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The story of my Sanskrit

 ANANYA VAJPEYI 

OPINION » LEAD 

 August 16, 2014 

Updated: August 16, 2014 10:17 IST

 Sanskrit must be taken back from the clutches of Hindu supremacists, bigots, believersin brahmin exclusivity, misogynists, Islamophobes and a variety of other wrong-headed characters on the right, whose colossal ambition to control India’s vastintellectual legacy is only matched by their abysmal ignorance of what it means andhow it works

 An article in this paper on July 30 revealed that Dina Nath Batra, head of the ShikshaBachao Andolan Samiti, had formed a “Non-Governmental Education Commission”(NGEC) to recommend ways to “Indianise” education. I had encountered Mr. Batra’snotions about education during a campaign I was involved with in February and Marchthis year, to keep the American scholar Wendy Doniger’s books about Hindus andHinduism in print. His litigious threats had forced Penguin India to withdraw anddestroy a volume by Prof. Doniger, and this was even before the national electioninstalled the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the ruling party in Delhi.

Ever since Mr. Narendra Modi’s government has come to power, Mr. Batra has becomemore active, zealous and confrontational in stating his views about Indian history,Hindu religion, and what ought to qualify as appropriate content in schoolbooks andsyllabi not only in his native Gujarat but in educational institutions all over the country.He is backed up by a vast governmental machinery, by the fact that Mr. Modi himselfhas penned prefatory materials to his various books, and of course by the RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which he has been a member and an ideologue for overseveral decades.

 Anything but ordinary  

It’s unclear what the status or authority of Mr. Batra’s proposed NGEC is to be, but I wasstruck by the mention of one of my former teachers as a potential member of thiscommission. Seeing the name of Prof. Kapil Kapoor took me back to my days as an M.A.student in English and Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Prof. Kapoorfirst introduced me and my classmates to traditions of literature, language philosophy,

literary analysis, poetics, semiotics, grammar and aesthetics in Sanskrit. Many of us went on to write doctoral dissertations about these subjects, deviating from British, American and postcolonial literature, and the European literary and critical theory thatconstituted the bulk of our coursework.

Prof. Kapoor ended up becoming dean and rector, and later, during the NationalDemocratic Alliance (NDA) regime, setting up the Centre for Sanskrit Studies at JNU.He and I lost touch, partly because I went away overseas and partly because of our

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political disagreements that were becoming increasingly apparent. But encounters withother scholars like the philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti, the Panini expert GeorgeCardona, and the Sanskritist, and eventually my doctoral supervisor, Sheldon Pollockmade me decide to pursue more seriously the path that I had glimpsed in Prof. Kapoor’sclassroom: I took up the study of Sanskrit for real.

One of the reasons this did not seem outlandish to me was because my father is a poetand writer in Hindi, and I had been exposed to Indian literary and intellectual traditionsat home from a very young age. Along the way I had studied Romance languages as well,so that adding Sanskrit to the repertoire did not feel at all counter-intuitive. At Oxford, I wrote an M.Phil thesis about how the study of Sanskrit had shaped the ideas ofFerdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics in Europe. But after that, whenI entered the South Asian Languages and Civilizations doctoral program at theUniversity of Chicago, I did not properly realise what I had signed up for.

Learning philology and Indology at Chicago was intensely challenging, yet also

proportionately gratifying. We had the best scholars of South Asian studies in the worldfor our teachers. Along with a small group of classmates, most of whom are professorsnow in America’s top universities, I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours at theRegenstein Library, painstakingly unpacking sutras, verses, commentaries andarguments in a range of Sanskrit texts, increasingly difficult as we moved to moreadvanced levels.

Encountering prejudice 

It’s hard to describe the peculiar pain and pleasure of this language, so strict are itsformal rules, so complex the ideas it allows one to formulate, express and analyse.Sanskrit enables thought at a level distinct from ordinary thinking in the languages ofeveryday life. This is not to say that one cannot have a perfectly ordinary conversation inspoken Sanskrit: one can, of course, and in Sanskrit pedagogical environments, this isnormal. But most of the vast literature available in this amazing language is specialised,technical and anything but ordinary. D. Venkat Rao estimates that some 30 million textsin various forms exist in Sanskrit at this time, the largest textual corpus of any extanthuman language.

Half of my long years as a doctoral student were spent away from Chicago, in India. Formy dissertation, I read a small body of late medieval Sanskrit dharmashastra works.These were texts of a legal and normative nature that were specifically aboutshudra-dharma: the rituals, duties and constraints associated with shudras, the social categorythat constitutes the fourth stratum of the orthodox brahminical fourfold varna-vyavastha, what we now normally designate as the “caste system.” I read with panditsand professors, at mathas, Sanskrit colleges, Oriental institutes and Sanskritdepartments within regular universities, in places like Mysore, Bangalore and Pune. Ieven studied Kannada and Marathi to ease my passage.

Nothing in my experience or education up to that time had prepared me for the sheer wall of prejudice that blocked the access of someone like me to the particular aspects of

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the history, ideology and politics of Sanskrit that I was interested in. Here I was— female, a north Indian in south India, a student enrolled at a foreign university, a Hindi-speaker, and only tenuously and dubiously of a caste that pandits considered acceptable.My teachers and I struggled to communicate, but in the end, most things were lost intranslation. A well-known Sanskrit professor in Maharashtra told me that only

“perverted women” became scholars, a pronouncement that brought several months ofour readings to an abrupt close one afternoon, and ensured I never again returned tomeet him.

The caste hierarchy and sexism, the inequality and misogyny that the social worlds ofSanskrit engender and proliferate are shocking to a modern sensibility. For a decade, myteachers in India and abroad had taught, tended, scolded and moulded me like theirown child. Now I was confronted with a shrinking community of Sanskrit scholars left ina few places in India. They felt embattled inside collapsing institutions that had no spacefor their learning, demeaned by democratic politics and secular public life thatstigmatised their orthodox beliefs, threatened by gender equality that resisted thepatriarchy inherent in their practices, and humiliated by their sheer marginality in theeconomy of new knowledge systems, communication technologies and political commonsense. They were bitter and resentful, and the occasional interloper like me— that toosomeone with an obviously critical agenda — had to face the brunt of their frustration.

 Another journey  

 After about three years of fighting a losing battle, I decided to make what I could ofthe dharmashastramaterials on my own. The dissertation got completed, and later, when I was writing my first book on an unrelated subject, I returned with joy andpleasure to the classics of Sanskrit literature, like Kalidasa’s long poem, the“ Meghaduta,” sections of the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and theBhagavad Gita. In the safe cocoon of another great American institution, this timeHarvard University’s Widener Library, I could bracket for a few years the dark side ofSanskrit, its complicity with the power dynamics of caste and gender that make modernIndia the most confounding contradiction of on-paper political equality and lived socialinequality.

But now that India is ruled by the Hindu nationalist government of Mr. Modi, withgrandiose and historically baseless announcements being made all the time by the likesof Mr. Batra, it seems the time has come to deal with everything that is wrong withSanskrit, yet again. A language is only a means to an end. Sanskrit is a powerful tool, but whether its uses are salutary or destructive depends on whose hands it happens to fall

into. Its rigour and beauty are undeniable; so are its rigidity and elitism, in certaincircumstances.

My former professor, Kapil Kapoor, was knowledgeable and passionate about Sanskrit, which is what made him such a memorable teacher. I cannot believe that he wouldendorse the ridiculous claims made by some Hindutva spokespersons that there wereairplanes and cars in ancient India, and that the Vedic culture invented stem cellresearch. One of the things I remember about him most vividly was his earthy sense of

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humour. “If Panini was at Takshila,” he often joked, “that probably means he was aPunjabi, like me.” We would all laugh, transported for a moment to the vanishedclassrooms of remote antiquity, when one of the most astonishing works of systematicknowledge of all-time, Panini’s Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi , was probablycomposed somewhere on the plains of north-western Punjab.

It’s up to liberal, secular, egalitarian, enlightened and progressive sections of our societyto preserve and protect this unique civilisational resource. Kapil Kapoor opened a window for his students, from where they could see a breathtaking vista of India’s past,filled with traditions of philosophy, religion and literature unparalleled in almost anyother language. Scholarship like that of Sheldon Pollock and his colleagues helps us tounderstand the history, the power, the circulation and the importance of Sanskritknowledge systems in the pre-modern world, not just in India but across Asia. We learnto really read texts, to carefully unpack their meaning in complex historical contexts ofproduction and reception, rather than merely brandish them as false tokens of identityand imagined superiority in our own times.

Sanskrit must be taken back from the clutches of Hindu supremacists, bigots, believersin brahmin exclusivity, misogynists, Islamophobes and a variety of other wrong-headedcharacters on the right, whose colossal ambition to control India’s vast intellectuallegacy is only matched by their abysmal ignorance of what it means and how it works.

(Ananya Vajpeyi is the author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, HUP,

2012. E-mail: vajpeyi@csds.in )