Geopolitics and Sanskrit Phobia

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Geopolitics and Sanskrit Phobia

 

Rajiv Malhotra

 

 

Published on Tuesday, July 5, 2005

 

Overview

 

This paper discusses the historical and contemporary relationship between

geopolitics and Sanskrit, and consists of the following sections:

 

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

structures and categories contain a built-in framework for representing

specific worldviews. Sanskriti is the name of the culture and civilization

that embodies this framework. One may say that Sanskriti is the term for

what has recently become known as Indic Civilization, a civilization that

goes well beyond the borders of modern India to encompass South Asia and

much of Southeast Asia. At one time, it included much of Asia.

 

II. Interactions among different regions of Asia helped to develop and

exchange this pan-Asian Sanskriti. Numerous examples involving India,

Southeast Asia and China are given.

 

III. Sanskrit started to decline after the West Asian invasions of the

Indian subcontinent. This had a devastating impact on Sanskriti, as many

world-famous centers of learning were destroyed, and no single major

university was built for many centuries by the conquerors.

 

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

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

European universities. These influences shaped many intellectual disciplines

that are (falsely) classified as “Western”. But the “discovery” of Sanskrit

by Europe also had the negative influence of fueling European racism since

the 19th century.

 

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

de-Sanskritized and replaced by an English based education. This served to

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

the process of self-denigration among Indians, a trend that continues today.

Many prominent Indians achieved fame and success as middlemen serving the

Empire, and Gandhi's famous 1908 monograph, “Hind Swaraj,” discusses this

phenomenon.

 

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

affair with Sanskrit as an important nation-building vehicle. However,

successive generations of Indian intellectuals have replaced this with what

this paper terms “Sanskrit Phobia,” i.e. a body of beliefs now widely

disseminated according to which Sanskrit and Sanskriti are blamed for all

sorts of social, economic and political problems facing India's

underprivileged classes. This section illustrates such phobia among

prominent Western Indologists and among trendy Indians involved in South

Asian Studies who learn about Sanskrit and Sanskriti according to Western

frameworks and biases.

 

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

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

Asia.

 

VIII. Some concrete suggestions are made for further consideration to

revitalize Sanskrit as a living language that has potential for future

knowledge development and empowerment of humanity.

 

I. Sanskrit and the Multicultural Sanskriti (Indic Civilization)

 

In modern Westernized universities, Sanskrit is taught primarily as a

language only and that too in connection with Indo-European philology. On

the other hand, other major languages such as English, Arabic and Mandarin

are treated as containers of their respective unique civilizational

worldviews; the same approach is not accorded to Sanskrit. In fact, the word

itself has a wider, more general meaning in the sense of civilization.

Etymologically, Sanskrit means "elaborated,refined,cultured," or

"civilized," implying wholeness of expression. Employed by the refined and

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

a vehicle of civilizational transmission and evolution.

 

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

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

population, Sanskrit is experienced through the civilization named

Sanskriti, which is built on it.

 

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

theatre, literature, pilgrimage, rituals and spirituality, which embody

pan-Indic cultural traits. Sanskriti incorporates all branches of science

and technology - medical, veterinary, plant sciences, mathematics,

engineering, architecture, dietetics, etc. Pannini's grammar, a

meta-language with such clarity, flexibility and logic that certain pioneers

in computer science are turning to it for ideas is one of the stunning

achievements of the human mind and is a part of this Sanskriti.

 

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

century, Sanskrit was the paramount linguistic and cultural medium for the

ruling and administrative circles, from Purushapura (Peshawar) in Gandhara

(Afghanistan) to as far east as Pandurang in Annam (South Vietnam) and

Prambanam in Central Java. Sanskrit facilitated a cosmopolis of cultural and

aesthetic expressions that encompassed much of Asia for over a thousand

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

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

cultural consciousness shared by most South and Southeast Asians regardless

of their religion, class or gender and expressed in essential similarities

of mental and spiritual outlook and ethos.

 

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

Sanskriti based on it persists and underpins the civilizations of South and

Southeast Asia today. What Monier-Williams wrote of India applies equally to

Southeast Asia as well: “India's national character is cast in a Sanskrit

mould and in Sanskrit language. Its literature is a key to its vast

religious system. Sanskrit is one medium of approach to the hearts of the

Indians, however unlearned, or however disunited by the various

circumstances of country, caste, and creed” (Gombrich 1978, 16).

 

Sanskrit unites the great and little traditions:

 

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

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

common spoken languages; simultaneously, there was a bottom-up assimilation

of local culture and language into Sanskrit's open architecture. This is

analogous to Microsoft (top down) and Linux (bottom up) rolled into one.

Such a culture grows without breaking down, as it can evolve from within to

remain continually contemporaneous and advanced.

 

Pan-Indic civilization emerged in its present composite form through the

intercourse between these two cultural streams, which have been called the

"great" and "little" traditions, respectively. The streams and flows between

them were interconnected by various processes, such as festivals and

rituals, and scholars have used these “tracers” to understand the reciprocal

influences between Sanskrit and local languages.

 

Marriott has delineated the twin processes: (i) the “downward” spread of

cultural elements that are contained in Sanskrit into localized cultural

units represented by local languages, and (ii), the “upward” spread from

local cultural elements into Sanskrit. Therefore, Sanskrit served as a

meta-language and framework for the vast range of languages across Asia.

While the high culture of the sophisticated urbane population (known as

"great tradition" in anthropology) provides Sanskriti with refinement and

comprehensiveness, cultural input produced by the rural masses ("little

tradition") gives it popularity, vitality and pan-Indian outlook.

 

Once information about local or regional cultural traits is recorded and

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

elements of Sanskriti are localized and given local flavour, they acquire a

distinct regional cultural identity and colour. Just as local cultural

elements become incorporated into Sanskriti, elements of Sanskriti are

similarly assimilated and multiply into a plurality of regional cultural

units.

 

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

sculpture, painting, and religious narratives. Dimock (1963, 1-5) has

suggested that the diversity to be found in the Indic region (i.e. South and

Southeast Asia) is permeated by patterns that recur throughout the country,

so that each region, despite its differences from other regions, expresses

the patterns - the structural paradigmatic aspects - of the whole. Each

regional culture is therefore to be seen as a structural microcosm of the

full system.

 

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

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

communication among speakers of local languages, much as English is employed

today.

 

Early Buddhist scriptures were composed and preserved in Pali and other

Prakrit (local) languages, but later started to also be composed in what is

known as "hybrid Sanskrit." There was a trend using elegant, Paninian

Sanskrit for both verbal and written communication. Tibetan was developed

based on Sanskrit and is virtually a mirror image of it.

 

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

literati and was, therefore, never a dead language. It is living, as Michael

Coulson points out, because people chose it to formulate their ideas in

preference to some other language. It flourished as a living language of

inter-regional communication and understanding before becoming eclipsed

first by Persian and then by English after the military and political

conquest of India.

 

Refuting the habit of dividing the Prakrit languages of India into two

structurally separate “North” and “South” independent families, Stephen

Tyler explains that “[M]odern Indo-Aryan languages are more similar to

Dravidian languages than they are to other Indo-European languages" (Tyler

1973: 18-20).

 

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

Sanskrit brought Sanskrit closer to the language of the home, while a

judicious Sanskritization made Prakrit into a language of a higher cultural

status. Both of these processes were simultaneous and worked at conscious as

well as subconscious levels (Deshpande 1993, 35). As an example of this

symbiosis, one may point to various Sanskrit texts in medieval India which

were instruction manuals for spoken or conversational Sanskrit by the

general public (Deshpande 1993; Salomon 1982; Wezler 1996).

 

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

relationship between Sanskrit and local languages, and that Sanskriti is the

common cultural container, it is not necessary for everyone to know Sanskrit

in order to absorb and develop an inner experience of the embedded values

and categories of meaning it carries. Similarly, a knower of the local

languages would have access to the ideas, values and categories embodied in

Sanskriti.

 

Unlike the cultural genocides of natives by Arabic, Mandarin and English

speaking conquerors and colonizers, Sanskrit had a mutually symbiotic

relationship with the popular local languages, and this remained one of

reciprocal reinforcement rather than forced adoption through coercion or

conquest.

 

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

that is often superficially misattributed to the British English: how modern

India despite its vast economic disadvantages is able to produce adaptive

and world-class individuals in virtually all fields of endeavour. This

dynamism makes the assimilation of "modern" and "progressive" ideologies and

thought patterns easier in India than in many other developing countries. In

fact, it facilitates incorporating "modern" innovations into the tradition.

It allows India to achieve its own kind of “modernity” in which it would

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

European structures despite their claim of universality. This is why Indians

are adaptive and able to compete globally compared to other non-Western

traditions today.

 

II. Pan-Asian Sanskriti

 

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

from Japan in the far north-east to Ireland in the far north-west. Between

these two extremities the chain sags down southwards in a festoon that dips

below the Equator in Indonesia.” (A.J. Toynbee)

 

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

from Central Asia through Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia,

Viet Nam and all the way to Indonesia was a crucible of a sophisticated

pan-Asian civilization. In A.L. Basham's “A Cultural History of India,” it

is said that:

 

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

along the traditional lines of Indian political theory and following the

Buddhist or Hindu religions, had established themselves in many regions of

Burma, Thailand, Indo-China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. (Basham 1975, 442-3)

 

However, unlike the violent spread of Europeanism in recent centuries, this

Sanskritisation of Asia was entirely peaceful, never resorting to physical

force or coercion to subvert local cultures or identities, or to engage in

economic or political exploitation of the host cultures and societies. Its

worldviews were based on compassion and mutual exchange, and not on the

principle of conquest and domination. This is not to say that political

disputes and wars of conquest never occurred, but that in most instances,

neither the motive nor the result was the imposition of cultural or

religious homogeneity.

 

The following passage from Arun Bhattacharjee's “Greater India” elaborates

this point clearly:

 

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

and peoples of the world is that the cultural expansion was never confused

with colonial domination and commercial dynamism far less economic

exploitation. That culture can advance without political motives, that trade

can proceed without imperialist designs, settlements can take place without

colonial excesses and that literature, religion and language can be

transported without xenophobia, jingoism and race complexes are amply

evidenced from the history of India's contact with her neighbors...Thus

although a considerable part of central and south-eastern Asia became

flourishing centers of Indian culture, they were seldom subjects to the

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

havocs of any Indian military campaign. They were perfectly free,

politically and economically and their people representing an integration of

Indian and indigenous elements had no links with any Indian state and looked

upon India as a holy land rather than a motherland – a land of pilgrimage

and not an area of jurisdiction. (Bhattacharjee 1981, 1-3)

 

This Sanskritisation in Asia provided an adaptive and flexible unity to

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

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

inhabited by monkeys is thought to have been the home of Hanuman at some

point and the current residences his descendents. Every polity influenced by

this Sanskritization was able to incorporate the vast Sanskriti culture into

its own. This malleability provided a non-invasive and unimposing diffusion.

 

Sanskriti and Southeast Asia:

 

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

India and Southeast Asia was the mechanism of this culture and knowledge

trade:

 

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

established, persisted; and cultural changes in the Indian subcontinent had

their effect across the Bay of Bengal. During the late Gupta and the

Pala-Sena periods many Southeast Asian regions were greatly influenced by

developments in Indian religious ideas, especially in the Buddhist field.

(Basham 1975, 449)

 

This Sanskrit based civilization was not centrally developed in what is

present day India, but was rather the collaborative effort of Indians with

many Asian peoples, especially the Southeast Asians. For example, there were

regular scholarly exchanges between thinkers from many diverse parts of

Asia.

 

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

such as Taksasila and Nalanda, which were ancient equivalents of today's Ivy

Leagues in America where the third world now sends its brightest youth for

higher education. King Baladeva of Indonesia was so supportive of the

university in Nalanda that in A.D. 860 he made a donation to it (Basham

1975, 449). The support given to the university from a foreign king

thousands of miles away in Southeast Asian demonstrates how important

scholarly exchange was for those regions under the influence of Pan-Asian

Sanskriti.

 

Interestingly, the geographies mentioned in the Puranas, such as Ramayana

and Mahabharata, include many countries, especially of Southeast Asia, as a

part and parcel of the Indic region. This indicates an ancient link between

South and Southeast Asian even before the relatively modern Sanskritization

that is being discussed here.

 

Sanskriti and Thailand:

 

Sanskriti has an established and obvious influence in Thailand, dating from

1500 years ago to the present day. Sanskrit was used for public social,

cultural, and administrative purposes in Thailand and other regions of

Southeast Asia.

 

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

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

example of the mechanics of cultural fusion in South-East Asia... On the

other hand, the Thais absorbed much from their Khmer and Mon subjects; and

the influence of Angkor and Dvaravati is obvious in Thai art. Thai kings

embraced the Indian religions, and they based their principles of government

upon Hindu practice as it had been understood by their Khmer predecessors

(Basham, 1975, 450).

 

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

legitimating, and transmitting royal succession and instituting formal

rituals.

 

The Thai monarchy, though following Hinayana Buddhism of the Sinhalese type,

still requires the presence of Court brahmans... for the proper performance

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

 

Furthermore, India and Sanskriti directly influenced aspects of Thai

aesthetics such as architecture and art.

 

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

from the disruption of Islamic conquest, to bring back models upon which to

base an official sculpture and architecture. Hence Thai architects began to

build replicas of the Bodh-Gaya stupa (Wat Chet Yot in Chiengmai is a good

example) and Thai artists made Buddha images according to the Pala canon as

they saw it. (Basham: 450).

 

Dance and theatre also continue to reflect the underlying influence of

Sanskriti.

 

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

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

their audiences with the adventures of Rama and Sita and Hanuman. (Basham

1975, 442-3)

 

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

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

for instance, a person who knows Pali can often guess the meaning of present

day Cambodian, Burmese, Thai and Lao, and this Pali impact was largely from

Sri Lanka. Basham points out:

 

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

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

written in scripts which are clearly derived from Indian models. (Basham

1975, 442-3).

 

Sanskriti and China:

 

China and India had a unique and mutually respected exchange. Buddhist

thought is the most notable and obvious import into China from Sanskriti

influence. The Tang dynasty provided an opening for the Chinese civilization

to welcome Sanskriti coming from South and Southeast Asia.

 

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

glorious periods in the history of China. The whole of China came under one

political power that extended over Central Asia. It was in this period that

the influence of India over China reached the highest peak. A large number

of missionaries and merchants crowded the main cities of China. Similarly,

more Chinese monks and royal embassies came to India in the seventh century

AD than during any other period. The Nalanda University which was at its

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

Chinese scholars at Nalanda not only studied Buddhism but Brahmanical

philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and medicine also. The Chinese emperor

gave liberal support to the Chinese scholars studying at Nalanda”

(Bhattacharjee 1981, 131-2).

 

The characteristic of the recipient “pulling” knowledge is typical in the

transmission of Sanskriti and is to be contrasted with the “pushing” model

of the spread of Christianity and Islam by divine fiat. Unlike Christian

evangelists “pushing”, Hiuen Tsang and I-Tsing came from China to “pull”

knowledge by learning Buddhism and other disciplines in India and taking

them back.

 

Foremost among such scholars was Hiuen Tsang who played the most

distinguished part in establishing Buddhism on a solid footing in China and

improving the cultural relations between these two countries. He learnt the

Yogachara system at Nalanda from the famous monk Silabhadra. On his return

to China he translated Buddhist texts and trained his pupils. He founded a

new school of Buddhist philosophy in China, which carried on his work after

his death. His noble example induced other Chinese monks to visit India. We

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

reached the port of Tamralipti in Bengal in 673 AD. He stayed at Nalanda for

ten years (675-685 AD) and studied and copied Buddhist texts. He came back

to China with a collection of four hundred Sanskrit manuscripts containing

more than fifty thousand slokas. He translated several texts and compiled a

Chinese-Sanskrit dictionary. In his book A Record of the Buddhist Religion

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

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

special interest. He also wrote a biography of sixty Buddhist monks who

visited India. Most of such monks were Chinese, though some of them belonged

to Korea, Samarkand and Tushdra (Turk countries). This book shows the

international position of Buddhism in Asia and at the same time indicates

its influence in outlying countries like Korea (Bhattacharjee 1981, 138).

 

Chinese pilgrims were officially sent to Indian holy sites to pay homage on

behalf of the Chinese emperorship. The presence of Chinese pilgrims was a

practice of close interaction between the Sanskriti superstructure and the

Chinese civilization.

 

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

964 AD 300 Chinese monks left China to pay imperial homages (as desired by

the Chinese emperor) to the holy places of India. Five of the pilgrims left

short inscriptions at the sacred site of Bodh-Gaya. It records the

construction of a stupa in honour of emperor T'ai-tsong by the emperor and

the dowager empress of the great Song dynasty...The last Chinese monk to

visit India was after 1036 AD which marks the close of the long and intimate

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

 

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

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

went to China not just to exchange ideas but also for the practical task of

translating Sanskrit texts into Chinese.

 

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

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

honours. He is credited with translating a large number of Sanskrit texts.

Between 970 and 1036 AD a number of other Indian monarchs including a prince

of western India named Manjusri stayed at China between 970 and 1036 AD. We

know from the Chinese records that there were never so many Indian monks in

the Chinese court as at the close of the tenth and the beginning of the

eleventh century AD. These Indian monks and Chinese pilgrims carried with

them a large number of Sanskrit manuscripts into China. The Chinese emperor

appointed a Board of Translators with three Indian scholars at the head.

This board succeeded in translating more than 200 volumes between 982 and

1011 AD. (Bhattacharjee 1981, 125-8).

 

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

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

fields as diverse as arts, language, linguistics, mathematics, astronomy,

medicine, botany, martial arts and philosophy. For instance, in China:

 

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

official boards were Indian astronomers to prepare the calendars. In the

seventh century AD in the capital city flourished three astronomical schools

known as Gautama, Kasyapa and Kumara. China had already adopted the Indian

theory of nine planets. The Sanskrit astronomical work – Navagraha-Siddhanta

was translated into Chinese in the T'ang period. A large number of

mathematical and astronomical works were translated into Chinese...Indian

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

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

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

translated into Chinese in the eleventh century AD (Bhattarcharjee 1981,

134-5).

 

The arts were also centers of confluence of Chinese culture and Sanskriti.

Motifs and styles as well as actual artists were exported to China.

 

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

India exerted a great influence on the native traditions and gave rise to a

new school of art known as Sino-Indian art. The Wei period witnessed a great

development in this art. A number of rock-cut caves at Thunwang, Yun-kang

and Longmen, colossal images of Buddha 60 to 70 feet high and fresco

paintings on the walls of the caves illustrate this art. The inspiration

came not only from the images and pictures that were imported from India to

China but also from the Indian artists who visited China. Three Indian

painters of the names of Sakyabuddha, Buddhakirti and Kumarabodhi worked in

China during the Wei period. Gandhara, Mathura and Gupta – the three

different schools of sculpture in India were well represented in Chinese

art. The best image of Buddha of Wei period was definitely made after the

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

 

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

talent.

 

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

its sponsor in China. In 581 AD a musical party went from India to China.

Although emperor Kaotsu (581-595 AD) vainly tried to ban it by an Imperial

order, his successor gave encouragement to the lndian music in China. From a

Japanese tradition we come to understand that two principal types of music

called Bodhisattva and Bhairo were taken from China to Japan by an Indian

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

 

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

to have remarked that India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20

centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.

 

Implications:

 

While today's globalization is largely the Westernization of the globe, the

earlier civilizational expansion was a mutually nourishing form of

Sanskritisation that made huge impacts on the intellectual and cultural

development of India, China, Japan, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, present-day

Afghanistan and Central Asia.

 

As will be discussed later, beyond Asia, Indic civilization profoundly

influenced Europe's modernity and the enlightenment movements. While

Sanskrit's positive role in world history is well documented, awareness of

this is primarily confined to a few narrowly specialized scholars. The

current teaching of world history tends to be Eurocentric and ignores the

contributions of other civilizations and traditions.

 

Sanskrit can help generate the necessary knowledge systems in order to

explore the objectives, methods, and institutional dynamics of intellectual

life in contemporary Asia. Also, the history of Sanskrit and Sanskriti can

provide the modern world a model of how cultural diffusion can lead to a

harmonious and synergetic flowering of humanity rather than forced

assimilation through oppression and subjugation. The colonial and

neo-colonial necessity of a master/slave relationship in the spread of

influence is neatly refuted by the legacy of Sanskriti.

 

III. Decline of Sanskrit

 

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

while remaining an important influence, gradually lost its vitality as the

cornerstone for a pan-Asian culture.

 

While many universities in India were destroyed by invaders from West Asia,

it is telling that there was no new major university founded during the

entire 500 year Mughal rule over India.

 

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

became an importer of know-how from and dependent upon Europeans, a fate

shared by much of Southeast Asia.

 

IV. Sanskrit Influence on Modern Europe

 

Europe's “discovery” of Sanskrit:

 

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is a wonderful structure;

more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely

refined than either...” (Sir William Jones, Supreme Court Judge of the

British East India Company, 1786, Singer 1972, 29).

 

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

appropriating the “discovery.” One need not look hard to find vivid examples

of this in the conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The “discovery”

of Sanskrit and Sanskriti by European scholars followed this model quite

well. European scholarship saw potential in the Sanskrit language not only

for exploration on its own terms, but also to take back to Europe and use

for imperial purposes.

 

Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawaii, brought

to my attention a colonial wall carving in Oxford which blatantly boasts of

the intellectual conquest of Sanskrit by the British. Chakrabarti wrote as

follows:

 

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

British Orientalist, in the chapel of University College, Oxford. This

marble frieze shows Sir William sitting on a chair writing something down on

a desk while three Indian traditional scholars squatting in front of him are

either interpreting a text or contemplating or reflecting on some problem.

 

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

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

and metaphysics. He wrote letters home about how fascinating and yet how

complex and demanding was his new learning of these old materials. But this

sculpture shows – quite realistically – the Brahmins sitting down below on

the floor, slightly crouching and bare-bodied – with no writing implements

in their hands (for they knew by heart most of what they were teaching and

did not need notes or printed texts!) while the overdressed Jones sits

imperiously on a chair writing something at a table. The inscription below

hails Jones as the “Justinian of India” because he “formed” a digest of

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

into English a tiny tip of the massive iceberg of ancient Indian

Dharmashastra literature along with some Islamic law books. Yet the monument

says and shows Jones to be the “law-giver,” and the “native informer” to be

the “receiver of knowledge.”

 

What this amply illustrates is that the semiotics of colonial encounters

have – perhaps indelibly – inscribed a profound asymmetry of epistemic

prestige upon any future East-West exchange of knowledge. (Arindam

Chakrabarti, “Introduction,” Philosophy East & West Volume 51, Number 4

October 2001 449-451.)

 

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

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

get the following picture of it.

 

The picture symbolizes how academic Indians today often remain under the

glass ceiling as “native informants” of the Westerners. Yet in 19th century

Europe, Sanskrit was held in great awe and respect, even while the natives

of India were held in contempt or at best in a patronizing manner as

children to be raised into their master's advanced “civilization.”

 

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

In 1808, Schlegel's university had replaced Hebrew and Arabic with Sanskrit.

Sanskrit was introduced into every major European university between 1800

and 1850 and overshadowed other classical languages which were often

downsized to make way for Sanskrit positions. This frenzy may be compared

with today's spread of computer science in higher education. The focus on

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

intellectual thought.

 

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

Hebrew as the language deemed to belong to the ancestors of Europeans –

eventually leading to the Aryanization of European identity, which, in turn,

led to the cataclysmic events of the following century.

 

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

testimony, were either Sanskritists, or were greatly shaped by Sanskrit

literature and thought by their own testimony. Professor Kapil Kapoor

describes how Europeans have benefited from Sanskrit:

 

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

well to recall that the contemporary western theories, though essentially

interpretive, have evolved from Europe's 19th century interaction with

Sanskrit philosophy, grammar and poetics; they would care to remember that

Roman Jakobson, Trubetzkoy and de Saussure were Sanskritists, that Saussure

was in fact a professor of Sanskrit at Geneva and that his published papers

include work on Sanskrit poetics. The structural, formalist thinking and the

linguistic turn of contemporary theory have their pedigree in Sanskrit

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

thought over practically the same time-span contrasts sharply with 150 years

of sterile Indian interaction with the western thought. After the founding

of Sanskrit chairs in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Europe

interacted with the Indian thought, particularly in philosophy, grammar,

literary theory and literature, in a big way without abandoning its own

powerful tradition. In the process, it created, as we have said a new

discipline, Historical-Comparative Linguistics, produced a galaxy of

thinkers - Schiller, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jakobson,

Trubetzkoy and above all Saussure - and founded a revolutionary conceptual

framework which was to influence the European thought for the next century,

Structuralism. (From “Eleven Objections to Sanskrit Literary Theory: A

Rejoinder,” by Kapil Kapoor, the expanded version of the lecture delivered

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

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

 

To this list of “revolutionary” European thinkers who benefited from

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

Schlegel, Max Muller, Voltaire and J. S. Mill. Max Mueller's very

influential book, “What India can teach us,” gave a strong push for the

European assimilation of Sanskrit thought. The French, ranging from Voltaire

to Renoir, and the British also learnt a great deal via the Germans. In the

19th century, there was also a shift away from the Enlightenment Project of

“reason” as the pinnacle of man, and this was influenced by Sanskrit studies

in Europe and eventually led to a departure from Aristotelian thought to

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

Sanskrit texts, including philosophy, linguistics, literature and

mathematics.

 

Sanskrit used to boost White Christian Supremacy:

 

European “discovery” of Sanskrit brought the opportunity to appropriate its

rich tradition for the sake of the Europeans' obsession to reimagine their

own history. Many rival theories emerged, each claiming a new

historiography. The new European preoccupation among scholars was to

reinvent identities of various European peoples by suitably locating

Sanskrit amidst other selective facts of history to create Grand Narratives

of European supremacy. Exploiting India's status as a colony, Europeans were

successful in capturing Sanskrit and Sanskriti from India in order to

fulfill their own ideological imperatives of reconciling theology

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

their self-imposed role of world ruler.

 

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

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

for a new science of human origins:

 

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

called . . . and thanks to the discovery of the close kinship between this

language and the idioms of the principal races of Europe, which was

established by the genius of Schlegel, Humboldt, Bopp, and many others, a

complete revolution has taken place in the method of studying the world's

primitive history (Olender, 7)

 

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

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

language was spoken in the Garden of Eden was considered central to this.

The newly discovered language of Sanskrit and its literature proved to be

vast and erudite and the uncovered links between European language and

Sanskrit excited the scholars and encouraged an assimilation of this most

ancient and profound linguistic culture. At the same time, the perceived

spiritual providence that the Abrahamic God had bestowed on Europeans in the

form of Christianity had to be incorporated and synthesized into the

narrative. The “scientific” and empirical evidence of linguistic survey had

to coincide with theological laws.

 

”The comparative study of languages was inspired by Renaissance debates over

what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden. By the eighteenth century

scholars were persuaded that European languages shared a common ancestor.

With the adoption of positivist, "scientific" methods in the nineteenth

century, the hunt for the language of Eden and the search for a European

Ursprache diverged. Yet the desire to reconcile historical causality with

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

 

The formation of two mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed groups of

peoples was the device constructed to achieve this need – these were the

Semitic 'race' and the mythical 'Aryans'. The Semitics, synonymous with the

Hebrews, were portrayed as a sedentary, passive, inclusive, and trapped in

time. However, they were a people who were in communication with the one

true God and thus held the seed of religion.

 

Faithful guardians of pure monotheism, the Hebrews had a magnificent part in

the divine plan, but one wonders where the world would be today if they had

remained the sole leaders of mankind. The fact is, while they religiously

preserved the principle of truth from which a higher light would one day

emanate…(Olender: 99-102).

 

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

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

and dominate. The concocted Aryan race was assigned this role. Scholars

coined various ethno-linguistic terms such as “Indo-European”,

“Indo-Germanic”, and “Aryan” to refer to this newly discovered people, and

used these interchangeably to refer to the linguistic family as well as a

race.

 

As scholars established the disciplines of Semitic and Indo-European

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

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

Christianized West the secret of their identity, also bestowed upon them the

patent of nobility that justified their Spiritual, religious, and political

domination of the world. The balance was not maintained, however, between

the two components of this couple. The Hebrew undeniably had the privilege

of monotheism in his favor, but he was self-centered, static, and refractory

both to Christian values and to progress in culture and science. The Aryan,

on the other hand, was invested with all the noble virtues that direct the

dynamic of history: imagination, reason, science, arts, politics. The Hebrew

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

the religious tradition with which the scholars in question identified, but

he was also alien to that tradition. Wherever he lived, under the name of

Jew, in a specific place among a specific people, he remained an outsider,

aloof, different (Olender: Foreword x-xi).

 

The key players in the scholastic juggling act who attempted to reconcile

the Semitic and the Aryan included several famous European scholars, namely:

Renan, Pictet, Max Muller, and Grau. Christian supremacy and Christian

manifest destiny was central to the works of these Orientalists.

 

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

central figure in the conceptualization of Indo-European civilization. The

new religious sciences attempted to treat all religions in the same way and

yet to impose a Christian providential meaning on the new comparative order.

The very organization of religious data was affected by older hierarchical

classifications. The cataloging of peoples and faiths reflected the belief

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

 

These scholars' main objective was to use scientific reason to substantiate

theological necessities no matter how far the hard facts had to be bent. Max

Muller, in reference to comparative philology, explicitly stated the

orientation of his research:

 

“We are entering into a new sphere of knowledge, in which the individual is

subordinate to the general and facts are subordinate to law. We find

thought, order, and design scattered throughout nature, and we see a dark

chaos of matter illuminated by the reflection of the divine spirit.”

(Olender, 90-92)

 

Since the paradigmatic expectations of the scholar are exposed as foregone

conclusions of his analysis, the bias and subjectivity in the writer's

scholarship becomes obvious. Furthermore, the Christian supremacist agenda

behind his work is obvious:

 

The Science of Religion will for the first time assign to Christianity its

right place among the religions of the world; it will show for the first

time what was meant by the fullness of time; it will restore to the whole

history of the world, in its unconscious progress towards Christianity, its

true and sacred character." A good disciple of Augustine, Max Muller was

fond of citing his remark that Christianity was simply the name of "the true

religion," a religion that was already known to the ancients and indeed had

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

 

He deplored the tactlessness that many Christian missionaries exhibited in

their dealings with pagans, and advocated subtlety in asserting superiority:

 

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

our religion is the only true one it surely is not necessary to maintain

that all other forms of belief are a fabric of errors. (Olender: 90-92).

 

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

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

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

Christian Europe with its perceived religious supremacy. The scholars were

forced to reconcile with the paradox of how the intellectually superior

Aryans believed in such a low form of religion. Pictet was forced to ask

himself:

 

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

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

ultimately brought such intensity to intellectual and religious life started

from the lowly estate of either having no religion or wallowing in the abyss

of an obscure polytheism? (Olender: 93-98).

 

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

theories proclaimed with great aplomb fit into a general framework of Aryan

people being superior in every way except the spiritual impetus to be world

rulers. Therefore, the early Indo-Europeans were said to posses the seed of

monotheism which did not sprout until the providence of the Abrahamic God

through Christ. Pictet justifies this 'primordial monotheism' as follows:

 

Pictet then attempts to provide philological justification for the notion of

"primitive monotheism" by examining Indo- European words for the divine. The

Sanskrit word deva attracts his attention. Can a word exist without a prior

meaning? If deva is attested, then so is the implicit sense of "superior

Being".

 

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

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

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

once known the truth, the Aryas should have abandoned it for error. Weak and

vacillating as their monotheistic vocation no doubt was, it was nevertheless

providential; it would fall to Christianity to nurture the seed first

planted by the Aryas. (Olender: 93-98)

 

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

eventually transmit to the whole world. Grau, a German Christian evangelist,

took this idea to a new level by purporting that though the Aryans were

“endlessly adaptable”, without Christianity the Aryans were hopeless and

lost. In other words, they “suffered a congenital lack of backbone provided

by monotheistic Christianity” (Olender, 106). The preservation of Christian

dominance was Grau's primary directive.

 

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

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

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

would be forgotten: the Cross had to be planted firmly at the center of any

venture of cultural understanding. Grau's writings give a surprising new

twist to the fortunes of the Aryan-Semitic pair. (Olender: 106).

 

Parallels with the Self-Appropriation of Judaism by Europe:

 

An interesting parallel is to examine the colonial mindset of

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

the European identity. Though history-centric monotheism was appropriated by

Europe from the Jews to be implemented in the colonial scheme, the Jews were

excluded as “others” and even denigrated. For example, Grau is explicit in

his distancing Christian Europeans from the Jews.

 

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

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

people that has contributed nothing to history other than perhaps its

religious potential- and in that case he generally refers to "Hebrews"

rather than "Jews”… (Olender: 109-110).

 

The theme of feminizing the colonized by the masculine conqueror is also

applied to the Hebrew people.

 

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

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

nevertheless have a monopoly on one sublime quality: religion, or love of

God. This Semitic monism goes hand in hand with a deep commitment to female

monogamy. The masculine behavior of the Indo-German, who masters the arts

and sciences in order to dominate the natural world, is met with the

Semite's feminine response of passivity and receptivity. As the wife is

subject to her husband, so the Semites are absolutely permeable to the God

who chose them (Olender: 109-110).

 

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

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

masculine traits of world domination.

 

Indian Influence on European Linguistics and Postmodernism:

 

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

being studied intensely in Europe. One of the basic concepts of Sanskrit

grammar is how domains of knowledge, music, language, society, etc. hang

together. Every such domain, as per this principle, is constructed such that

no unit has meaning by itself, but meaning exists only in a two-dimensional

system. Such a system is a network of opposites in two dimensions:

paradigmatic (vertical) and syntagmatic (horizontal). Saussure later used

this central concept from Pannini's “Astadyhayi” to formulate his

Structuralism model. By contrast, Aristotle's morphology is mere taxonomy,

i.e. a mere system of enumeration. His system does not show unity via

relations, and his world is not a cohesive unified system. Over the

following fifty years, there came about a revolution in European thought in

the use of this “structuralist” mode of thinking, even though it was much

later that Saussure formalized the system and then Europeans gave it the

name “Structuralism.”

 

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

studies of fossils, which is a special case of what became later known as

structuralism. This was a major discontinuity in European thought, and is

believed to be the influence of Sanskrit structure of knowledge. Charles

Darwin's work in the 1880s was also morphological in method. In the 1890s,

Germany developed morphological schools, and Russian formalist schools also

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

literary theory and linguistics.

 

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

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

Sorbonne, where he taught the famous lecture series on linguistics. The

notes from this series were compiled later by his students into the

published work that is still regarded as the “origin” of Structuralism. But

it is amazing that this published work by his students did not even mention

Panini or Sanskrit or any Indic works at all! What a blackout!(1)

 

Saussure's own PhD dissertation was on “Genitive case in Sanskrit,” a fact

overlooked in today's historiography of European linguistics. It is unclear

if Saussure himself suffered any embarrassment about learning from Sanskrit.

He published a paper titled, “Concept of Kavi,” for instance. Unfortunately,

he did not publish very much himself, and relied on students to do that

after him. Saussure's works became the foundation for all linguistics

studies throughout Europe.

 

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

is actually the Indian Buddhist theory of apohavada which Saussure had

researched and taught in France in his Sanskrit seminars.(2)

 

It is important to note that Pictet mentored and influenced Saussure's

understanding of linguistics and philology. Saussure was fifteen when he

first began correspondence with Pictet whose work Saussure claimed “took the

reader 'to the threshold' of the origin of language and 'of the human races

themselves'” (Olender 99-102). It is more than likely that the

presuppositions and biases in Pictet's work flowed through the

mentor/student relationship down to Saussure's work.

 

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

Europeans to study Sanskrit sources, because Saussure's formulation into

French, repackaged by his students without any reference to Sanskrit, meant

that subsequent scholars of linguistics could divorce their work from the

Sanskrit foundations and origins of the principles of Structuralism.

 

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

the watershed event and gateway through which many developments were

precipitated in European thought. For example, Levi Strauss applied

Structuralism in the 1930s/40s to the study of societies.

 

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

Sanskrit, is now called the “Father of Structural Phenology.” Yet today's

books on the subject rarely mention his debt to Sanskrit for his ideas. (His

PhD dissertation from Moscow University in 1916 was on the Rig Veda.)

 

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

Marxist critiques of Western society. There was loss of faith in

Enlightenment reason after World War I, because going beyond religion into

reason had resulted in such massive calamities. TS Eliot and WB Yeats

started the inwards movement in literature and history, respectively, going

away from exclusive belief in 'reason.' They reinterpreted the classical

Eurocentric Grand Meta-Narratives. The new thinking was that a structure is

not just an absolute or abstract entity, but is in N number of

manifestations.

 

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

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

of all tendencies of Grand Narratives. Hence, the focus is on small stories

of small people and centers on the literature of Subaltern peoples, the

marginalized sectors of society. Monism/Modernity is replaced by Plurality.

However, the relationship between Marxism and Indic frameworks has been too

simplistically based on the Marxist critiques of European societies. What

has not been adequately examined is that many Post-Modernist principles are

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

telling the truth, and many paths being valid.

 

V. Colonial De-Sanskritisation of India

 

European colonizers embarked on ambitious campaigns to assert their cultural

and religious superiority. They systematically bred many generations of

Indians under their tutelage, making them embarrassed of their own

“backward” heritage and pressurizing them to sycophantically mimic the

“modern” West for their ideal “civilization.” An example is the famous

Macaulay's Minute which became the blueprint to remove Sanskrit from India's

education system and replace it with English:

 

Macaulay's Minute (2nd Feb. 1835)

 

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

literature of India...

 

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

which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language

is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used

at preparatory schools in England...

 

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

their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign language...

 

Even more shocking than this is that some19th century Bengali apologists of

Hindu renaissance internalized this contempt and became anti-Sanskritists.

Ram Mohan Roy's intellectual legacy continues unabated in that science and

Sanskrit are still held to be incompatible and mutually exclusive. Sanskrit

was dismissed as a dead language of ancient liturgy without a future, its

advocates declared a sentimental, nostalgic miserable lot brooding over its

lost, past glory. Modern, Westernizing Indians are afraid that Sanskrit

learning will undermine the secular and scientific spirit and ideal of

independent India. To learn Sanskrit is to oppose progress, evolution, and

to reinforce elite, Brahmanical hegemony on the masses. Roy, who is

sometimes described as a champion of modern India, strongly protested

against the decision of the committee of Public Instruction set up by the

colonial authorities to start a Sanskrit college in Calcutta. In a letter

written in 1823 he argued,

 

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

addition of vain and empty subtleties since then produced by speculative man

(Bhate 1996: 387).

 

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

Indians, as explained by Prof. Kapoor:

 

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

forced into hibernation by the vocabulary of the west. For him, West is the

theory and India is the data. The Indian academy has willingly entered into

a receiver-donor relationship with the western academy, a relationship of

intellectual subordination. This 'de-intellectualization' needs to be

countered and corrected by re-locating the Indian mind in the Indian

thought.

 

Kapoor contrasts this with the attitude of “the self-respecting voice of an

intellectually confident India” as represented by the 5th century

philosopher of language, Bhartrhari, who emphasized the importance of

understanding others' traditions but without abandoning one's own: "The

intellect acquires critical acumen by familiarity with different traditions.

How much does one really understand by merely following one's own reasoning

only?”

 

VI. Post Independence Indian assault on Sanskrit

 

Sanskrit enthusiasm after independence:

 

Independent India started out with great enthusiasm to preserve and recover

its indigenous civilization, including the central place of Sanskrit in it.

 

Dr Ambedkar zealously worked to promote the composite civilization

(Sanskriti) of India characterized by linguistic and religious plurality. A

dispatch of the Press Trust of India (PTI) dated September 10, 1949 states

that Dr Ambedkar was among those who sponsored an amendment making Sanskrit

as the official language of the Indian Union in place of Hindi. Most

newspapers carried the news on September 11, 1949 (see the Sanskrit monthly

Sambhashan Sandeshah issue of June 2003: 4-6). Other dignitaries who

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

Minister for External Affairs and Professor Naziruddin Ahmed. The amendment

dealt with Article 310 and read:

 

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

anything contained in Clause 1 of this article, for a period of fifteen

years from the commencement of this constitution, the English language shall

continue to be used for the official purposes of the union for which it was

being used at such commencement: provided that the President may, during the

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

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

 

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

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

was granted a place in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, (2)

Sanskritized Hindi to be written in Devanagari script was declared the

national language of India, and (3) the slogans appearing on various federal

ministry buildings and on the letter heads of different federal

organizations would be in Sanskrit, and (4) a citizen of India would be able

to make representations to the Government in Sanskrit.

 

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

belonged to all of the Indian people, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and

others, because their forefathers had helped to build it. Subsequent

conversion to another religion could not deprive them of this heritage; any

more than the Greeks, after their conversion to Christianity, could have

ceased to feel proud of their achievements of their ancestors (Nehru 1946:

343). Considered the pioneer of Indian secularism, Nehru wrote:

 

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

is her finest heritage, I would answer unhesitatingly - it is the Sanskrit

language. This is a magnificent inheritance, and so long as it endures and

influences the life of our people, so long the basic genius of the people of

India will continue...India built up a magnificent language, Sanskrit, and

through this language, and its art and architecture, it sent its vibrant

message to far away countries.

 

Such thinking survives in many segments of India's intelligentsia today. In

a verdict by the Supreme Court of India on the offering of Sanskrit as an

option in the schools operated by Central Board of Secondary Education, the

Honorable Judges quoted Nehru, and also drew attention to the "New policy

directives on National Ed

 

continued

 

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