Geopolitics and Sanskrit Phobia

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Geopolitics and Sanskrit Phobia

 

Rajiv Malhotra

Overview

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This paper discusses the historical and contemporary relationship

between geopolitics and Sanskrit, and consists of the following

sections:

 

I. Sanskrit is more than a language. Like all languages, its

structures and categories contain a built-in framework for

representing specific worldviews. Sanskriti is the name of the

culture and civilization that embodies this framework. One may say

that Sanskriti is the term for what has recently become known as

Indic Civilization, a civilization that goes well beyond the borders

of modern India to encompass South Asia and much of Southeast Asia.

At one time, it included much of Asia.

 

II. Interactions among different regions of Asia helped to

develop and exchange this pan-Asian Sanskriti. Numerous examples

involving India, Southeast Asia and China are given.

 

III. Sanskrit started to decline after the West Asian invasions

of the Indian subcontinent. This had a devastating impact on

Sanskriti, as many world-famous centers of learning were destroyed,

and no single major university was built for many centuries by the

conquerors.

 

IV. Besides Asia, Sanskrit and Sanskriti influenced Europe's

modernity, and Sanskrit Studies became a large-scale formal activity

in most European universities. These influences shaped many

intellectual disciplines that are (falsely) classified as "Western".

But the "discovery" of Sanskrit by Europe also had the negative

influence of fueling European racism since the 19th century.

 

V. Meanwhile, in colonial India, the education system was de-

Sanskritized and replaced by an English based education. This served

to train clerks and low level employees to administer the Empire, and

to start the process of self-denigration among Indians, a trend that

continues today. Many prominent Indians achieved fame and success as

middlemen serving the Empire, and Gandhi's famous 1908

monograph, "Hind Swaraj," discusses this phenomenon.

 

VI. After India's independence, there was a broad based

Nehruvian love affair with Sanskrit as an important nation-building

vehicle. However, successive generations of Indian intellectuals have

replaced this with what this paper terms "Sanskrit Phobia," i.e. a

body of beliefs now widely disseminated according to which Sanskrit

and Sanskriti are blamed for all sorts of social, economic and

political problems facing India's underprivileged classes. This

section illustrates such phobia among prominent Western Indologists

and among trendy Indians involved in South Asian Studies who learn

about Sanskrit and Sanskriti according to Western frameworks and

biases.

 

VII. The clash of civilizations among the West, China and Islam

is used as a lens to discuss the future of Sanskriti across South and

Southeast Asia.

 

VIII. Some concrete suggestions are made for further

consideration to revitalize Sanskrit as a living language that has

potential for future knowledge development and empowerment of

humanity.

 

I. Sanskrit and the Multicultural Sanskriti (Indic Civilization)

 

In modern Westernized universities, Sanskrit is taught primarily as a

language only and that too in connection with Indo-European

philology. On the other hand, other major languages such as English,

Arabic and Mandarin are treated as containers of their respective

unique civilizational worldviews; the same approach is not accorded

to Sanskrit. In fact, the word itself has a wider, more general

meaning in the sense of civilization. Etymologically, Sanskrit

means "elaborated,refined,cultured," or "civilized," implying

wholeness of expression. Employed by the refined and educated as a

language and a means of communication, Sanskrit has also been a

vehicle of civilizational transmission and evolution.

 

The role of Sanskrit was not merely as a language but also as a

distinct cultural system and way of experiencing the world. Thus, to

the wider population, Sanskrit is experienced through the

civilization named Sanskriti, which is built on it.

 

Sanskriti is the repository of human sciences, art, architecture,

music, theatre, literature, pilgrimage, rituals and spirituality,

which embody pan-Indic cultural traits. Sanskriti incorporates all

branches of science and technology - medical, veterinary, plant

sciences, mathematics, engineering, architecture, dietetics, etc.

Pannini's grammar, a meta-language with such clarity, flexibility and

logic that certain pioneers in computer science are turning to it for

ideas is one of the stunning achievements of the human mind and is a

part of this Sanskriti.

 

>From at least the beginning of the common era until about the

thirteenth century, Sanskrit was the paramount linguistic and

cultural medium for the ruling and administrative circles, from

Purushapura (Peshawar) in Gandhara (Afghanistan) to as far east as

Pandurang in Annam (South Vietnam) and Prambanam in Central Java.

Sanskrit facilitated a cosmopolis of cultural and aesthetic

expressions that encompassed much of Asia for over a thousand years,

and this was not constituted by imperial power nor sustained by any

organized church. Sanskriti, thus, has been both the result and cause

of a cultural consciousness shared by most South and Southeast Asians

regardless of their religion, class or gender and expressed in

essential similarities of mental and spiritual outlook and ethos.

 

Even after Sanskrit as a language faded explicitly in most of Asia,

the Sanskriti based on it persists and underpins the civilizations of

South and Southeast Asia today. What Monier-Williams wrote of India

applies equally to Southeast Asia as well: "India's national

character is cast in a Sanskrit mould and in Sanskrit language. Its

literature is a key to its vast religious system. Sanskrit is one

medium of approach to the hearts of the Indians, however unlearned,

or however disunited by the various circumstances of country, caste,

and creed" (Gombrich 1978, 16).

 

Sanskrit unites the great and little traditions:

 

A bi-directional process facilitated the spread of Sanskriti in South

and Southeast Asia. The top-down meta-structure of Sanskrit was

transmitted into common spoken languages; simultaneously, there was a

bottom-up assimilation of local culture and language into Sanskrit's

open architecture. This is analogous to Microsoft (top down) and

Linux (bottom up) rolled into one. Such a culture grows without

breaking down, as it can evolve from within to remain continually

contemporaneous and advanced.

 

Pan-Indic civilization emerged in its present composite form through

the intercourse between these two cultural streams, which have been

called the "great" and "little" traditions, respectively. The streams

and flows between them were interconnected by various processes, such

as festivals and rituals, and scholars have used these "tracers" to

understand the reciprocal influences between Sanskrit and local

languages.

 

Marriott has delineated the twin processes: (i) the "downward" spread

of cultural elements that are contained in Sanskrit into localized

cultural units represented by local languages, and (ii), the "upward"

spread from local cultural elements into Sanskrit. Therefore,

Sanskrit served as a meta-language and framework for the vast range

of languages across Asia. While the high culture of the sophisticated

urbane population (known as "great tradition" in anthropology)

provides Sanskriti with refinement and comprehensiveness, cultural

input produced by the rural masses ("little tradition") gives it

popularity, vitality and pan-Indian outlook.

 

Once information about local or regional cultural traits is recorded

and encoded in Sanskrit, they become part of Sanskriti. On the other

hand, when elements of Sanskriti are localized and given local

flavour, they acquire a distinct regional cultural identity and

colour. Just as local cultural elements become incorporated into

Sanskriti, elements of Sanskriti are similarly assimilated and

multiply into a plurality of regional cultural units.

 

Sanskriti includes the lore and repository of popular song, dance,

play, sculpture, painting, and religious narratives. Dimock (1963, 1-

5) has suggested that the diversity to be found in the Indic region

(i.e. South and Southeast Asia) is permeated by patterns that recur

throughout the country, so that each region, despite its differences

from other regions, expresses the patterns - the structural

paradigmatic aspects - of the whole. Each regional culture is

therefore to be seen as a structural microcosm of the full system.

 

Sanskrit served two purposes: (1) spiritual, artistic, scientific and

ritual lingua franca across vast regions of Asia, and (2) a useful

vehicle of communication among speakers of local languages, much as

English is employed today.

 

Early Buddhist scriptures were composed and preserved in Pali and

other Prakrit (local) languages, but later started to also be

composed in what is known as "hybrid Sanskrit." There was a trend

using elegant, Paninian Sanskrit for both verbal and written

communication. Tibetan was developed based on Sanskrit and is

virtually a mirror image of it.

 

By the time of Kalidasa (600 C.E.) Sanskrit was mastered diligently

by the literati and was, therefore, never a dead language. It is

living, as Michael Coulson points out, because people chose it to

formulate their ideas in preference to some other language. It

flourished as a living language of inter-regional communication and

understanding before becoming eclipsed first by Persian and then by

English after the military and political conquest of India.

 

Refuting the habit of dividing the Prakrit languages of India into

two structurally separate "North" and "South" independent families,

Stephen Tyler explains that "[M]odern Indo-Aryan languages are more

similar to Dravidian languages than they are to other Indo-European

languages" (Tyler 1973: 18-20).

 

There is synergy between Sanskrit and Prakrit: A tinge of Prakrit

added to Sanskrit brought Sanskrit closer to the language of the

home, while a judicious Sanskritization made Prakrit into a language

of a higher cultural status. Both of these processes were

simultaneous and worked at conscious as well as subconscious levels

(Deshpande 1993, 35). As an example of this symbiosis, one may point

to various Sanskrit texts in medieval India which were instruction

manuals for spoken or conversational Sanskrit by the general public

(Deshpande 1993; Salomon 1982; Wezler 1996).

 

Understanding this leads us to a vital insight about Sanskriti: Given

this relationship between Sanskrit and local languages, and that

Sanskriti is the common cultural container, it is not necessary for

everyone to know Sanskrit in order to absorb and develop an inner

experience of the embedded values and categories of meaning it

carries. Similarly, a knower of the local languages would have access

to the ideas, values and categories embodied in Sanskriti.

 

Unlike the cultural genocides of natives by Arabic, Mandarin and

English speaking conquerors and colonizers, Sanskrit had a mutually

symbiotic relationship with the popular local languages, and this

remained one of reciprocal reinforcement rather than forced adoption

through coercion or conquest.

 

This deeply embedded cultural dynamism could be the real key to a

phenomenon that is often superficially misattributed to the British

English: how modern India despite its vast economic disadvantages is

able to produce adaptive and world-class individuals in virtually all

fields of endeavour. This dynamism makes the assimilation of "modern"

and "progressive" ideologies and thought patterns easier in India

than in many other developing countries. In fact, it facilitates

incorporating "modern" innovations into the tradition. It allows

India to achieve its own kind of "modernity" in which it would also

remain "Indian," just as Western modernity is built on distinctly

European structures despite their claim of universality. This is why

Indians are adaptive and able to compete globally compared to other

non-Western traditions today.

 

II. Pan-Asian Sanskriti

 

"India is the central link in a chain of regional civilizations that

extend from Japan in the far north-east to Ireland in the far north-

west. Between these two extremities the chain sags down southwards in

a festoon that dips below the Equator in Indonesia." (A.J. Toynbee)

 

Centuries prior to the trend of Westernization of the globe, the

entire arc from Central Asia through Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka,

Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam and all the way to Indonesia was a

crucible of a sophisticated pan-Asian civilization. In A.L.

Basham's "A Cultural History of India," it is said that:

 

By the fifth century CE, Indianized states, that is to say states

organized along the traditional lines of Indian political theory and

following the Buddhist or Hindu religions, had established themselves

in many regions of Burma, Thailand, Indo-China, Malaysia, and

Indonesia. (Basham 1975, 442-3)

 

However, unlike the violent spread of Europeanism in recent

centuries, this Sanskritisation of Asia was entirely peaceful, never

resorting to physical force or coercion to subvert local cultures or

identities, or to engage in economic or political exploitation of the

host cultures and societies. Its worldviews were based on compassion

and mutual exchange, and not on the principle of conquest and

domination. This is not to say that political disputes and wars of

conquest never occurred, but that in most instances, neither the

motive nor the result was the imposition of cultural or religious

homogeneity.

 

The following passage from Arun Bhattacharjee's "Greater India"

elaborates this point clearly:

 

The unique feature of India's contacts and relationship with other

countries and peoples of the world is that the cultural expansion was

never confused with colonial domination and commercial dynamism far

less economic exploitation. That culture can advance without

political motives, that trade can proceed without imperialist

designs, settlements can take place without colonial excesses and

that literature, religion and language can be transported without

xenophobia, jingoism and race complexes are amply evidenced from the

history of India's contact with her neighbors...Thus although a

considerable part of central and south-eastern Asia became

flourishing centers of Indian culture, they were seldom subjects to

the regime of any Indian king or conquerors and hardly witnessed the

horrors and havocs of any Indian military campaign. They were

perfectly free, politically and economically and their people

representing an integration of Indian and indigenous elements had no

links with any Indian state and looked upon India as a holy land

rather than a motherland – a land of pilgrimage and not an area of

jurisdiction. (Bhattacharjee 1981, 1-3)

 

This Sanskritisation in Asia provided an adaptive and flexible unity

to those regions it influenced. For example, in Thailand you can find

the city of Ayodhya and Thai versions of the Ramayana. In Java, a

local forest inhabited by monkeys is thought to have been the home of

Hanuman at some point and the current residences his descendents.

Every polity influenced by this Sanskritization was able to

incorporate the vast Sanskriti culture into its own. This

malleability provided a non-invasive and unimposing diffusion.

 

Sanskriti and Southeast Asia:

 

The establishment of trade (of goods and mutual material benefit)

between India and Southeast Asia was the mechanism of this culture

and knowledge trade:

 

Contacts between India and South-East Asia along the trade-routes,

once established, persisted; and cultural changes in the Indian

subcontinent had their effect across the Bay of Bengal. During the

late Gupta and the Pala-Sena periods many Southeast Asian regions

were greatly influenced by developments in Indian religious ideas,

especially in the Buddhist field. (Basham 1975, 449)

 

This Sanskrit based civilization was not centrally developed in what

is present day India, but was rather the collaborative effort of

Indians with many Asian peoples, especially the Southeast Asians. For

example, there were regular scholarly exchanges between thinkers from

many diverse parts of Asia.

 

Many Asian kings sent their best students to centers of learning in

India, such as Taksasila and Nalanda, which were ancient equivalents

of today's Ivy Leagues in America where the third world now sends its

brightest youth for higher education. King Baladeva of Indonesia was

so supportive of the university in Nalanda that in A.D. 860 he made a

donation to it (Basham 1975, 449). The support given to the

university from a foreign king thousands of miles away in Southeast

Asian demonstrates how important scholarly exchange was for those

regions under the influence of Pan-Asian Sanskriti.

 

Interestingly, the geographies mentioned in the Puranas, such as

Ramayana and Mahabharata, include many countries, especially of

Southeast Asia, as a part and parcel of the Indic region. This

indicates an ancient link between South and Southeast Asian even

before the relatively modern Sanskritization that is being discussed

here.

 

Sanskriti and Thailand:

 

Sanskriti has an established and obvious influence in Thailand,

dating from 1500 years ago to the present day. Sanskrit was used for

public social, cultural, and administrative purposes in Thailand and

other regions of Southeast Asia.

 

The Thais, once established in the Menam basin, underwent a process

of Indianization which, because it is well documented, provides an

invaluable example of the mechanics of cultural fusion in South-East

Asia... On the other hand, the Thais absorbed much from their Khmer

and Mon subjects; and the influence of Angkor and Dvaravati is

obvious in Thai art. Thai kings embraced the Indian religions, and

they based their principles of government upon Hindu practice as it

had been understood by their Khmer predecessors (Basham, 1975, 450).

 

In Thailand, Sanskrit is highly respected today as the medium of

validating, legitimating, and transmitting royal succession and

instituting formal rituals.

 

The Thai monarchy, though following Hinayana Buddhism of the

Sinhalese type, still requires the presence of Court brahmans... for

the proper performance of its ceremonials. (Basham 1975, 442-3)

 

Furthermore, India and Sanskriti directly influenced aspects of Thai

aesthetics such as architecture and art.

 

Thai rulers...sent, for example, agents to Bengal, at that time

suffering from the disruption of Islamic conquest, to bring back

models upon which to base an official sculpture and architecture.

Hence Thai architects began to build replicas of the Bodh-Gaya stupa

(Wat Chet Yot in Chiengmai is a good example) and Thai artists made

Buddha images according to the Pala canon as they saw it. (Basham:

450).

 

Dance and theatre also continue to reflect the underlying influence

of Sanskriti.

 

The traditional dance and shadow-puppet theatres in many South-East

Asian regions, in Thailand, Malaya, and Java for example, continue to

fascinate their audiences with the adventures of Rama and Sita and

Hanuman. (Basham 1975, 442-3)

 

In linguistic terms, Sanskrit had the same cultural influence on Thai

as Latin had on English. In other cases, Pali influenced more than

Sanskrit - for instance, a person who knows Pali can often guess the

meaning of present day Cambodian, Burmese, Thai and Lao, and this

Pali impact was largely from Sri Lanka. Basham points out:

 

Many South-East languages contain an important proportion of words of

Sanskrit or Dravidian origin. Some of these languages, like Thai, are

still written in scripts which are clearly derived from Indian

models. (Basham 1975, 442-3).

 

Sanskriti and China:

 

China and India had a unique and mutually respected exchange.

Buddhist thought is the most notable and obvious import into China

from Sanskriti influence. The Tang dynasty provided an opening for

the Chinese civilization to welcome Sanskriti coming from South and

Southeast Asia.

 

The Tang dynasty ruled in China from 618 to 907 AD. This is one of

the most glorious periods in the history of China. The whole of China

came under one political power that extended over Central Asia. It

was in this period that the influence of India over China reached the

highest peak. A large number of missionaries and merchants crowded

the main cities of China. Similarly, more Chinese monks and royal

embassies came to India in the seventh century AD than during any

other period. The Nalanda University which was at its height

attracted large number of Buddhist monks from all over Asia. The

Chinese scholars at Nalanda not only studied Buddhism but Brahmanical

philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and medicine also. The Chinese

emperor gave liberal support to the Chinese scholars studying at

Nalanda" (Bhattacharjee 1981, 131-2).

 

The characteristic of the recipient "pulling" knowledge is typical in

the transmission of Sanskriti and is to be contrasted with

the "pushing" model of the spread of Christianity and Islam by divine

fiat. Unlike Christian evangelists "pushing", Hiuen Tsang and I-Tsing

came from China to "pull" knowledge by learning Buddhism and other

disciplines in India and taking them back.

 

Foremost among such scholars was Hiuen Tsang who played the most

distinguished part in establishing Buddhism on a solid footing in

China and improving the cultural relations between these two

countries. He learnt the Yogachara system at Nalanda from the famous

monk Silabhadra. On his return to China he translated Buddhist texts

and trained his pupils. He founded a new school of Buddhist

philosophy in China, which carried on his work after his death. His

noble example induced other Chinese monks to visit India. We find

that during the later half of the seventh century AD as many as sixty

Chinese monks visited India. (Bhattacharjee 1981, 131-2)

 

An outstanding scholar who dipped into India's prestigious centers of

learning to transfer know-how to China was I-Tsing:

 

I-Tsing...left China by the sea route in 671 AD and having spent

several years in Sri-vijaya, an important centre of Buddhist learning

in Sumatra reached the port of Tamralipti in Bengal in 673 AD. He

stayed at Nalanda for ten years (675-685 AD) and studied and copied

Buddhist texts. He came back to China with a collection of four

hundred Sanskrit manuscripts containing more than fifty thousand

slokas. He translated several texts and compiled a Chinese-Sanskrit

dictionary. In his book A Record of the Buddhist Religion as

practiced in India and the Malay Archipelago, he has recorded in

details the rules of monastic life as practiced in India, which was a

subject of his special interest. He also wrote a biography of sixty

Buddhist monks who visited India. Most of such monks were Chinese,

though some of them belonged to Korea, Samarkand and Tushdra (Turk

countries). This book shows the international position of Buddhism in

Asia and at the same time indicates its influence in outlying

countries like Korea (Bhattacharjee 1981, 138).

 

Chinese pilgrims were officially sent to Indian holy sites to pay

homage on behalf of the Chinese emperorship. The presence of Chinese

pilgrims was a practice of close interaction between the Sanskriti

superstructure and the Chinese civilization.

 

Between 950 and 1033 AD a large number of Chinese pilgrims visited

India. In 964 AD 300 Chinese monks left China to pay imperial homages

(as desired by the Chinese emperor) to the holy places of India. Five

of the pilgrims left short inscriptions at the sacred site of Bodh-

Gaya. It records the construction of a stupa in honour of emperor

T'ai-tsong by the emperor and the dowager empress of the great Song

dynasty...The last Chinese monk to visit India was after 1036 AD

which marks the close of the long and intimate cultural intercourse

between India and China (Bhattacharjee 1981, 125-8).

 

The exchange was by no means unidirectional. Indian gurus and pandits

also went to China and were received with honor by the Chinese. These

holy men went to China not just to exchange ideas but also for the

practical task of translating Sanskrit texts into Chinese.

 

In 972 AD as many as forty-four Indian monks went to China. In 973 AD

Dharmadeva, a monk of Nalanda was received by the Chinese emperor

with great honours. He is credited with translating a large number of

Sanskrit texts. Between 970 and 1036 AD a number of other Indian

monarchs including a prince of western India named Manjusri stayed at

China between 970 and 1036 AD. We know from the Chinese records that

there were never so many Indian monks in the Chinese court as at the

close of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century AD.

These Indian monks and Chinese pilgrims carried with them a large

number of Sanskrit manuscripts into China. The Chinese emperor

appointed a Board of Translators with three Indian scholars at the

head. This board succeeded in translating more than 200 volumes

between 982 and 1011 AD. (Bhattacharjee 1981, 125-8).

 

Buddhism's spread across Asia is well acknowledged, but beyond mere

religion, this pan-Asian civilization also become a fountain of

knowledge in fields as diverse as arts, language, linguistics,

mathematics, astronomy, medicine, botany, martial arts and

philosophy. For instance, in China:

 

Indian astronomy, mathematics and medicine earned great popularity...

On the official boards were Indian astronomers to prepare the

calendars. In the seventh century AD in the capital city flourished

three astronomical schools known as Gautama, Kasyapa and Kumara.

China had already adopted the Indian theory of nine planets. The

Sanskrit astronomical work – Navagraha-Siddhanta was translated into

Chinese in the T'ang period. A large number of mathematical and

astronomical works were translated into Chinese...Indian medicinal

treatise found great favour in China. A large number of medical texts

are found in the Chinese Buddhist collection. Rdvana-Kumara Charita,

a Sanskrit treatise on the method of treatment of children's diseases

was translated into Chinese in the eleventh century AD

(Bhattarcharjee 1981, 134-5).

 

The arts were also centers of confluence of Chinese culture and

Sanskriti. Motifs and styles as well as actual artists were exported

to China.

 

Along with Buddhism art of India traveled to China. In fact, the art

of India exerted a great influence on the native traditions and gave

rise to a new school of art known as Sino-Indian art. The Wei period

witnessed a great development in this art. A number of rock-cut caves

at Thunwang, Yun-kang and Longmen, colossal images of Buddha 60 to 70

feet high and fresco paintings on the walls of the caves illustrate

this art. The inspiration came not only from the images and pictures

that were imported from India to China but also from the Indian

artists who visited China. Three Indian painters of the names of

Sakyabuddha, Buddhakirti and Kumarabodhi worked in China during the

Wei period. Gandhara, Mathura and Gupta – the three different schools

of sculpture in India were well represented in Chinese art. The best

image of Buddha of Wei period was definitely made after the Buddha

images of Ajanta and Sarnath. (Bhattarcharjee 1981, 134-5)

 

Indian musicians also traveled to China and even Japan to share their

talent.

 

Indian music also traveled to China. An Indian musician settled in

Kuchi was its sponsor in China. In 581 AD a musical party went from

India to China. Although emperor Kaotsu (581-595 AD) vainly tried to

ban it by an Imperial order, his successor gave encouragement to the

lndian music in China. From a Japanese tradition we come to

understand that two principal types of music called Bodhisattva and

Bhairo were taken from China to Japan by an Indian brahmana called

Bodhi in the T'ang period. (Bhattarcharjee 1981, 134-5)

 

It is little wonder that Hu Shih, former Chinese ambassador to USA is

said to have remarked that India conquered and dominated China

culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single

soldier across her border.

 

Implications:

 

While today's globalization is largely the Westernization of the

globe, the earlier civilizational expansion was a mutually nourishing

form of Sanskritisation that made huge impacts on the intellectual

and cultural development of India, China, Japan, Mongolia, Southeast

Asia, present-day Afghanistan and Central Asia.

 

As will be discussed later, beyond Asia, Indic civilization

profoundly influenced Europe's modernity and the enlightenment

movements. While Sanskrit's positive role in world history is well

documented, awareness of this is primarily confined to a few narrowly

specialized scholars. The current teaching of world history tends to

be Eurocentric and ignores the contributions of other civilizations

and traditions.

 

Sanskrit can help generate the necessary knowledge systems in order

to explore the objectives, methods, and institutional dynamics of

intellectual life in contemporary Asia. Also, the history of Sanskrit

and Sanskriti can provide the modern world a model of how cultural

diffusion can lead to a harmonious and synergetic flowering of

humanity rather than forced assimilation through oppression and

subjugation. The colonial and neo-colonial necessity of a

master/slave relationship in the spread of influence is neatly

refuted by the legacy of Sanskriti.

 

III. Decline of Sanskrit

 

Since 12th CE, Sanskrit slowly declined in India under political

duress and, while remaining an important influence, gradually lost

its vitality as the cornerstone for a pan-Asian culture.

 

While many universities in India were destroyed by invaders from West

Asia, it is telling that there was no new major university founded

during the entire 500 year Mughal rule over India.

 

India's valuable lead as knowledge producer and exporter was lost,

and India became an importer of know-how from and dependent upon

Europeans, a fate shared by much of Southeast Asia.

 

IV. Sanskrit Influence on Modern Europe

 

Europe's "discovery" of Sanskrit:

 

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is a wonderful

structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more

exquisitely refined than either..." (Sir William Jones, Supreme Court

Judge of the British East India Company, 1786, Singer 1972, 29).

 

The European colonial mindset was one of discovery with the goal of

appropriating the "discovery." One need not look hard to find vivid

examples of this in the conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

The "discovery" of Sanskrit and Sanskriti by European scholars

followed this model quite well. European scholarship saw potential in

the Sanskrit language not only for exploration on its own terms, but

also to take back to Europe and use for imperial purposes.

 

Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawaii,

brought to my attention a colonial wall carving in Oxford which

blatantly boasts of the intellectual conquest of Sanskrit by the

British. Chakrabarti wrote as follows:

 

There is a monument to Sir William Jones, the great eighteenth-

century British Orientalist, in the chapel of University College,

Oxford. This marble frieze shows Sir William sitting on a chair

writing something down on a desk while three Indian traditional

scholars squatting in front of him are either interpreting a text or

contemplating or reflecting on some problem.

 

It is well known that for years Jones sat at the feet of learned

pandits in India to take lessons in Sanskrit grammar, poetics, logic,

jurisprudence, and metaphysics. He wrote letters home about how

fascinating and yet how complex and demanding was his new learning of

these old materials. But this sculpture shows – quite realistically –

the Brahmins sitting down below on the floor, slightly crouching and

bare-bodied – with no writing implements in their hands (for they

knew by heart most of what they were teaching and did not need notes

or printed texts!) while the overdressed Jones sits imperiously on a

chair writing something at a table. The inscription below hails Jones

as the "Justinian of India" because he "formed" a digest of Hindu and

Mohammedan laws. The truth is that he translated and interpreted into

English a tiny tip of the massive iceberg of ancient Indian

Dharmashastra literature along with some Islamic law books. Yet the

monument says and shows Jones to be the "law-giver," and the "native

informer" to be the "receiver of knowledge."

 

What this amply illustrates is that the semiotics of colonial

encounters have – perhaps indelibly – inscribed a profound asymmetry

of epistemic prestige upon any future East-West exchange of

knowledge. (Arindam Chakrabarti, "Introduction," Philosophy East &

West Volume 51, Number 4 October 2001 449-451.)

 

It took me nearly two years to locate the carving in Oxford, which I

had to personally visit to see and then to go through a bureaucratic

quagmire to get the following picture of it.

 

The picture symbolizes how academic Indians today often remain under

the glass ceiling as "native informants" of the Westerners. Yet in

19th century Europe, Sanskrit was held in great awe and respect, even

while the natives of India were held in contempt or at best in a

patronizing manner as children to be raised into their master's

advanced "civilization."

 

In 1794 the first chair of Sanskrit in Europe was established in

Copenhagen. In 1808, Schlegel's university had replaced Hebrew and

Arabic with Sanskrit. Sanskrit was introduced into every major

European university between 1800 and 1850 and overshadowed other

classical languages which were often downsized to make way for

Sanskrit positions. This frenzy may be compared with today's spread

of computer science in higher education. The focus on Sanskrit

replaced the earlier focus on Arabic/Persian as the source of

intellectual thought.

 

As a part of this frenzy among Europe's leading thinkers, Sanskrit

replaced Hebrew as the language deemed to belong to the ancestors of

Europeans – eventually leading to the Aryanization of European

identity, which, in turn, led to the cataclysmic events of the

following century.

 

Most of the famous European minds of the 19th century, by their own

testimony, were either Sanskritists, or were greatly shaped by

Sanskrit literature and thought by their own testimony. Professor

Kapil Kapoor describes how Europeans have benefited from Sanskrit:

 

[T]hose who believe that this [sanskrit] knowledge is now archaic

would do well to recall that the contemporary western theories,

though essentially interpretive, have evolved from Europe's 19th

century interaction with Sanskrit philosophy, grammar and poetics;

they would care to remember that Roman Jakobson, Trubetzkoy and de

Saussure were Sanskritists, that Saussure was in fact a professor of

Sanskrit at Geneva and that his published papers include work on

Sanskrit poetics. The structural, formalist thinking and the

linguistic turn of contemporary theory have their pedigree in

Sanskrit thought. In this, Europe's highly fruitful interaction with

the Indian thought over practically the same time-span contrasts

sharply with 150 years of sterile Indian interaction with the western

thought. After the founding of Sanskrit chairs in the first decade of

the nineteenth century, Europe interacted with the Indian thought,

particularly in philosophy, grammar, literary theory and literature,

in a big way without abandoning its own powerful tradition. In the

process, it created, as we have said a new discipline, Historical-

Comparative Linguistics, produced a galaxy of thinkers - Schiller,

Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy and above

all Saussure - and founded a revolutionary conceptual framework which

was to influence the European thought for the next century,

Structuralism. (From "Eleven Objections to Sanskrit Literary Theory:

A Rejoinder," by Kapil Kapoor, the expanded version of the lecture

delivered at Dhvanyaloka on June 11, 2000. See the complete essay on-

line at: http://www.indianscience.org/essays/st_es_kapoo_eleven.shtml)

 

To this list of "revolutionary" European thinkers who benefited from

Sanskrit, one may add many more, such as Bopp, von Humboldt,

Grassman, Schlegel, Max Muller, Voltaire and J. S. Mill. Max

Mueller's very influential book, "What India can teach us," gave a

strong push for the European assimilation of Sanskrit thought. The

French, ranging from Voltaire to Renoir, and the British also learnt

a great deal via the Germans. In the 19th century, there was also a

shift away from the Enlightenment Project of "reason" as the pinnacle

of man, and this was influenced by Sanskrit studies in Europe and

eventually led to a departure from Aristotelian thought to

structuralism. Many disciplines in Europe got a boost from the study

of Sanskrit texts, including philosophy, linguistics, literature and

mathematics.

 

Sanskrit used to boost White Christian Supremacy:

 

European "discovery" of Sanskrit brought the opportunity to

appropriate its rich tradition for the sake of the Europeans'

obsession to reimagine their own history. Many rival theories

emerged, each claiming a new historiography. The new European

preoccupation among scholars was to reinvent identities of various

European peoples by suitably locating Sanskrit amidst other selective

facts of history to create Grand Narratives of European supremacy.

Exploiting India's status as a colony, Europeans were successful in

capturing Sanskrit and Sanskriti from India in order to fulfill their

own ideological imperatives of reconciling theology

(specifically 'Semitic' monotheism, from which Christianity sprouted)

with their self-imposed role of world ruler.

 

One of the leading promoters of Aryan theories, Friedrich Max Muller

(1823-1900) described the inception of his discipline as the starting

point for a new science of human origins:

 

Thanks to the discovery of the ancient language of India, Sanskrit as

it is called . . . and thanks to the discovery of the close kinship

between this language and the idioms of the principal races of

Europe, which was established by the genius of Schlegel, Humboldt,

Bopp, and many others, a complete revolution has taken place in the

method of studying the world's primitive history (Olender, 7)

 

The central theme to this reinvention of European (read "Christian")

narrative was of origins and, thus, implied destinies. Determining

what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden was considered central

to this. The newly discovered language of Sanskrit and its literature

proved to be vast and erudite and the uncovered links between

European language and Sanskrit excited the scholars and encouraged an

assimilation of this most ancient and profound linguistic culture. At

the same time, the perceived spiritual providence that the Abrahamic

God had bestowed on Europeans in the form of Christianity had to be

incorporated and synthesized into the narrative. The "scientific" and

empirical evidence of linguistic survey had to coincide with

theological laws.

 

"The comparative study of languages was inspired by Renaissance

debates over what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden. By the

eighteenth century scholars were persuaded that European languages

shared a common ancestor. With the adoption of

positivist, "scientific" methods in the nineteenth century, the hunt

for the language of Eden and the search for a European Ursprache

diverged. Yet the desire to reconcile historical causality with

divine purpose remained... " (Olender, jacket)

 

The formation of two mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed

groups of peoples was the device constructed to achieve this need –

these were the Semitic 'race' and the mythical 'Aryans'. The

Semitics, synonymous with the Hebrews, were portrayed as a sedentary,

passive, inclusive, and trapped in time. However, they were a people

who were in communication with the one true God and thus held the

seed of religion.

 

Faithful guardians of pure monotheism, the Hebrews had a magnificent

part in the divine plan, but one wonders where the world would be

today if they had remained the sole leaders of mankind. The fact is,

while they religiously preserved the principle of truth from which a

higher light would one day emanate…(Olender: 99-102).

 

The rightful rulers of the world had to have been intelligent, moral,

active, and industrious - a people willing to explore and expand,

conquer and dominate. The concocted Aryan race was assigned this

role. Scholars coined various ethno-linguistic terms such as "Indo-

European", "Indo-Germanic", and "Aryan" to refer to this newly

discovered people, and used these interchangeably to refer to the

linguistic family as well as a race.

 

As scholars established the disciplines of Semitic and Indo-European

studies, they also invented the mythical figures of the Hebrew and

the Aryan, a providential pair which, by revealing to the people of

the Christianized West the secret of their identity, also bestowed

upon them the patent of nobility that justified their Spiritual,

religious, and political domination of the world. The balance was not

maintained, however, between the two components of this couple. The

Hebrew undeniably had the privilege of monotheism in his favor, but

he was self-centered, static, and refractory both to Christian values

and to progress in culture and science. The Aryan, on the other hand,

was invested with all the noble virtues that direct the dynamic of

history: imagination, reason, science, arts, politics. The Hebrew was

troublesome, disturbing, problematic: he stood at the very foundation

of the religious tradition with which the scholars in question

identified, but he was also alien to that tradition. Wherever he

lived, under the name of Jew, in a specific place among a specific

people, he remained an outsider, aloof, different (Olender: Foreword

x-xi).

 

The key players in the scholastic juggling act who attempted to

reconcile the Semitic and the Aryan included several famous European

scholars, namely: Renan, Pictet, Max Muller, and Grau. Christian

supremacy and Christian manifest destiny was central to the works of

these Orientalists.

 

In the works of Renan, Pictet, Max Muller, and Grau, Christ remained

a central figure in the conceptualization of Indo-European

civilization. The new religious sciences attempted to treat all

religions in the same way and yet to impose a Christian providential

meaning on the new comparative order. The very organization of

religious data was affected by older hierarchical classifications.

The cataloging of peoples and faiths reflected the belief that

history was moving in a Christian direction (Olender: 136-7).

 

These scholars' main objective was to use scientific reason to

substantiate theological necessities no matter how far the hard facts

had to be bent. Max Muller, in reference to comparative philology,

explicitly stated the orientation of his research:

 

"We are entering into a new sphere of knowledge, in which the

individual is subordinate to the general and facts are subordinate to

law. We find thought, order, and design scattered throughout nature,

and we see a dark chaos of matter illuminated by the reflection of

the divine spirit." (Olender, 90-92)

 

Since the paradigmatic expectations of the scholar are exposed as

foregone conclusions of his analysis, the bias and subjectivity in

the writer's scholarship becomes obvious. Furthermore, the Christian

supremacist agenda behind his work is obvious:

 

The Science of Religion will for the first time assign to

Christianity its right place among the religions of the world; it

will show for the first time what was meant by the fullness of time;

it will restore to the whole history of the world, in its unconscious

progress towards Christianity, its true and sacred character." A good

disciple of Augustine, Max Muller was fond of citing his remark that

Christianity was simply the name of "the true religion," a religion

that was already known to the ancients and indeed had been

around "since the beginning of the human race (Olender: 90-92).

 

He deplored the tactlessness that many Christian missionaries

exhibited in their dealings with pagans, and advocated subtlety in

asserting superiority:

 

The man who is born blind is to be pitied, not berated. . . . To

prove that our religion is the only true one it surely is not

necessary to maintain that all other forms of belief are a fabric of

errors. (Olender: 90-92).

 

One large problem about the synthesis was that the Vedic religion had

to be shown as barbaric and primitive in order to legitimize the need

to colonize Indians. Therefore, it could not have been the beliefs of

the ancestors of Christian Europe with its perceived religious

supremacy. The scholars were forced to reconcile with the paradox of

how the intellectually superior Aryans believed in such a low form of

religion. Pictet was forced to ask himself:

 

Everything known about them [Aryans] suggests that they were "an

eminently intelligent and moral race". Is it possible to believe that

people who ultimately brought such intensity to intellectual and

religious life started from the lowly estate of either having no

religion or wallowing in the abyss of an obscure polytheism?

(Olender: 93-98).

 

The result of such groping in the dark was pathetic and childish. The

theories proclaimed with great aplomb fit into a general framework of

Aryan people being superior in every way except the spiritual impetus

to be world rulers. Therefore, the early Indo-Europeans were said to

posses the seed of monotheism which did not sprout until the

providence of the Abrahamic God through Christ. Pictet justifies

this 'primordial monotheism' as follows:

 

Pictet then attempts to provide philological justification for the

notion of "primitive monotheism" by examining Indo- European words

for the divine. The Sanskrit word deva attracts his attention. Can a

word exist without a prior meaning? If deva is attested, then so is

the implicit sense of "superior Being".

 

Shrouded in mystery, the Aryas' idea of God remained "in an embryonic

state," and their rudimentary monotheism lacked rigor. Pictet readily

concedes all this, all the more readily as it is hard to explain why,

having once known the truth, the Aryas should have abandoned it for

error. Weak and vacillating as their monotheistic vocation no doubt

was, it was nevertheless providential; it would fall to Christianity

to nurture the seed first planted by the Aryas. (Olender: 93-98)

 

Christianity was thus deemed to be the destiny for the Aryans to

adopt and eventually transmit to the whole world. Grau, a German

Christian evangelist, took this idea to a new level by purporting

that though the Aryans were "endlessly adaptable", without

Christianity the Aryans were hopeless and lost. In other words,

they "suffered a congenital lack of backbone provided by monotheistic

Christianity" (Olender, 106). The preservation of Christian dominance

was Grau's primary directive.

 

Grau's views were in some ways "reactionary," in the sense that they

ran counter to the praising of Aryan values that was all too often to

the detriment of the Christian church. For Grau, the danger was that

Christ would be forgotten: the Cross had to be planted firmly at the

center of any venture of cultural understanding. Grau's writings give

a surprising new twist to the fortunes of the Aryan-Semitic pair.

(Olender: 106).

 

Parallels with the Self-Appropriation of Judaism by Europe:

 

An interesting parallel is to examine the colonial mindset of self-

appropriation of knowledge in the case of the Jews for the creation

of the European identity. Though history-centric monotheism was

appropriated by Europe from the Jews to be implemented in the

colonial scheme, the Jews were excluded as "others" and even

denigrated. For example, Grau is explicit in his distancing Christian

Europeans from the Jews.

 

The monotheism with which Grau credits the Semites has little to do

with the Jews. When he does speak of Jews, it is to recall the

wretchedness of a people that has contributed nothing to history

other than perhaps its religious potential- and in that case he

generally refers to "Hebrews" rather than "Jews"… (Olender: 109-110).

 

The theme of feminizing the colonized by the masculine conqueror is

also applied to the Hebrew people.

 

Semites, Grau argues, are like women in that they lack the Indo-

German capacity for philosophy, art, science, warfare, and politics.

They nevertheless have a monopoly on one sublime quality: religion,

or love of God. This Semitic monism goes hand in hand with a deep

commitment to female monogamy. The masculine behavior of the Indo-

German, who masters the arts and sciences in order to dominate the

natural world, is met with the Semite's feminine response of

passivity and receptivity. As the wife is subject to her husband, so

the Semites are absolutely permeable to the God who chose them

(Olender: 109-110).

 

In one fell swoop of the ideological axe, European scholars were able

to take ownership of the 'backbone' of monotheism through Christ and

the masculine traits of world domination.

 

Indian Influence on European Linguistics and Postmodernism:

 

In the early 19th century, Sanskrit grammar, philology, and

linguistics were being studied intensely in Europe. One of the basic

concepts of Sanskrit grammar is how domains of knowledge, music,

language, society, etc. hang together. Every such domain, as per this

principle, is constructed such that no unit has meaning by itself,

but meaning exists only in a two-dimensional system. Such a system is

a network of opposites in two dimensions: paradigmatic (vertical) and

syntagmatic (horizontal). Saussure later used this central concept

from Pannini's "Astadyhayi" to formulate his Structuralism model. By

contrast, Aristotle's morphology is mere taxonomy, i.e. a mere system

of enumeration. His system does not show unity via relations, and his

world is not a cohesive unified system. Over the following fifty

years, there came about a revolution in European thought in the use

of this "structuralist" mode of thinking, even though it was much

later that Saussure formalized the system and then Europeans gave it

the name "Structuralism."

 

Around the 1860s, Sir Charles Lyall worked in geology in

morphological studies of fossils, which is a special case of what

became later known as structuralism. This was a major discontinuity

in European thought, and is believed to be the influence of Sanskrit

structure of knowledge. Charles Darwin's work in the 1880s was also

morphological in method. In the 1890s, Germany developed

morphological schools, and Russian formalist schools also came up.

Morphological schools came up in Europe in geology, botany, literary

theory and linguistics.

 

A key figure in this East-West influence was Saussure, a Professor of

Sanskrit in Geneva, and an ardent scholar of Panini. He later moved

to Sorbonne, where he taught the famous lecture series on

linguistics. The notes from this series were compiled later by his

students into the published work that is still regarded as

the "origin" of Structuralism. But it is amazing that this published

work by his students did not even mention Panini or Sanskrit or any

Indic works at all! What a blackout!(1)

 

Saussure's own PhD dissertation was on "Genitive case in Sanskrit," a

fact overlooked in today's historiography of European linguistics. It

is unclear if Saussure himself suffered any embarrassment about

learning from Sanskrit. He published a paper titled, "Concept of

Kavi," for instance. Unfortunately, he did not publish very much

himself, and relied on students to do that after him. Saussure's

works became the foundation for all linguistics studies throughout

Europe.

 

What gets labeled as "difference" in French postmodern thought via

Derrida is actually the Indian Buddhist theory of apohavada which

Saussure had researched and taught in France in his Sanskrit seminars.

(2)

 

It is important to note that Pictet mentored and influenced

Saussure's understanding of linguistics and philology. Saussure was

fifteen when he first began correspondence with Pictet whose work

Saussure claimed "took the reader 'to the threshold' of the origin of

language and 'of the human races themselves'" (Olender 99-102). It is

more than likely that the presuppositions and biases in Pictet's work

flowed through the mentor/student relationship down to Saussure's

work.

 

One of the consequences of Saussure's work was that it reduced the

need for Europeans to study Sanskrit sources, because Saussure's

formulation into French, repackaged by his students without any

reference to Sanskrit, meant that subsequent scholars of linguistics

could divorce their work from the Sanskrit foundations and origins of

the principles of Structuralism.

 

Structuralism, once formulated and codified by Saussure's students,

became the watershed event and gateway through which many

developments were precipitated in European thought. For example, Levi

Strauss applied Structuralism in the 1930s/40s to the study of

societies.

 

Trubetzkoy, who belonged to the famous Praha (modern Prague) school

of Sanskrit, is now called the "Father of Structural Phenology." Yet

today's books on the subject rarely mention his debt to Sanskrit for

his ideas. (His PhD dissertation from Moscow University in 1916 was

on the Rig Veda.)

 

Later in the 20th century, Post-Structuralism was developed in

response to Marxist critiques of Western society. There was loss of

faith in Enlightenment reason after World War I, because going beyond

religion into reason had resulted in such massive calamities. TS

Eliot and WB Yeats started the inwards movement in literature and

history, respectively, going away from exclusive belief in 'reason.'

They reinterpreted the classical Eurocentric Grand Meta-Narratives.

The new thinking was that a structure is not just an absolute or

abstract entity, but is in N number of manifestations.

 

After World War II, there was a general dislike for Grand Narratives

and linear progression theories of all sorts. Post-Modernism became a

rejection of all tendencies of Grand Narratives. Hence, the focus is

on small stories of small people and centers on the literature of

Subaltern peoples, the marginalized sectors of society.

Monism/Modernity is replaced by Plurality. However, the relationship

between Marxism and Indic frameworks has been too simplistically

based on the Marxist critiques of European societies. What has not

been adequately examined is that many Post-Modernist principles are

deeply embedded in classical Indian thought, i.e. many truths, many

ways of telling the truth, and many paths being valid.

 

V. Colonial De-Sanskritisation of India

 

European colonizers embarked on ambitious campaigns to assert their

cultural and religious superiority. They systematically bred many

generations of Indians under their tutelage, making them embarrassed

of their own "backward" heritage and pressurizing them to

sycophantically mimic the "modern" West for their

ideal "civilization." An example is the famous Macaulay's Minute

which became the blueprint to remove Sanskrit from India's education

system and replace it with English:

 

Macaulay's Minute (2nd Feb. 1835)

 

[A] single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole

native literature of India...

 

It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical

information which has been collected from all the books written in

the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the

most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England...

 

We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by

means of their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign

language...

 

Even more shocking than this is that some19th century Bengali

apologists of Hindu renaissance internalized this contempt and became

anti-Sanskritists. Ram Mohan Roy's intellectual legacy continues

unabated in that science and Sanskrit are still held to be

incompatible and mutually exclusive. Sanskrit was dismissed as a dead

language of ancient liturgy without a future, its advocates declared

a sentimental, nostalgic miserable lot brooding over its lost, past

glory. Modern, Westernizing Indians are afraid that Sanskrit learning

will undermine the secular and scientific spirit and ideal of

independent India. To learn Sanskrit is to oppose progress,

evolution, and to reinforce elite, Brahmanical hegemony on the

masses. Roy, who is sometimes described as a champion of modern

India, strongly protested against the decision of the committee of

Public Instruction set up by the colonial authorities to start a

Sanskrit college in Calcutta. In a letter written in 1823 he argued,

 

The pupils will there acquire what was known two thousand years ago

with the addition of vain and empty subtleties since then produced by

speculative man (Bhate 1996: 387).

 

The long term result of this trend has been to de-intellectualize the

Indians, as explained by Prof. Kapoor:

 

The 'educated' Indian has been de-intellectualized. His vocabulary

has been forced into hibernation by the vocabulary of the west. For

him, West is the theory and India is the data. The Indian academy has

willingly entered into a receiver-donor relationship with the western

academy, a relationship of intellectual subordination. This 'de-

intellectualization' needs to be countered and corrected by re-

locating the Indian mind in the Indian thought.

 

Kapoor contrasts this with the attitude of "the self-respecting voice

of an intellectually confident India" as represented by the 5th

century philosopher of language, Bhartrhari, who emphasized the

importance of understanding others' traditions but without abandoning

one's own: "The intellect acquires critical acumen by familiarity

with different traditions. How much does one really understand by

merely following one's own reasoning only?"

 

VI. Post Independence Indian assault on Sanskrit

 

Sanskrit enthusiasm after independence:

 

Independent India started out with great enthusiasm to preserve and

recover its indigenous civilization, including the central place of

Sanskrit in it.

 

Dr Ambedkar zealously worked to promote the composite civilization

(Sanskriti) of India characterized by linguistic and religious

plurality. A dispatch of the Press Trust of India (PTI) dated

September 10, 1949 states that Dr Ambedkar was among those who

sponsored an amendment making Sanskrit as the official language of

the Indian Union in place of Hindi. Most newspapers carried the news

on September 11, 1949 (see the Sanskrit monthly Sambhashan Sandeshah

issue of June 2003: 4-6). Other dignitaries who supported Dr

Ambedkar's initiative included Dr B.V. Keskar, India's Deputy

Minister for External Affairs and Professor Naziruddin Ahmed. The

amendment dealt with Article 310 and read:

 

1. The official language of the Union shall be Sanskrit. 2.

Notwithstanding anything contained in Clause 1 of this article, for a

period of fifteen years from the commencement of this constitution,

the English language shall continue to be used for the official

purposes of the union for which it was being used at such

commencement: provided that the President may, during the said

period, by order authorise for any of the official purposes of the

union the use of Sanskrit in addition to the English language.

 

But the amendment to make Sanskrit the national language of India was

defeated in the Constituent Assembly. By way of consolation, (1)

Sanskrit was granted a place in the Eighth Schedule of the

Constitution, (2) Sanskritized Hindi to be written in Devanagari

script was declared the national language of India, and (3) the

slogans appearing on various federal ministry buildings and on the

letter heads of different federal organizations would be in Sanskrit,

and (4) a citizen of India would be able to make representations to

the Government in Sanskrit.

 

In Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that the ancient past

of India belonged to all of the Indian people, Hindus, Muslims,

Christians, and others, because their forefathers had helped to build

it. Subsequent conversion to another religion could not deprive them

of this heritage; any more than the Greeks, after their conversion to

Christianity, could have ceased to feel proud of their achievements

of their ancestors (Nehru 1946: 343). Considered the pioneer of

Indian secularism, Nehru wrote:

 

If I was asked what was the greatest treasure that India possesses

and what is her finest heritage, I would answer unhesitatingly - it

is the Sanskrit language. This is a magnificent inheritance, and so

long as it endures and influences the life of our people, so long the

basic genius of the people of India will continue...India built up a

magnificent language, Sanskrit, and through this language, and its

art and architecture, it sent its vibrant message to far away

countries.

 

Such thinking survives in many segments of India's intelligentsia

today. In a verdict by the Supreme Court of India on the offering of

Sanskrit as an option in the schools operated by Central Board of

Secondary Education, the Honorable Judges quoted Nehru, and also drew

attention to the "New policy directives on National Education"

proposed in 1986 which included the following provision:

 

Considering the special importance of Sanskrit to the growth and

development of Indian languages and its unique contribution to the

cultural unity of the country, facilities for its teaching at the

school and university stages should be offered on a more liberal

scale.

 

The Honourable Judges accordingly instructed the Board to amend its

constitution and offer Sanskrit as an option forthwith after

concluding:

 

Victories are gained, peace is preserved, progress is achieved,

civilization is built and history is made not only in the

battlefields but also in educational institutions which are seed beds

of cultures.

 

In 1969, a delegation of members of parliament led by Dr. Karan

Singh, met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and impressed upon her the

need and the importance of promoting Sanskrit as the cultural lingua

franca of India and proclaiming a Sanskrit Day to promote the

cultural unity of India. Mrs. Gandhi supported the project. Since

then Sanskriti is being promoted through a number of symbolic

projects: Sanskrit Day is celebrated every year. A daily news

bulletin in Sanskrit is broadcast on the All India Radio. The staging

of plays in Sanskrit and production of films and documentaries in

Sanskrit is encouraged.

 

Sanskrit Phobia:

 

Unfortunately, after a few years of honeymoon with Indian traditions,

the marginalization of Sanskrit began in full force in independent

India. Kapil Kapoor gives a good introduction to this:

 

A debate has been on in this country for quite some time now about

the role of its inherited learning that at present finds no place in

the mainstream education. It has been restricted either to the

traditional institutes or special institutes, 'sanctuaries'. It is

assumed, and argued by its opponents, that this inherited learning is

now obsolete and no longer relevant to the living realities. This is

however counter-factual - the inherited learning not only endures in

the traditional institutes but also vibrates in the popular modes of

performances and in the mechanisms of transmitting the tradition,

such as katha, pravacana and other popular cultural and social

practices. And what is more to the point, the vocabulary of this

thought is now the ordinary language vocabulary of the ordinary

speakers of modern Indian languages. The thought permeates the mind

and language.

 

This trend started with the mimicry of the 19th century Orientalist

critique of Sanskrit as the language of hegemony and domination,

which was based on the normative Western European experience being

projected upon others. Not surprisingly, the title of an unpublished

paper of Robert Goldman is "The Communalization of Sanskrit and

Sanskritisation of Communalism." Lele similarly advises jettisoning

of Sanskrit from its position of power, prestige and profit in favour

of vernacular languages. The critical, subaltern school champions the

local, the indigenous, and the autochthonous seeking the continuity

and specificity of 'native' culture. The emphasis is on recuperating

cultural authenticity of the subaltern from Sanskritic hegemony.

 

These attacks against Sanskrit are grounded in the following beliefs:

 

* There has been no connection between Sanskrit and Prakrit

(and/or other vernacular languages of South Asia. This is because

Sanskrit was entirely elitist and was never a spoken language and

there were never any native speakers of it.

* Sanskrit has been an effective instrument of creating a

civilization (Sanskriti) built on Brahmanical hegemony and domination

of the subaltern classes.

* Sanskrit is a language of rites and rituals that are devoid of

philosophical merit.

* Sanskrit does not have the expressive spirit and temper of

science and technology. Hence, to make Indians modern they must

abandon it.

* Sanskrit has no value to non-Hindu traditions. It would

compromise secularism.

* As a dead language, Sanskrit has no future in the world

culture.

 

While it is true that Sanskrit privileged a small percentage of the

population - drawn from many castes and communities - as being

learned, the same bias has also existed in every other learned

tradition, such as Latin, Persian, Arabic and Mandarin, and is now

true of the elitist role of English (Ironically the very scholars who

are anti-Sanskrit, use and thrive on the hegemony of English.) Yet

these other languages are not subject to the same political attacks

as Sanskrit. European classics are respected in modern secular

education, even though Socrates kept slaves and many famous European

thinkers violated human rights. Likewise, classical scholarship in

Persian, Arabic and Mandarin also accepted or even advocated social

oppression of the under classes, such as women or non-believers, and

yet these classical languages and their respective cultures are

respected in the modern academy. This is accomplished by focusing on

their positive aspects and downplaying their negative aspects, but

the same treatment is not accorded to Sanskrit.

 

Kapoor explains this prejudice against Sanskrit as compared to other

classical languages:

 

The charge [that Sanskrit frameworks are Brahmanical and hence

elitist]...stems from a deep ignorance of things Indian. Only a

person who has not read the primary texts and has only read about the

texts can make this kind of statement...I am afraid the criticism

ceases to be honest and becomes merely a political gesture treading

the familiar paradigm of 'caste - elephant - snake charmer - rope

trick ' India. Just as we cannot characterize Plato's ontological

categories as 'pagan', just as we cannot characterize Derrida's

epistemic categories as 'Jewish', we cannot characterize any of the

Indian literary theoretic categories as 'Brahminical'.

 

An important equality between Sanskrit and Western classics would

also be achieved if we were to decouple the study of Sanskrit from

the history of religious privileges and focus on its many positive

qualities. In fact, the vast majority of known Sanskrit texts are in

disciplines that are nowadays considered secular and not in Hinduism

per se. Kapoor continues his comparison with Greek classics as

follows:

 

Europe's 13th century onwards successful venture of relocating the

European mind in its classical Greek roots is lauded and expounded in

the Indian universities as 'revival of learning' and

as 'Renaissance'. But when it comes to India, the political

intellectuals dismiss exactly the same venture as 'revivalism'

or 'obscurantism'. The words such as 'revivalism' are, what I

call, 'trap words'. And there are more, for example 'traditional'

and 'ancient' - the person working in Indian studies is put on the

defensive by these nomenclatures. 'Tradition' is falsely opposed

to 'modern' and the word 'traditional' is equated with oral and given

an illegitimate pejorative value. And the adjective 'ancient' as pre-

fixed - 'Panini, the ancient grammarian', 'ancient Indian poetics /

philosophical thought'- makes the classical Indian thinkers and

thought look antiquated. No western writer ever refers to Plato, for

example, as 'ancient' or Greek thought as 'ancient'. This psychic

jugglery is directed at the continuity of Indian intellectual

traditions suggesting as it does a break or a disjunction in the

intellectual history. There is no such disjunction in India's

intellectual history but then the Indian intellectual brought up on

alien food must set up a disjunction in Indian history if there is

one in the western history! If at all there is a disjunction it

happens with the foundation of the English education and then too it

is a horizontal disjunction between the mainstream education system

and the traditional institutes of learning and not a vertical

temporal disjunction.

 

Nevertheless, the negation of Sanskrit and its replacement by

Eurocentric civilizational structures plagues the modern Indian

education for several reasons. Orientalist discourse in Indology is

based largely on a politics of emphasizing difference and

irreconcilable dichotomies with reference to the civilization,

religion, society and identity of the people of India – the old

divide-and-rule strategy to control people of colour. One such major

dichotomy that has been imposed as an intellectual lens is Sanskrit

versus Prakrit and the related Sanskritic versus "subaltern"

civilization. In its analysis of Sanskrit as an instrument of

oppression and domination, Orientalist discourse (e.g. van der Veer

1993: 21) has a two-pronged strategy: (i) the fabrication of a phobia

of Sanskrit based on selective analysis of "Brahmanical" ideas,

values, and discourse, and the generation of a counter-image of non-

Brahmin and non-Hindu groups and their alleged oppression. The result

is the charge of Sanskrit as an instrument for creating and

sustaining "Hindu Hegemony."

 

Western Indologists, such as Sheldon Pollock and Robert Goldman, and

their Indian counterparts have embarked on the task to exhume,

isolate, analyze, and theorize about the modalities of domination

rooted in Sanskrit as the basis of Brahmanical ideology of power and

domination. They assume that Sanskrit and the classical culture based

on it have radically silenced and screened out of history entire

groups and communities of disadvantaged persons. They therefore seek

to construct new perspectives that accords priority to what has

hitherto been "marginal, invisible, and unheard" people and their

(non-Sanskrit) languages.

 

This construction of Sanskritic (equated by them as Brahmanical)

domination is coupled with a hermeneutic for understanding the

continuity of specific past forms of violent sediments in

contemporary India. In fact, the subaltern "others" are often held

together as a category by a single principle, namely, having a common

enemy who is deemed to be the cause of all their problems. This

common enemy is Sanskriti. Such a task, they feel, entails solidarity

with its contemporary victims: subalterns, women, religious and

cultural minorities. Here is one such example:

 

The exclusive use of Sanskrit higher learning was in many ways

instrumental in consolidating the hegemony of the Brahmins over Hindu

society. If the teaching method can be said to have served the

exclusive design of the Brahmanical education, the teacher-student

relationship replicated the hierarchical model of Hindu society

(Acharya 1996: 103).

 

For example, Prof. Vijay Prashad is among those who have championed a

massive Western funded program to create solidarity between Indian

Dalits and African-Americans under the umbrella of a newly engineered

identity known as Afro-Dalits. The thesis they proclaim says that

Dalits are "the blacks of India" and non-Dalits, i.e. upper castes,

are "the whites of India." Using this framing, the history of

American slavery gets transferred over to reinterpret Indian history,

and to locate the cause of all Dalit socioeconomic problems on Indian

civilization. Many Christian evangelists have jumped on this

bandwagon as a great way to earn the trust of India's downtrodden, by

projecting their fellow Indian countrymen and countrywomen as the

culprits. The project includes reinventing the history of various

Indian jatis to make them feel un-Indian and eventually anti-Indian.

Once a certain threshold is reached, i.e. once the ground has been

prepared, a given local activist "cell" can get appropriated by other

more blatantly political forces. Many foreign funded activities are

going on that create a separatist identity especially among the youth

of these jatis. The intellectual cover for this anti-India work is

under slick terms like "empowerment", "leadership training" and, of

course, "human rights".

 

One may say that certain portions of the Indian left have been

appropriated by the very same "imperialistic" forces which in their

day jobs they attack. In fact, it is precisely such leftists who make

excellent candidates to be recruited as they seem more authentic in

their stands on India. This has created a career market for young

Indians seeking to step into the shoes of such sepoys in order to

enjoy the good life promised and delivered by the well funded foreign

nexuses of South Asian Studies and related institutions of Church,

government related think tanks and even the supposedly liberal media.

 

There is a major untold story in the way many Indian intellectuals

play both sides, some more intentionally than others: On the one

hand, they project images of being patriotic Indians winning

recognition abroad and are being idolized back in India. On the other

hand, they are deeply committed in often deliberately ambiguous work

which can be made to appear in multiple ways, but which ultimately

feed various separatist forces. Meanwhile, ambiguity serves as great

cover because many Indians tend to be naïve about geopolitical

implications of such work, are trusting of the good intentions of

others or feel uncomfortable confronting problems they cannot deal

with.

 

It is against this backdrop that much of the anti-Hindutva

scholarship and lobbying works. Of course, most Hindus I know are

against any form of religious bigotry, especially violence, for

respect for every person's own sva-dharma (personal dharma) is a core

Hindu value, and being Christian, Muslim, etc. falls under sva-

dharma. But what most broadminded Hindus fail to realize is that

underneath this attack on Hindutva there lies a broader attack on

Indian Sanskriti, and this, in turn, feeds the pipeline of separatist

tendencies. Naturally, many foreign nexuses have invested in such

human and institutional assets while maintaining a "human rights"

demeanour as part of their strategy of managed ambiguity.

 

Sheldon Pollock, one of the foremost Sanskritists of today, appears

to agree with Edward Said in the need to reclaim "traditions,

histories, and cultures from imperialism" (Said 1989: 219). He

nevertheless insists that we must not forget that most of the

traditions and cultures in question [india is obviously included in

this] have been empires of oppression in their own right - against

women and also against other domestic communities (Pollock 1993:

116). The Western Sanskritist, he says, feels this most acutely,

given that Sanskrit was the principal discursive instrument of

domination in premodern India. Thus Pollock deftly turns Said's

attack on imperialism into nonsense by insisting that the subjugated

Indians are themselves imperialists, as much as the conquering

Europeans. In Pollock's view, the trend continues today, and Sanskrit

is being continuously reappropriated by many of the most reactionary

and communalist sectors of the population (Pollock 1993: 116).

Needless to say, this line of imagining invites many Indian mimics

who make their careers as India-bashers in order to prove their

usefulness to the Western institutions they serve.

 

Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (1997) have no hesitation in declaring

that the main purpose of the learned traditions preserved in Sanskrit

is to underpin a static social and religious structure, while they

spare similar criticism against the elitist Arabic and Persian based

cultures. Additionally, they continue to make use of the loaded

term "Brahmanical" in the formulating the following

expressions: "Brahmanical orthodoxy,Brahmanical social orthodoxy,"

neo-Brahmanical orthodoxy,the high Brahmanical tradition,"

or "Brahmanical ruling ideology." Yet they fail to define and

establish their premises of tyranny vested in whatever they mean

by "Brahmanical," nor do they use similar rhetoric against "Mullah

orthodoxy", "Imam ruling ideology" and so forth when discussing Islam.

 

One of the pillars on which Sanskrit Phobia is sustained is the

linearization of Indian civilization into arbitrary historical stages

just to map India on to European historical stages. Kapoor criticizes

this:

 

[There] is a questionable assumption, the assumption of a break or a

rupture in the Indian cultural / intellectual tradition between

the 'Sanskrit' period and the 'vernacular' period, something that

actually does not exist but is postulated on the false analogy of the

western history of ideas. From Vedic Sanskrit to Classical Sanskrit

to Pali to Prakrit to Apabhramshas to the modern Indian languages, it

is one story of linguistic-cultural-intellectual continuity.

 

Contemporary Indologists and South Asianists (a term used by the US

State Department to refer to scholars it depends upon for research on

South Asia) emphasize a class conflict between Sanskrit and Prakrit.

The use of the Marathi language by Jnanesvara, who was the son of an

excommunicated Brahmin, according to Jayant Lele, initiated a revolt

by the subaltern and the oppressed against the Brahmanical hegemony

and the force of reaction symbolized by Sanskrit, a dead, fossilized

language that had lost the ability to generate live, new meanings.

Being monopolized by the ruling classes, Sanskrit held no meaning for

Jnanesvara's community of the oppressed. Marathi, on the other hand,

was the language of the living tradition of that community (Lele

1981: 109).

 

According to Lele, Sanskrit traditionally has been limited to the

Brahmins and other higher castes. It was manipulated by the wily

Brahmin leadership on behalf of landed or dominant castes to serve

their own agenda and vested interests. The thesis may be stated as

follows: Elitist Brahminism = (1) hegemonic Sanskrit + (2)

homogenizing Hindutva + (3) subjection of the masses to forced

Sanskritisation.

 

Hardened and rigid languages (like Sanskrit, at this stage)

simultaneously threaten individual and social identity. A living

language is, therefore, in itself a critique of domination. It is a

rejection of the language of oppression. Ideology critique uses a

language of protest but at the same time, launches a quest for a

hermeneutic understanding, for establishing a new community. In this

sense Varkari sampradaya was a discourse of the oppressed(Lele, 1995:

70).

 

Varkaris (devotees of Vitthala) offered an all-encompassing blue

print for transcending the context-bound interpretations of tradition

while containing its essential ones. As per Lele, their use of

Marathi language, a living language, in itself was a critique of

domination and of Sanskrit, a language of oppression (Lele 1995: 70).

By remaining fully involved in social life Varkaris subverted a

significant hegemonic appropriative strategy. They explicitly denied

the priestly role of a mediator relying on self-experience gained

through the daily involvement in normal social life. They united

spirituality with daily life experience and thereby opened up the

possibilities for reflection on life that has inherent in it a

transformative potential (Lele 1995: 71).

 

According to Lele, the Varkari critique involved rejection of

external (Brahmanical) authority, magic and miracles, severe

criticism of mindless rituals, secrecy, exclusivism and esoteric

practices, insistence on full involvement in productive life,

emphasis on the unity of the male-female principle in identifying

both god and guru as mauli (mother manifestation), equal and

authoritative status of the female poet-saints and a conscious and

yet fully living use of the language and idiom of the oppressed

classes indicate an attempt to widen discourse and to involve those

who experienced the falsehood of a hierarchical social order in their

daily life (Lele 1995: 72).

 

Lele's logic appears to be that simply by using Marathi, the Varkaris

were "obviously" engaged in a "critique"; hence, their practices and

themes must necessarily be a criticism of Sanskriti which was

threatening to their individual and social identity. There are

several flaws in such logic: (1) Many of these themes are not

discontinuities but part and parcel of traditional Hinduism - uniting

spirituality with daily life experience is, for instance, one of the

main themes of the Bhagavad Gita, and worship of God as mother (and

women poet-sages) is present in the Veda. (2) Initiation into

profound and esoteric disciplines and the occurrences of miracles in

the lives of the saints are all part of the Varkari tradition, as

much as of "Brahminical" or traditional Hinduism. (3) Tremendous

social, cultural and political disruptions in the form of Islamic

invasions and iconoclasm may have also been a little threatening to

individual and social identity of the Marathi-speakers. Indeed, it

can be argued that the Varkari tradition blossomed at a time when

traditional Hinduism was under tremendous stress from Islamic

invasions and acted to shore up core local symbols, beliefs and

ritual practices - such as pilgrimage - exactly as a culture

symbiotic with Sanskritic learning would.

 

Apart from works such as the above that dubiously pit Sanskrit in a

historical fight with the vernaculars, Sanskrit phobia is also being

spread by a second line of attack, which uses contemporary Indian

politics as the starting point. A research project (in partial

fulfilment of a Ph D degree) submitted in 1994 to the Department of

Anthropology, University of Chicago would serve as an illustration of

that trend. The proposal by Adi Hastings (a cultural anthropology

student at the University of Chicago) was provisionally entitled,"

The 'Revival' Of Spoken Sanskrit In Modern India: An Ethnographic And

Linguistic Study." (This project has since been completed.)

 

Hastings described in detail his goal to examine recent attempts in

India to promote and broaden the use of spoken "simple" Sanskrit.

While the classical Sanskrit language has been supported by

authorities as a medium of scholarly and literary discourse, it

recently has been promoted by political groups as a future lingua

franca and emblem of a specifically Hindu nation. Hastings's project

sought to problematize the privately-funded movements to promote

conversational "simple Sanskrit" as the emblem of a specifically

Hindu nation.

 

He proposed the following working hypothesis: the movements under

investigation have fashioned Sanskrit, India's classical literary

language, into a sign which both represents and points to membership

in an imagined Hindu national community. In promoting explicitly

conversational Sanskrit, these organizations are trying to recapture

elements of a perceived Hindu heritage, and in doing so to reinstate

or revive what they see as the most important element or unifying

thread of ancient Indian civilization.

 

Thus, Sanskrit, once symbolically identified as the exclusive

property of certain restricted communities (entailing access to and

mastery over certain forms of privileged knowledge), is now used to

invoke a generalized and popular level Hindu cultural heritage. In

this context, argued Hastings, Sanskrit would no longer function as a

classical language (if indeed it ever was; cf. Kelly 1996), but would

become a superordinated language of politico-religious unification.

 

Refuting the Sanskrit Phobics:

 

A dominant assumption common among Sanskrit phobic scholars, both

Western and their Indian accomplices, is Gramsci's theory that

the "vernaculars are written down when the people regain importance"

(1991: 168). This is, unfortunately, untrue for both Europe itself

and India. The history of the relationship between Sanskrit and the

non-Hindu, non-elite populace suggests many positive

interrelationships which Sanskrit phobics simply ignore. For example:

 

* Lele shares in the widely held belief that the emergence of

regional languages in India was due to bhaktas who mostly came from

the marginalized castes. But this is simply untrue. In Karnataka, for

example, old Kannada literature was courtly, was suffused with

Sanskrit, and was unintelligible to those ignorant of Sanskrit.

Similarly many Tamil kings, poets and scholars of all castes, Jains

and Hindus, appear to have been fluent in Sanskrit as well as Tamil,

and this does not seem to have inhibited the development of Tamil in

the least, but benefited both.

* In the north, some of the earliest regional-language texts were

composed by courtly (elitist) Muslims (e.g. verses of Mas'ud Sa'd

Salman, ca. 1100, of the Yamini Kingdom of Lahore). The relationships

between language, literature, and social power cannot be analyzed by

any simple formula transferred from Europe, as Lele does in order to

interpret Indian contemporary politics using Sanskrit as the whipping

boy (Pollock 1996: 244-245).

* Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, writing in the first decade of the

nineteenth century about Bengal, observed, "The first rudiments of

education are usually given...under the tuition of teachers called

Gurus, who may be of any caste or religion."

* According to William Adam, there were more than 100,000

vernacular indigenous schools for the "indigent" classes in Bengal

and Bihar in 1835. This averaged a school for every sixty-three

children of school-going age (cited in Acharya 1996: 105, 99). In

fact, colonial scholars sent to study India's education system

remarked that native education was often more widespread than in

England and that it included lower caste students.

* While the genealogical account found in many inscriptions is in

Sanskrit, the "business" portion (i.e. details of the land grant etc)

are in the regional language. This is an interesting indicator of

bilingualism.

 

The importance of Sanskrit given in Jainism and Buddhism – which have

always been against caste hierarchies – undermines the claim that

Sanskrit was a Hindu/Brahmin hegemonic instrument. For example:

 

* Paul Dundas observes that Jains of Western India produced, from

about thirteenth century onwards, an extensive literature of the

types of narratives, chronicles, and biographies in a style that has

been called "Jain Sanskrit" (Dundas 1996: 137). As the lingua franca

of shastra, and general literary culture, Jains could

enthusiastically utilize Sanskrit without any danger of compromising

their sectarian identity and socio-religious values.

* In the days of Buddhists studies in China, when Indian Sanskrit

scholars were translating Buddhist texts into Chinese with the help

of boards of local scholars, there existed a school of Sanskrit

studies in China. Clearly, this was not intended for the purposes of

any Brahmin hegemony in China.

* Jan Houben draws our attention to the fact that testimonies of

Chinese Buddhist pilgrims show that Sanskrit was widely used, not

only in a great number of texts but apparently also in discussions.

However, he laments that the background and precise circumstances of

the shift of the Buddhist and Jain to Sanskrit and its importance for

the development of Sanskrit as a "lingua franca" at least in the

sphere of intellectual and religious discussion have not yet received

sufficient attention (Houben 1996: 176).

 

At the meetings of the Constituent Assembly (1946-1949) members who

were not Sanskritists, nor Brahmins, nor Hindus, moved an amendment

to make Sanskrit the national language of India. Sponsors included Dr

Ambedkar and Professor Naziruddin Ahmad. Standing up in the

Constituent Assembly, Professor Ahmad declared:

 

I offer you a language which is the grandest and the greatest, and it

is impartially difficult, equally difficult for all to learn.

 

This stance certainly unsettles the presumption that Sanskrit is a

language of the wily Brahmins and other ruling elites who have been

using it for centuries to dominate the masses.

 

Pollock feels the need to rethink received accounts that imagine

a "resurgence of Brahmanism" leading to a "re-assertion of Sanskrit"

as the language of literature and administration after the Maurya

period (Norman 1988, 17-18; Kulke & Rothermund 1990, 85). Pollock

instead suggests the possibility that a new cultural formation, a

Sanskrit cosmopolis, was created and which continued until 1300

(Pollock 1996, 207).

 

Pollock persuasively argues that the prominence of Prakrit in

inscriptional discourse does not represent ignorance or rejection of

Sanskrit. Such a claim is based on the assumption that there was some

type of invariable co-relation between Prakrit and Buddhism/Jainism

and Sanskrit and Brahmanism. The available epigraphic evidence

suggests, as Pollock affirms, that trans-regional use of Sanskrit for

public political texts was instituted in South India by no specific

event of political or religious revolution. A uniform idiom and

aesthetics of politics, homogenous in diction, form, and theme

characterizes all of India (Pollock 1996, 216-217). When vernacular

languages were becoming popular among the masses, Sanskrit became the

language of communication among them.

 

Sanskrit was appreciated by some of the Muslim rulers of India who

patronized it, and, in some cases (as in Bengal and Gujarat), had

their epigraphic records inscribed in Sanskrit. It was the scientific

and secular aspect of Sanskrit that made the Arabs welcome Indian

scholars to Baghdad to discourse on sciences and to translate books

in these subjects into Arabic.

 

A large mass of literature in Sanskrit was not produced by any

particular community. Several instances can be quoted of non-Brahmin

and non-Hindu authors who have made significant contribution to

Sanskrit literature. In Karnataka, 300 Sanskrit schools are nowadays

being run by non-Brahmins.

 

Kapil Kapoor explains the non sectarian importance of Sanskrit as a

major container of Indian civilization and national identity:

 

By abandoning...Sanskrit tradition, we have become passive,

uncritical recipients of Western theories and models...Had the

classical thought enshrined in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit texts and

some of it preserved as adaptation in Old Tamil texts been made a

part of the mainstream education it would have enabled the educated

Indian to interact with the west on a level ground. This tradition

has attested texts and thinkers in a wide range of disciplines -

philosophy, grammar, poetics, prosody, astronomy, architecture,

mathematics, medicine, atmospheric sciences, sociology / ethics

(dharmasastra), chemistry, physics, agriculture, economics and

commerce, music, botany and zoology, weaponry and art of warfare,

logic, education, metallurgy. The texts of these disciplines not only

make statements about the respective domains of knowledge but also

enshrine the empirical wisdom gathered by our society over centuries

in these spheres. All this knowledge has been marginalized by and

excluded from the mainstream education system. Efforts to incorporate

it or teach it have been politically opposed and condemned

as 'revivalism'.

 

The table below summaries the main Sanskrit Phobic arguments and

rejoinders to them:

 

Sanskrit Phobic Arguments Responses

There has been no connection between Sanskrit and Prakrit (and/or

other South Asian vernacular languages). Linguistic evidence

suggests that Sanskrit is related to Prakrit languages and that

exchanges occurred in both directions.

Sanskrit has been the instrument of creating a civilization built on

Brahmanical hegemony and domination of the subaltern. This is

missionary/colonial lens imposing Western social models to a very

different Indian social structure and denies the vital role of

Sanskrit in shaping and fulfilling, thriving and vibrant culture that

benefited many.

Sanskrit is only a language of rites and rituals that are devoid of

philosophical merit. The depth and breadth of Sanskrit literature

covers many non-religious disciplines. Besides, the rites and rituals

are often deeply poetic and reflect a plurality of philosophies of

life.

Sanskrit does not have the expressive spirit and temper of science

and technology. The depth and breadth of Sanskrit thought

encompasses many scientific and technical fields such as mathematics

and metallurgy. Abstract thought, open inquiry and logic are key

hallmarks of Sanskrit learning.

Sanskrit has no value to non-Hindu traditions. It would compromise

secularism. Numerous Jain and Buddhist scriptures are composed in

Sanskrit. Sikh scholars went to Benares to learn Sanskrit.

As a dead language, Sanskrit has no use to world culture.

Sanskrit, just as it contributed to Western thought, has the

potential to contribute towards a renaissance of thought in Southeast

Asia and India.

 

Sanskrit studies have been pursued (whether within or outside India)

in isolation from the true spirit of Sanskrit and Indians. Arvind

Sharma has a provocative question: "What would have Sanskrit studies

abroad looked like if they had originated in India and gone abroad,

instead of originating abroad and then being adopted by the Indians?"

 

The House Indians:

 

To interpret the contemporary Indian intellectual fashion of selling

out to the West, let us examine the framework established by Malcolm

X in his analysis of a segment of African-Americans whom he

labeled, "house Negro." Malcolm X said:

 

There were two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the

field Negro. The house Negroes - they lived in the house with master,

they dressed pretty good, they ate good 'cause they ate his food --

what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they

lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the

master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master's

house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master

said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah,

we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he

said "we." That's how you can tell a house Negro.

 

If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight

harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got

sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?"

We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master

identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and

said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro

would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate?

Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better

clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was

that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And

that's what we call him today, because we've still got some house

niggers running around here.

 

This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him.

He'll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near

his master, and then brag about "I'm the only Negro out here.I'm

the only one on my job.I'm the only one in this school." You're

nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and

says, "Let's separate," you say the same thing that the house Negro

said on the plantation. "What you mean, separate? From America? This

good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get

here?"

 

....Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to

keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has

Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle

Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us

passive...To keep you from fighting back, he [the white man] gets

these old religious Uncle Toms to teach you and me...

 

(http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/malcolmxgrassroots.htm)

 

In an analogous fashion, and entirely independently of Malcolm X,

Kapil Kapoor analyzes the Anglicized and now Americanized Indian

intellectuals' internalization of Western categories to form what

they call Indian literary criticism. He writes:

 

The Indian literary criticism has in fact been marked by severe

limitations. It has, all in all, been derivative and backward. Before

PL-480, it was Anglo- and after PL 480 it is a footnote to the Anglo-

American school - even the European frameworks filter through English

translations, commentaries and Anglo-American practices. Besides, it

has always been backward - there is always a time lag between its

enunciation in the west and its emulation here. Hence, the derisive

comment about Indian literary criticism quoted by Prof. Narasimhaiah

ji - "You mean those carbon copies of Mathiessen, Blackmur and

Leavis?"

 

And [indian literary criticism]...has been seasonal. Every successive

passing fashion in the Anglo-American school has been dutifully

applied to the Indian literary reality - Leavisian Moral, New

Criticism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Semiotics and

Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Marxist, New

Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Stylistics. Each successive

framework has been found to be a perfect fit for the malleable Indian

reality, without any modification or adaptation!... This is

expressive of what we said above - the mental subordination of the

Indian critical mind to the western academy, the uncritical reception

of western theory, the data - theory / the recipient-donor

relationship into which the post-1947 mind has so willingly

contracted. As a result of this, all the modern Indian languages,

including Indian English have become recipient language - Sanskrit is

the only donor language, has always been and continues to be. The

displacement from what has been and is a donor tradition amounts to

promoted de-intellectualization (de-culturization, if you please).

 

....The body of literature it addresses is Metro. There is metro

literature written under the influence of, and often imitating, both

the western (Anglo-American) societal problematic as themes and there

is the metro theory that both explains it and is validated by this

body of literature. Its audience is urban (English) educated elite.

There are no western readers for this as the West is not interested

in Indian language literatures or in the Indian paraphrase or

redaction of their theories. (Whatever limited but profitable western

audience is there is of readers interested in being told by

India's 'colonized' minds about India's colonized mind!)

 

As in the case of house Negroes, these house Indians enjoy great

privilege from Western institutions either directly or indirectly.

Kapoor continues his description of these self-hating Indians:

 

[T]he educated Indian, particularly the Hindu, suffers from such a

deep loss of self respect that he is unwilling to be recognized as

such. He feels, in fact, deeply threatened by any surfacing or

manifestation of the identity that he has worked so hard to, and has

been trained to reject. But it lies somewhere in his psyche as 'an

unhappy tale', as something that is best forgotten. It is these

people wearing various garbs - liberal, left, secular, modern - who

oppose, more often than not from sheer ignorance, any attempt to

introduce Indian traditions of thought in the mainstream education

system - a classic case of self-hate taking the form of mother-hate!

 

I regularly come across such house Indians in the US academic study

of India. When the masters say, "jump," the house Indian asks, "how

high sir?"

 

VII. Sanskriti and the Clash of Civilizations

 

Contrary to the wishful thinking of postmodernist literary theories

and trends in pop culture, the competition among major civilizations

is intensifying. Sanskrit phobia must be examined in the broader

context of geopolitics today and not in the narrower context of local

Indian sociopolitics only. Each of the main three contenders in the

clash of civilizations – USA, China and Islam – deploys its own

culture as a form of social and political capital, and each has a

unique language in which its civilization is rooted.

 

There are pragmatic reasons behind the intensifying clash of

civilizations, and ideology may often be a weapon rather than the

underlying cause: Only one billion out of the six billion people in

the world today live at Western levels of consumption, but by mid

century most of the ten billion people (projected population level by

mid century) will mimic Western consumerist lifestyles, and this will

further pressure the environment, resources, capital and labor

markets.

 

This global competition is deploying collective assets, such as

identities, cultural capital and soft power. France, USA, UK, China,

Arabia, Japan, etc. each wear their respective civilizations with

great pride, and use it as a vehicle in international diplomacy,

foreign soft power and cultural capital.

 

Every ancient civilization has had its social abuses, but the proud

cultures named above do not throw out the baby with the bathwater,

i.e. they each insist on reforming their tradition internally rather

than demonizing it in world forums to gain legitimacy in foreign eyes

or abandoning it in the name of "progress."

 

The West (especially America), China and Pan-Islam are, therefore,

each asserting themselves in this inter-civilizational competition

for intellectual market share, projecting with pride their respective

rich heritages which include languages. For instance, the rapid

globalization of English language culture has privileged Western

paradigms that are implicitly embedded in its literature and thought:

 

* Despite the numerical expansion of English speaking people in

non-Western countries, the certification and legitimization of

English and of its modern thought are controlled by standards

established by Western institutions.

* These control mechanisms are diverse: prestigious awards,

elitist institutional affiliations, jobs, financial grants, foreign

travel, access to media channels, etc.

* The intellectual capital includes Eurocentric historiography,

literature, philosophy, sociology, human rights theories, art

history, and school curricula.

* The institutional backbone of the West that propagates this

superiority includes government agencies, multinational religious

institutions, academic establishments and private funding agencies.

* In this new inter-civilizational competition, everyone is

equally invited to play; however, the rules, referees and rewards are

often controlled by a few.

* In some instances, the dominant culture also selects and props

up proxies to represent the third world in a fashion acceptable to

the dominant religious and secular ideologies of the West.

 

The above figure shows how Sanskrit Phobia and the denigration of the

Indic Civilization are often interrelated, how these might feed the

subversion of sovereignty of Asian nation-states through the various

levels of foreign intervention made possible by this.

 

If one were to apply this to a hypothetical scenario of Western

intervention in China, the components might be as follows (not

necessarily in this sequence):

 

* Attack on China's human rights

* Demands for internal reforms

* Critiques of Mandarin as hegemonic

* Denigration of Chinese culture and the hierarchies embedded in

Confucianism as the basis of China's human rights abuses.

* Social re-engineering of minority groups to promote separatism

 

That this trajectory is not currently in vogue in the Western academy

is an indicator of China's strength as a geopolitical force. But let

us not forget that the linking of China's traditional culture with

backwardness and the scapegoating of Confucianism as anti-progress

and promoting inequality, led Chinese patriots using imported Western

Marxism to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the murder of

millions of innocents. There are many ways for Asian cultures to be

taught to hate themselves, but the consequences are always the same -

genocide and cultural devastation.

 

Unfortunately, India's domestic relationship with its Sanskrit-based

heritage is mixed up in petty short sighted politics:

 

* Sanskrit phobia has become a weapon for identity based vote

banking, often under the guise of imported ideologies and funding

for "human rights."

* India's social schisms, cleavages and centrifugal forces have

been exacerbated by interventions from the three global

civilizational powers – the West, Pan-Islam and China – each of which

has made heavy investments in India's intellectuals, media, NGOs (Non-

Governmental Organizations) and other mechanisms of influence.

* While powerful top down economic forces (such as foreign

capital in business, infrastructure development and export growth)

are integrating India, simultaneously, other sociopolitical forces

are potentially trying to downgrade India's geopolitical influence by

breaking apart its social fabric and identity at the grass roots.

* Such fragmentation has energized the anti-Sanskrit movement.

 

VIII. Leveling the Civilizational Playing Field

 

Kapil Kapoor explains that literary theories embed culture-specific

thinking and experience and that the trendy Indian intellectual

application of Western theories to Indian culture is dangerous:

 

Theories are culture specific - they are codes of a community's

expectations from the art form / forms and therefore more adequately

account for that community's response to the artifacts. Cultural

specificity of theories can therefore be problematic if the theories

of one culture are applied uncritically to the empirical reality of

another culture. There are the Indian habits of mind and there are

the western habits of mind nurtured over time by the specificity of

the community's experience and these may differ crucially. It is

these habits of mind that are imbricated deeply in the respective

conceptual frameworks. The western linearity of time and thought with

its in-built evolutionary imperative that is implicit in such

structures as 'pre-X-post A' (pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial)

contrasts sharply with the Indian schema of cyclic and simultaneity.

Similarly, the western binarism and the search for certainty differs

from the either-or/both schema and the uncertainty schema of the

Indian mind. The list is long - the teleological anxiety, the

apocalyptic vision, the wait for the millennium, the redeemer

expectation, the anthropological centrism, the conception of man as a

sinner, a vengeful God, an ethics contingent on a personal God - all

these western constructs offer conceptual opposition to the Indian

habits of mind, at least to the non-Hebraic habits of mind...The

world-view / philosophy of a culture cannot be ignored in any

discussion of an appropriate aesthetic. The Indian world-view

therefore has to be taken into account. The critics of an Indian

aesthetics rooted in Indian philosophy reduce Indian philosophy to

simple 'idealism' and ignore the tremendous inner differentiation and

range of Indian philosophical thinking...

 

As global competition becomes increasingly knowledge based, it

becomes important for each civilization to excavate its intellectual

assets that lie embedded within its non-translatable categories,

frameworks and literature.

 

What will be the future of the Sanskrit-based Indic and pan-Asian

civilization in this emerging global theater?

 

This issue has great relevance to many Asian nations, including

Thailand, which regard Sanskrit with the same respect with which

Westerners regard Latin and Greek.

 

India and Southeast Asia share this magnificent ancient, yet modern

and postmodern, civilization. It deserves to be nurtured and

presented to the world on par with the other civilizations competing

for global market share, i.e. civilizations that are based on

European thought, Chinese thought, and Arabic-Persian thought.

 

India and other countries with Sanskrit based cultures should form

joint projects to reinvigorate this discipline. Some principles to

consider are the following:

 

* European Christians created a great Renaissance from heathen

Greek and Latin texts which led them eventually to establish cultural

equations with many other ancient languages and develop modern

philology. South and Southeast Asians must also look at their own

classical heritage for creative solutions while at the same time

assimilating Western thought.

* There must be parity between the positioning of Sanskrit and

other major classical languages: India and Southeast Asia should give

Sanskrit a status comparable to the status given to Latin by the

West, Arabic by the Arabs, Persian by Iran, and Mandarin by China.

* Objective, multi-disciplinary scholarly efforts must be funded

and undertaken to engage and challenge biased scholarship based on

trendy theories of suppression of vernaculars and oppression

of "marginalized" people by Sanskrit.

* Dalits and other under privileged Indic peoples should be

encouraged to study Sanskrit as a possible path to self re-discovery,

and should be promoted as leaders of learning.

* Asian countries should sponsor the study and teaching of the

history of Asia that would be less tainted by Eurocentrism than is

the case today.

* Freudian and other trendy "theories" to analyze Sanskrit texts

should not get privileged over indigenous interpretations, to restore

balance and respect for the tradition as is the norm for other

classical languages.

* Over 25 million Westerners (including almost 18 million

Americans) are yoga enthusiasts. Sanskrit inhabits their bodies as a

result of practices such as mantra, asanas, chakras, prana, kundalini

etc. -- all terms that cannot be translated into other languages

because they are discoveries of embodied states unknown to most other

cultures. This latest Sanskritization of the inner world could expand

to over 100 million Westerners in the next ten years. Indian

authorities should see this as a form of cultural capital, and

Indians should reclaim this heritage rather than allowing others to

appropriate and remap it into "Christian Yoga,Kabala

Yoga,Islamic Yoga,Western science," etc.

* There should be a fresh challenge the colonial divide-and-rule

scholarship that has created tensions between Buddhism and Hinduism.

For instance,

o Challenge the Orientalist theory that Buddhism

was "eradicated" in India by Hinduism

o Challenge the exaggeration of disconnects between

Hinduism and Buddhism

o The recent archeological findings in Raipur show once

again that Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Buddhism and Jainism thrived

peacefully together, under Hindu rulers. (See:

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050621/asp/frontpage/story_4896126.asp)

 

 

Endnotes

 

1 Panini's thought flowed over to Structuralism via Saussure's

students. This is discussed in the following. (1) Singh, Prem.

1992. "Rethinking history of linguistics: Saussure and the India

Connection." In "Language and Text: A Kelkar Festschrift." Ed. by R.

N. Srivastava. Delhi: Kalinga Publishers. Pages 43-51. Also, (2)

Ivanov, Vyacheslav V. 1974. "Growth of the Theoretical Framework of

Modern Poetics." In "Current Trends in Linguistics" edited by T. A.

Sebeok. Vol. 12. The Hague: Mouton. Pages 835 – 61.

 

2 Also see Kunjunni Raja, Indian Theories of Meaning (Adyar, Madras).

He is the topmost scholar in this.

 

Acknowledgments

 

Many scholars have contributed to this paper, most notably Dr.

Shrinivas Tilak, Jay Patel and Aditi Banerjee.

 

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the opening plenary

at the International Conference on Sanskrit in Asia: Unity in

Diversity, held in Bangkok in June, 2005, sponsored by The Infinity

Foundation and organized by Silpakorn University, Thailand, with Her

Royal Highness the Crown Princess of Thailand as its chief patron.

The earlier paper is published in the Sanskrit Centre Journal,

Silpakorn University, Volume 1, 2005. Feedback received at that event

has further helped to shape the final version.

 

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