Cambridge closes door on Sanskrit, Hindi

[Guest guest]

TIMES OF INDIA

 

LONDON: Cambridge has finally closed the door on Sanskrit as a hallowed subject of undergraduate study, nearly one-and-a-half centuries after it first established a chair in the 3,000-year-old language. The Times of India sought – and received - confirmation of the university's decision within hours of Cambridge honouring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a doctor of law degree, in what some scholars believe to be the most cynical form of "tactless academic marketing".

 

On Thursday, Dr Gordon Johnson, Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge confirmed that "Sanskrit and Hindi will no longer be offered to undergraduates within the Oriental Studies Tripos". But Johnson insisted that "South Asian Studies are thriving at the University of Cambridge and an agreed plan for their expansion is underway. Students continue to study specialist papers with a South Asian content in History, Geography, Economics, Social and Political Sciences, Social Anthropology, Divinity and Archaeology ".

 

Even so, Dr John Smith, reader in Sanskrit at Cambridge, told TOI that it is "not a trivial decision...this is a decision about letting the subject wither on the vine. It is an administrative decision but should actually have been an academic one".

 

Smith, who has taught Sanskrit to Cambridge undergraduates for 22 years said the decision was "tactless" in its timing and skewed in its objectives. "They are doing this at a point of time when they are honouring Manmohan Singh, soliciting benefactions from wealthy Indian businessmen and seeking students from South Asia," he said. He said he had no new undergraduate students seeking to learn Sanskrit in this academic year, which began a week ago.

 

Smith added with unconcealed anger at Cambridge and other Western universities' increasing propensity to run themselves as businesses that employ MBA-speak: "There are some subjects simply worth doing. This is a language that has been going 3,000 years and hasn't stopped yet. You cannot understand the culture of the Indian sub-continent and the world outside it without learning Sanskrit".

 

As expected of a Sanskrit scholar, Smith's fulminations are thought to be in line with the well-known Sanskrit proverb that enjoins one to think about the effect of disasters before they actually occur because it is not appropriate to start digging a well when the house is on fire.

 

The tradition of teaching Sanskrit in England – from undergraduate to higher level goes back to 1831, when the first chair in Sanskrit - the Boden - was set up at Oxford.

 

Smith, who counts amongst his predecessors such internationally-acclaimed Sanskrit scholars such as John Brough and Harold Bailey, said that when he retires and his Sanskrit-scholar colleague does as well, a dozen years from now, Cambridge may be left with no one to teach this liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism and Janinism. The effect on Sanskrit scholarship will be marked, he warned, because of the useful joint initiatives British Sanskrit scholars are able to work through with their counterparts in India.

 

"I was able to put the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune's criticial edition of the Mahabharat on the web in 1999," said Smith, "but all this may soon stop".

 

To many, the Cambridge decision is an incontrovertible sign of the times and an acknowledgement that most undergraduate Indian Studies courses at major European universities have a single-figure intake.

 

Smith admits the logic of this. Sanskrit is a small subject, he says, "last year – the last to take undergraduate Sanskrit students – we had two".

 

But he argues that universities and academics need to recognise their place in the world. "We are not here to sell ourselves, but to be scholars".

 

In a careful omission of the Sanskrit intake, Johnson said "the number of graduate students doing research on a South Asian subject remains high, at between 80 and 90 at any one time (overall)".

 

By all accounts, many see the university's decision to withdraw Sanskrit from its Indian Studies undergraduate course as part of a wider plan to re-deploy Cambridge's increasingly resource-starved academic troops in other areas, notably East and West Asia and Arabic studies.

 

But in a broad hint to wealthy British Indian, corporate Indian and official Indian entities, Cambridge 's Sanskrit scholars say it may be time to move to the Japanese model of academia. Japanese, another low-intake 'special interest' subject like Sanskrit, is thought to be safe from cut-backs and cut-offs because it has a multitude of endowed posts.

 

But Cambridge University insisted South Asian studies were "set to expand significantly in the near future at Cambridge, with the filling of two lectureships in modern South Asian history. The Centre of South Asian Studies is developing a new MPhil course, to extend its reach within the University and to develop further its outreach work within the UK, south and south-east Asia."

 

Interestingly, Indologists said the Cambridge decision may be consistent with Britain's initial reluctance to realise the importance of teaching Sanskrit at all. They said that the early history of Sanskrit studies in Britain contrasted sharply with that on the continent with the first European chair of Sanskrit founded not in Britain, as might have been expected of the country that had the greatest engagement with India, but in Paris, at the College de France in 1814.

 

Bonn was next to follow France's leadership in initiating the teaching of Sanskrit language and literature, they said.