geopolitics and sanskrit phobia

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Geopolitics And Sanskrit Phobia

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 singlemajor 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 Mandarinare 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

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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 andspirituality, 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 bythe 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

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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 Dravidianlanguages 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

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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 o

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

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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 thecollaborative 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)

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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 o

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 o

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 Buddhismon 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 o

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 o

Buddhist learning in Sumatra reached the port of Tamralipti in Bengal in 673 AD. He stayed at Nalanda for ten

ears (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.

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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 receivedwith 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. TheChinese 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 o

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 o

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

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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 amutually 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 newmajor 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 EastIndia 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 o

University College, Oxford. This marble frieze shows Sir William sitting on a chair writing something down on a desk

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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 theoverdressed 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:

[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 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

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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 othe 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 o

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 o

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 theHebrews, 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.

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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 withwhich 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 o

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 o

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:

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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 Aryanswere 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

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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

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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

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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 o

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

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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 offilms 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 o

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 ofpower, 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.

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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 o

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 perse. 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

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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 enemywho 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 tocreate 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.

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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 beenempires 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

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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 reactionsymbolized 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

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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. Hastingss 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,

Indias 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 acc

geopolitics and sanskrit phobia

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