(Fwd) Sanskrit in the West

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IndianCivilization, VAgarwalV@c... wrote:

Title: Why Is The West Crazy About A ‘Dead’ Language?

Source: The Indian Express

10 June 2001

Author: Ajit Kumar Jha

 

Ajit Kumar Jha finds some of the biggest stars in academia teach

Sanskrit

 

Imagine going to Varanasi to study the tragedies of the Greek

playwright Sophocles. Ludicrous? It seemed equally foolish to me when

on my way to California some years ago, I met the daughter of a

Marxist political economist from Calcutta, who was headed for Chicago,

to pursue her doctoral degree in Sanskrit. The double irony of the

situation befuddled me: even the Marxists were turning over-zealous to

revive Sanskrit, and strangely one had to go to the West to do so!

 

While we battle each other on the streets on whether Sanskrit should

be revived in the school curricula or not, top notch western

universities have been busy churning one esoteric dissertation after

another on Panini’s Ashtadhyay and comparing Bhartihari’s and

Patanjali’s grammatical logic. Yet the irony has been in place for

over two centuries now. Even as we neglect our rich cultural heritage,

it is the West that has revived interest in the East. Notwithstanding

Edward Said’s powerful attack on the “Eurocentric†epistemology

of Orientalism, and political correctness apart, half a century after

Independence, it is actually the Occident that is busy rediscovering

the genius of the Orient.

 

Ever since 1786, when Sir William Jones, in a paper presented to the

Royal Asiatic Society, in Calcutta, said, "the wonderful structure" of

the Sanskrit language, is "more perfect than the Greek, more copious

than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either," the West

has been busy learning from Sanskrit.

 

This Western passion for the oriental classics is not only limited to

Peter Brook’s brilliant dramatic rendering of the Sanskrit epic,

Mahabharata, or to the more recent attempt by Lee Siegel to write a

sensuously funny modern day Kamasutra in a fictionalised form,

entitled Love in a Dead Language. There is a much more systematic

tradition of Sanskrit learning of over two centuries. Not surprisingly

to a question about why should one study Sanskrit today, and whether

it has any future, Professor Sheldon Pollock of the University

of Chicago had the following answer: "It is indicative of the

appalling quality of the public discourse on Sanskrit in India today

that you even ask this question."

 

While we battle each other on the streets on whether Sanskrit should

be revived in the school curricula or not, top notch western

universities have been busy churning one esoteric dissertation after

another on Panini’s Ashtadhyay and comparing Bhartihari’s and

Patanjali’s grammatical logic.

 

There are essentially two traditions of teaching Sanskrit in the West

today: one scholastic, as a classical subject taught in the

universities; the other as a religious discourse in the various

temples being built by the cash rich Indian diaspora. The scholastic

tradition, which began a couple of centuries ago continues till today.

The temple tradition is a post-1965 phenomena, the year President

Lyndon Johnson liberalised immigration quotas. Today, the children of

the first wave of professional Indian immigrants to the USâ€"mainly

doctors and engineersâ€"have entered the university in large numbers.

It is these alienated kids, desperate to discover their historical

roots and cultural heritage, who are studying Sanskrit with a passion.

 

The British tradition

 

The first chair in Sanskrit in England, the Boden Chair, was set up at

Oxford in 1831. Later chairs were founded in University College,

London, Edinburgh, and Cambridge. The Boden chair continues till today

in addition to two other faculty positions. Professor Richard

Gombrich, the present occupant of the chair, is known worldwide for

his extraordinary work on Theravada Buddhism.

 

According to Gombrich: "The reasons for studying Sanskrit today are

the same as they ever were: that the vast array of Sanskrit texts

preserves for us a valuable part of the cultural heritage of mankind,

including much beautiful literature and many interesting, even

fascinating, ideas."

 

Today Oxford offers three kinds of degrees in Sanskrit: the three-year

BA, the two-year M.Phil in classical Indian religion, for which

Sanskrit is taught intensively, and the D Phil. The majority of the

undergraduates are usually British students, while the research

students are mostly from overseas, including a few Buddhist monks and

nuns from South-East Asia.

 

The wonderful structure of Sanskrit is better than Latin

 

In an attempt to popularise Sanskrit, Gombrich, has become associated

with a new publishing venture. In the style of the Loeb classical

library of Latin and Greek, the series will produce readable

translations of Sanskrit literary texts printed alongside the

originals.

 

The chair of Sanskrit in Edinburgh was established by the endowment of

John Muir. The university of Edinburgh offers either a full honours

course in Sanskrit or a joint honours course with Latin, Greek or

Linguistics. Unfortunately, the interest in Sanskrit in Britain arose

largely through colonial involvement. This, Dr John Brockington, who

today teaches Sanskrit in Edinburgh feels, "has been at once the

strength and the weakness of Sanskrit studies in Britain". The end of

British rule in 1947 dampened the interest in Sanskrit, for instance,

the Edinburgh chair was disestablished in 1949.

 

The American tradition

 

The Sanskrit craze has, however, caught up in the US. Unlike Britain,

and unlike its own past, it is totally demand driven.

 

But first, some background. The teaching of Sanskrit first began at

Yale university under professor Salisbury in the late 19th century.

His student William Dwight Whitney became the pioneer in the

development of American Sanskrit studies. This soon spread to Harvard,

Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other campuses.

 

Today several American campuses offer Sanskrit along with modern

Indian languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Tamil. Student

unions sit on hunger strikes demanding more and more departments. It

has happened at the University of Texas at Austin and in various

California campuses.

 

Although Sanskrit began to be taught at the University of Michigan, as

early as the 1890s as part of Oriental languages, today, it is

attracting large undergraduate crowds. Until 1985, it was primarily a

graduate subject attracting mainly foreign students. Not any more.

Most second generation Indo-American kids majoring in engineering,

medicine, and business studies read Sanskrit not as a specialised

branch but to satisfy the four-term foreign language requirement.

 

The University of Chicago attracts almost 30 or more undergraduate

students every year to study Sanskrit. There are five faculty members

teaching Sanskrit. Ditto at Harvard University which has a full

fledged department of Sanskrit. In the other US universities it is a

part of the South Asian departments and very popular among the

Indo-American kids.

 

However, the interest in Sanskrit persists even in those places where

there is no demand. The last conference of the International

Association of Sanskrit studies held at Turin, in Italy, according to

Brockington was, an eye-opener. There were a number of Sanskrit

scholars from the Eastern European countries, including

Poland,Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Russia. Unlike the US, most of

these countries hardly have much of an NRI population. They hardly

have any temples. No community funding, no involvement of

local populations. Yet, the zeal for Sanskrit continues.

 

While we in India today consider Sanskrit a dead language, the

Westerners consider it as simply a fascinating language, a language in

which the genius of the human civilisation was perfected to its

fullest.

 

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THE END

 

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