simply a semblance or an ābhasa – to dub it in Sanskrit.
Where is Sanskrit heading?
It is obvious that we have to place the Sanskrit language in the global context to recognize its current role, limitations, accolades, and humiliations. Surprising enough to kupamandukas (frogs in the well) but not-so-puzzling to people out-of-the-box, Sanskrit receives accolades and humiliations, more often the latter, not only in the contemporary Hindu dominant India but also among the Hindus and even among Brahmins, the longtime custodians of it.
The reasons for this situation are largely political. We have to examine how significant the role “language” has played thus far and is playing today in identity politics and nationalist movements in the context of Sri Lanka. For example, the relation between the intellectual forces that have made India what it is today has been debated – both within and largely beyond academia. Ratification of Indian Hindu identity is strongly connected, as they claim, with Sanskrit intellectual history in the past few centuries in particular. However, the saffron terror unleashed by militant Hinduism during the last few decades under the pretext of glorifying Sanskrit and Hindu identity is not, understandably, tolerated by non-Hindu and non-conservative Hindu Indians as well as the non-Indian world community at large. Further, such terror-laden nationalism or jingoism triggered Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hindu scriptures just like Arabic of Islamic scriptures, being abhorred even by non-conservative Hindus. While the political solution was sought to mitigate the repercussions of militant Hinduism and chauvinistic patriotism, Sanskrit scholarship was often frowned upon and measures were also taken to make amendments to the national language policy and structure of education. This historic blow on Sanskrit was hard but the local pundits and policymakers could not reverse it by grabbing the attention of Sanskrit-lovers outside of Indian soil.
Meanwhile, some public figures with a global reputation like Rajiv Malhotra (b. 1950), are supporting for over a decade the idea of traditional Hindutva enormously bolstered by Sanskrit scholarship. For instance, Malhotra, a widely cited author, who was born and raised in India, now an American by citizenship, but, promoting non-western and nationalistic view on India and Hinduism, complains with logical evidence that the non-Indian – mostly western – reading of Hinduism denigrates the tradition and undermines the interests of India “by encouraging the paradigms that oppose its unity and integrity”. His critiques publicly slashed down the writings of a number of intellectuals including Sheldon Pollock (b. 1948), the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia and Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (b. 1940), the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, who are very highly regarded as great Sanskritists and Indologists in western academia. In his recent work “The Battle for Sanskrit: Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred, Oppressive or Liberating, Dead or Alive?” that received much attention globally, Malhotra questions the legitimacy of empowering Pollock, an intellectual with – as he calls – “academic Hindufobia”, to lead a project on the Advaita Vedanta. Further, Pollock is determined, in Malhotra’s eye, in “utterly purging Sanskrit studies of their sacred dimension “secularises” the Sanskrit kāvya literature by removing its transcendental dimensions.
Malhotra’s criticism of O’Flaherty’s approach to Sanskrit centred around her arbitrary usage of psychoanalytic concepts to examine Indian subjects and purposively eroticizing the contents in Sanskrit texts that do not deserve as such. Consequently, such Sanskritists jeopardize this sacred tongue rather than promote by purportedly introducing Sanskrit classics to non-Sanskritists that includes the western readership.
Moreover, Sanskrit scholarship encounters the most serious condemnation by the outsiders, who are not necessarily non-Indians, which adds largely to its shape today. Again as Malhotra holds, insiders view Sanskrit as sacred, but outsiders view the sacredness of Sanskrit as merely a smokescreen for oppressive view. Therefore, the views of Indian and non-Indian “outsiders” have been the most atrocious that undervalue, neglect and threaten Sanskrit irrespective of what it has got in store for new learners and users as well. The truth of such claims is indeed debatable but the core of it is distinct.
However, political underpinning has not been unfavourable to Sanskrit in the recent past. Reverting India’s soft power needs support from Sanskrit as highlighted not only by Modi’s initiatives to uplift Sanskrit scholarship across India but also by the solid views of some intellectuals of the opposition, one of the best examples of which would be Shashi Tharoor (b. 1956), a Congress MP, an acclaimed writer, and a prolific public speaker. Supporting the Nehruvian legacy, Tharoor has highlighted several times how British rule ruined Indian intellectual heritage while swindling whatever it could out of the Indian soil, as he argued in his viral speech in a few years ago at the Oxford Union on whether Britain owes reparation for colonizing India. On a different occasion, Tharoor’s emphasis was on teaching Sanskrit as a language that endowed the world with wonderful classics vis-à-vis the classics in Greek and Latin, rather than a hegemonic language in the past and/or today. Sanskrit deserves what it deserves, not essentially paradigmatic nor obsolete. Traditional learning of Sanskrit as in the Mathas or Hindu monasteries and the universities such as Sampurnanand University, BHU in Varanasi, and Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan do contribute to the preserving of the language and the associated branches of knowledge but hardly contribute to determining the global presence of Sanskrit.
Samskrtha Bharati’s endeavour to democratize and popularize conversational Sanskrit deserves a special note here. Having roots in as early as 1981 but founded as a national level organization in 1995, the Samskrutha Bharati promotes Sanskrit for over two decades by making initiatives in introducing it as the mother tongue in thousands of households across India and beyond. Its philosophy of promoting Sanskrit comprises changing the pedagogical principles from rote learning to immersion method through speaking “in Sanskrit” but not only “about Sanskrit”, and encouraging the use of simple but not simplified forms of grammar in the conversational register. As their records prove, the face of Sanskrit scholarship today is fast changing from pedantic shastric learning in the niche of traditional Sanskrit pundits to the joy of effortlessly speaking the “divine” language as a living language.
Having glanced at how Sanskrit is received in contemporary India, I would like to step outside of its birthplace to review succinctly its trod in the west.
