geopolitics and sanskrit phobia by dr rajiv malhotra

Circulated in India's interest by www.satishankar.com

Overview

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 Europes 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 Gandhis famous 1908 monograph, Hind Swaraj, discusses this

phenomenon.

vi. After Indias 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 Indias 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. Panninis 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: Indias 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 Sanskrits

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:

i. Spiritual, artistic, scientific and ritual lingua franca across vast regions of Asia, and

ii. 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 Modern 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. Bashams 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 Bhattacharjees Greater India elaborates this point

clearly:

The unique feature of Indias 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 Indias

contact with her neighborsThus 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 todays 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 rulerssent, 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 Indias prestigious centers of learning to transfer know-

how to China was I-Tsing:

I-Tsingleft 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 Tai-tsong by the emperor and the

dowager empress of the great Song dynastyThe 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).

Buddhisms 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 Tang period. A large number of mathematical and

astronomical works were translated into ChineseIndian 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 childrens 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 Tang 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 todays 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 Europes

modernity and the enlightenment movements. While Sanskrits 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.

Indias 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

Europes 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.)

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 masters advanced civilization.

In 1794 the first chair of Sanskrit in Europe was established in Copenhagen. In 1808, Schlegels

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 todays 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 Europes 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:

Those 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 Europes

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, Europes 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 Muellers 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 Indias 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 worlds 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 writers 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

Graus primary directive.

Graus 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. Graus 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 Semites 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 Panninis Astadyhayi to formulate his Structuralism model. By contrast, Aristotles

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 Darwins 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)

Saussures own PhD dissertation was on Genitive case in Sanskrit, a fact overlooked in todays

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. Saussures 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 Saussures 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 Pictets work flowed through the mentor/student relationship

down to Saussures work.

One of the consequences of Saussures work was that it reduced the need for Europeans to

study Sanskrit sources, because Saussures 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 Saussures 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 todays 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 Macaulays

Minute which became the blueprint to remove Sanskrit from Indias education system and

replace it with English:

Macaulays 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 Roys 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 ones

own: The intellect acquires critical acumen by familiarity with different traditions. How much

does one really understand by merely following ones 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 Ambedkars initiative


included Dr B.V. Keskar, Indias 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

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 continueIndia 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 Indias 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:

1: 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.

2: Sanskrit has been an effective instrument of creating a civilization (Sanskriti) built on

Brahmanical hegemony and domination of the subaltern classes.

3: Sanskrit is a language of rites and rituals that are devoid of philosophical merit.

4: Sanskrit does not have the expressive spirit and temper of science and technology. Hence, to

make Indians modern they must abandon it.


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

6: 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 statementI 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 Platos ontological categories

as pagan, just as we cannot characterize Derridas 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:

Europes 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 Indias 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 Indias

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 nave 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 persons 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 Saids attack on

imperialism into nonsense by insisting that the subjugated Indians are themselves imperialists,

as much as the conquering Europeans. In Pollocks 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 Jnanesvaras 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).

Leles 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 De

geopolitics and sanskrit phobia by dr rajiv malhotra

Documents

sanskrit studies

discovery of sanskrit

future of sanskriti

southeast asia

paper terms sanskrit

panasian sanskriti

different regions of

south asian studies