Geopolitics and Sanskrit Phobia by DR Rajiv Malhotra

Overview
This paper discusses the historical and contemporary relationship between geopolitics and
Sanskrit, and consists of the following sections:
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
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
Interactions among different regions of Asia helped to develop and exchange this panAsian Sanskriti. Numerous examples involving India, Southeast Asia and China are given.
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.
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.
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
Circulated in India's interest by www.satishankar.com
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 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. 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 MonierWilliams 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 topdown 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.
ii.
the downward spread of cultural elements that are contained in Sanskrit into localized
cultural units represented by local languages, and
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:
i.
Spiritual, artistic, scientific and ritual lingua franca across vast regions of Asia, and
ii.
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 Modern 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. 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 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 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)
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 Indias prestigious centers of learning to transfer knowhow 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 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 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 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).
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 NavagrahaSiddhanta 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. RdvanaKumara 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 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
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 a mutually nourishing form of Sanskritisation that made huge impacts on the
intellectual and cultural development of India, China, Japan, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, presentday 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 new major 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 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.)
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:
Those 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, HistoricalComparative 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 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 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 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 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 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:
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
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 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 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
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 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
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 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 of
films 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 of 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 of power, 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.
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 of 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 per se. 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 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 enemy who 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 to create 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.
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 been empires 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, neoBrahmanical 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 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 reaction symbolized 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 malefemale 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 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 accomplices, is Gramscis theory that the vernaculars are written down when the
people regain importance (1991: 168). This is, unfortunately, untrue for both Europe itself and
India. The history of the relationship between Sanskrit and the non-Hindu, non-elite populace
suggests many positive interrelationships which Sanskrit phobics simply ignore. For example:
Lele shares in the widely held belief that the emergence of regional languages in India was due
to bhaktas who mostly came from the marginalized castes. But this is simply untrue. In
Karnataka, for example, old Kannada literature was courtly, was suffused with Sanskrit, and was
unintelligible to those ignorant of Sanskrit. Similarly many Tamil kings, poets and scholars of all
castes, Jains and Hindus, appear to have been fluent in Sanskrit as well as Tamil, and this does
not seem to have inhibited the development of Tamil in the least, but benefited both.
In the north, some of the earliest regional-language texts were composed by courtly (elitist)
Muslims (e.g. verses of Masud Sad Salman, ca. 1100, of the Yamini Kingdom of Lahore). The
relationships between language, literature, and social power cannot be analyzed by any simple
formula transferred from Europe, as Lele does in order to interpret Indian contemporary
politics using Sanskrit as the whipping boy (Pollock 1996: 244-245).
Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, writing in the first decade of the nineteenth century about Bengal,
observed, The first rudiments of education are usually givenunder the tuition of teachers
called Gurus, who may be of any caste or religion.
According to William Adam, there were more than 100,000 vernacular indigenous schools for
the indigent classes in Bengal and Bihar in 1835. This averaged a school for every sixty-three
children of school-going age (cited in Acharya 1996: 105, 99). In fact, colonial scholars sent to
study Indias education system remarked that native education was often more widespread
than in England and that it included lower caste students.
While the genealogical account found in many inscriptions is in Sanskrit, the business portion
(i.e. details of the land grant etc) are in the regional language. This is an interesting indicator of
bilingualism.
The importance of Sanskrit given in Jainism and Buddhism which have always been against
caste hierarchies undermines the claim that Sanskrit was a Hindu/Brahmin hegemonic
instrument. For example:
Paul Dundas observes that Jains of Western India produced, from about thirteenth century
onwards, an extensive literature of the types of narratives, chronicles, and biographies in a style
that has been called Jain Sanskrit (Dundas 1996: 137). As the lingua franca of shastra, and
general literary culture, Jains could enthusiastically utilize Sanskrit without any danger of
compromising their sectarian identity and socio-religious values.
In the days of Buddhists studies in China, when Indian Sanskrit scholars were translating
Buddhist texts into Chinese with the help of boards of local scholars, there existed a school of
Sanskrit studies in China. Clearly, this was not intended for the purposes of any Brahmin
hegemony in China.
Jan Houben draws our attention to the fact that testimonies of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims show
that Sanskrit was widely used, not only in a great number of texts but apparently also in
discussions. However, he laments that the background and precise circumstances of the shift of
the Buddhist and Jain to Sanskrit and its importance for the development of Sanskrit as a
lingua franca at least in the sphere of intellectual and religious discussion have not yet
received sufficient attention (Houben 1996: 176).
At the meetings of the Constituent Assembly (1946-1949) members who were not Sanskritists,
nor Brahmins, nor Hindus, moved an amendment to make Sanskrit the national language of
India. Sponsors included Dr Ambedkar and Professor Naziruddin Ahmad. Standing up in the
Constituent Assembly, Professor Ahmad declared:
I offer you a language which is the grandest and the greatest, and it is impartially difficult,
equally difficult for all to learn.
This stance certainly unsettles the presumption that Sanskrit is a language of the wily Brahmins
and other ruling elites who have been using it for centuries to dominate the masses.
Pollock feels the need to rethink received accounts that imagine a resurgence of Brahmanism
leading to a re-assertion of Sanskrit as the language of literature and administration after the
Maurya period (Norman 1988, 17-18; Kulke & Rothermund 1990, 85). Pollock instead suggests
the possibility that a new cultural formation, a Sanskrit cosmopolis, was created and which
continued until 1300 (Pollock 1996, 207).
Pollock persuasively argues that the prominence of Prakrit in inscriptional discourse does not
represent ignorance or rejection of Sanskrit. Such a claim is based on the assumption that there
was some type of invariable co-relation between Prakrit and Buddhism/Jainism and Sanskrit
and Brahmanism. The available epigraphic evidence suggests, as Pollock affirms, that transregional use of Sanskrit for public political texts was instituted in South India by no specific
event of political or religious revolution. A uniform idiom and aesthetics of politics,
homogenous in diction, form, and theme characterizes all of India (Pollock 1996, 216-217).
When vernacular languages were becoming popular among the masses, Sanskrit became the
language of communication among them.
Sanskrit was appreciated by some of the Muslim rulers of India who patronized it, and, in some
cases (as in Bengal and Gujarat), had their epigraphic records inscribed in Sanskrit. It was the
scientific and secular aspect of Sanskrit that made the Arabs welcome Indian scholars to
Baghdad to discourse on sciences and to translate books in these subjects into Arabic.
A large mass of literature in Sanskrit was not produced by any particular community. Several
instances can be quoted of non-Brahmin and non-Hindu authors who have made significant
contribution to Sanskrit literature. In Karnataka, 300 Sanskrit schools are nowadays being run
by non-Brahmins.
Kapil Kapoor explains the non sectarian importance of Sanskrit as a major container of Indian
civilization and national identity:
By abandoningSanskrit tradition, we have become passive, uncritical recipients of Western
theories and modelsHad the classical thought enshrined in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit texts and
some of it preserved as adaptation in Old Tamil texts been made a part of the mainstream
education it would have enabled the educated Indian to interact with the west on a level
ground. This tradition has attested texts and thinkers in a wide range of disciplines philosophy,
grammar, poetics, prosody, astronomy, architecture, mathematics, medicine, atmospheric
sciences, sociology / ethics (dharmasastra), chemistry, physics, agriculture, economics and
commerce, music, botany and zoology, weaponry and art of warfare, logic, education,
metallurgy. The texts of these disciplines not only make statements about the respective
domains of knowledge but also enshrine the empirical wisdom gathered by our society over
centuries in these spheres. All this knowledge has been marginalized by and excluded from the
mainstream education system. Efforts to incorporate it or teach it have been politically opposed
and
condemned
as
revivalism.
The table below summaries the main Sanskrit Phobic arguments and rejoinders to them:
Sanskrit Phobic Arguments
There has been no connection
between Sanskrit and Prakrit
(and/or other South Asian
vernacular languages).
Responses
Linguistic evidence suggests that Sanskrit is related to
Prakrit languages and that exchanges occurred in both
directions.
Sanskrit Phobic Arguments
Responses
Sanskrit has been the instrument

of creating a civilization built on
Brahmanical hegemony and
domination of the subaltern.
This is missionary/colonial lens imposing Western social

models to a very different Indian social structure and
denies the vital role of Sanskrit in shaping and fulfilling,
thriving and vibrant culture that benefited many.
The depth and breadth of Sanskrit literature covers

Sanskrit is only a language of rites
many non-religious disciplines. Besides, the rites and
and rituals that are devoid of
rituals are often deeply poetic and reflect a plurality of
philosophical merit.
philosophies of life.
Sanskrit does not have the

expressive spirit and temper of
science and technology.
The depth and breadth of Sanskrit thought encompasses

many scientific and technical fields such as mathematics
and metallurgy. Abstract thought, open inquiry and logic
are key hallmarks of Sanskrit learning.
Sanskrit has no value to nonHindu traditions. It would

compromise secularism.
Numerous Jain and Buddhist scriptures are composed in

Sanskrit. Sikh scholars went to Benares to learn Sanskrit.
As a dead language, Sanskrit has

no use to world culture.
Sanskrit, just as it contributed to Western thought, has

the potential to contribute towards a renaissance of
thought in Southeast Asia and India.
Sanskrit studies have been pursued (whether within or outside India) in isolation from the true
spirit of Sanskrit and Indians. Arvind Sharma has a provocative question: What would have
Sanskrit studies abroad looked like if they had originated in India and gone abroad, instead of
originating abroad and then being adopted by the Indians?
The House Indians:
To interpret the contemporary Indian intellectual fashion of selling out to the West, let us
examine the framework established by Malcolm X in his analysis of a segment of AfricanAmericans whom he labeled, house Negro. Malcolm X said:
There were two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house
Negroes they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good cause
they ate his food what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near
the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give
their life to save the masters house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the
master said, We got a good house here, the house Negro would say, Yeah, we got a good
house here. Whenever the master said we, he said we. Thats how you can tell a house
Negro.
If the masters house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out
than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, Whats the matter,
boss, we sick? We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified
with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, Lets run away, lets escape, lets
separate, the house Negro would look at you and say, Man, you crazy. What you mean,
separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this?
Where can I eat better food than this? That was that house Negro. In those days he was called
a house nigger. And thats what we call him today, because weve still got some house niggers
running around here.
This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. Hell pay three times as
much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about Im the only Negro
out here. Im the only one on my job. Im the only one in this school. Youre nothing but a
house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, Lets separate, you say the
same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. What you mean, separate? From
America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?
Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in
check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms,
20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us
passiveTo keep you from fighting back, he [the white man] gets these old religious Uncle Toms
to teach you and me
In an analogous fashion, and entirely independently of Malcolm X, Kapil Kapoor analyzes the
Anglicized and now Americanized Indian intellectuals internalization of Western categories to
form what they call Indian literary criticism. He writes:
The Indian literary criticism has in fact been marked by severe limitations. It has, all in all, been
derivative and backward. Before PL-480, it was Anglo- and after PL 480 it is a footnote to the
Anglo-American school even the European frameworks filter through English translations,
commentaries and Anglo-American practices. Besides, it has always been backward there is
always a time lag between its enunciation in the west and its emulation here. Hence, the
derisive comment about Indian literary criticism quoted by Prof. Narasimhaiah ji You mean
those
carbon
copies
of
Mathiessen,
Blackmur
and
Leavis?
And [Indian literary criticism]has been seasonal. Every successive passing fashion in the AngloAmerican school has been dutifully applied to the Indian literary reality Leavisian Moral, New
Criticism, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Semiotics and Deconstruction, Postmodernism,
Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Marxist, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Stylistics. Each
successive framework has been found to be a perfect fit for the malleable Indian reality, without
any modification or adaptation! This is expressive of what we said above the mental
subordination of the Indian critical mind to the western academy, the uncritical reception of
western theory, the data theory / the recipient-donor relationship into which the post-1947
mind has so willingly contracted. As a result of this, all the modern Indian languages, including
Indian English have become recipient language Sanskrit is the only donor language, has
always been and continues to be. The displacement from what has been and is a donor tradition
amounts to promoted de-intellectualization (de-culturization, if you please).
The body of literature it addresses is Metro. There is metro literature written under the
influence of, and often imitating, both the western (Anglo-American) societal problematic as
themes and there is the metro theory that both explains it and is validated by this body of
literature. Its audience is urban (English) educated elite. There are no western readers for this as
the West is not interested in Indian language literatures or in the Indian paraphrase or redaction
of their theories. (Whatever limited but profitable western audience is there is of readers
interested in being told by Indias colonized minds about Indias colonized mind!)
As in the case of house Negroes, these house Indians enjoy great privilege from Western
institutions either directly or indirectly. Kapoor continues his description of these self-hating
Indians:
The educated Indian, particularly the Hindu, suffers from such a deep loss of self respect that he
is unwilling to be recognized as such. He feels, in fact, deeply threatened by any surfacing or
manifestation of the identity that he has worked so hard to, and has been trained to reject. But
it lies somewhere in his psyche as an unhappy tale, as something that is best forgotten. It is
these people wearing various garbs liberal, left, secular, modern who oppose, more often
than not from sheer ignorance, any attempt to introduce Indian traditions of thought in the
mainstream education system a classic case of self-hate taking the form of mother-hate!
I regularly come across such house Indians in the US academic study of India. When the masters
say, jump, the house Indian asks, how high sir?
VII. Sanskriti and the Clash of Civilizations
Contrary to the wishful thinking of postmodernist literary theories and trends in pop culture,
the competition among major civilizations is intensifying. Sanskrit phobia must be examined in
the broader context of geopolitics today and not in the narrower context of local Indian
sociopolitics only. Each of the main three contenders in the clash of civilizations USA, China
and Islam deploys its own culture as a form of social and political capital, and each has a
unique language in which its civilization is rooted.
There are pragmatic reasons behind the intensifying clash of civilizations, and ideology may
often be a weapon rather than the underlying cause: Only one billion out of the six billion
people in the world today live at Western levels of consumption, but by mid century most of
the ten billion people (projected population level by mid century) will mimic Western
consumerist lifestyles, and this will further pressure the environment, resources, capital and
labor markets.
This global competition is deploying collective assets, such as identities, cultural capital and soft
power. France, USA, UK, China, Arabia, Japan, etc. each wear their respective civilizations with
great pride, and use it as a vehicle in international diplomacy, foreign soft power and cultural
capital.
Every ancient civilization has had its social abuses, but the proud cultures named above do not
throw out the baby with the bathwater, i.e. they each insist on reforming their tradition
internally rather than demonizing it in world forums to gain legitimacy in foreign eyes or
abandoning it in the name of progress.
The West (especially America), China and Pan-Islam are, therefore, each asserting themselves in
this inter-civilizational competition for intellectual market share, projecting with pride their
respective rich heritages which include languages. For instance, the rapid globalization of
English language culture has privileged Western paradigms that are implicitly embedded in its
literature and thought:
Despite the numerical expansion of English speaking people in non-Western countries, the
certification and legitimization of English and of its modern thought are controlled by standards
established by Western institutions.
These control mechanisms are diverse: prestigious awards, elitist institutional affiliations, jobs,
financial grants, foreign travel, access to media channels, etc.
The intellectual capital includes Eurocentric historiography, literature, philosophy, sociology,
human rights theories, art history, and school curricula.
The institutional backbone of the West that propagates this superiority includes government
agencies, multinational religious institutions, academic establishments and private funding
agencies.
In this new inter-civilizational competition, everyone is equally invited to play; however, the
rules, referees and rewards are often controlled by a few.
In some instances, the dominant culture also selects and props up proxies to represent the
third world in a fashion acceptable to the dominant religious and secular ideologies of the
West.
If one were to apply this to a hypothetical scenario of Western intervention in China, the
components might be as follows (not necessarily in this sequence):
Attack on Chinas human rights

Demands for internal reforms
Critiques of Mandarin as hegemonic
Denigration of Chinese culture and the hierarchies embedded in Confucianism as the basis of
Chinas human rights abuses.
Social re-engineering of minority groups to promote separatism
That this trajectory is not currently in vogue in the Western academy is an indicator of Chinas
strength as a geopolitical force. But let us not forget that the linking of Chinas traditional
culture with backwardness and the scapegoating of Confucianism as anti-progress and
promoting inequality, led Chinese patriots using imported Western Marxism to the horrors of
the Cultural Revolution and the murder of millions of innocents. There are many ways for Asian
cultures to be taught to hate themselves, but the consequences are always the same
genocide and cultural devastation.
Unfortunately, Indias domestic relationship with its Sanskrit-based heritage is mixed up in

petty short sighted politics:
Sanskrit phobia has become a weapon for identity based vote banking, often under the guise of
imported ideologies and funding for human rights.
Indias social schisms, cleavages and centrifugal forces have been exacerbated by interventions
from the three global civilizational powers the West, Pan-Islam and China each of which has
made heavy investments in Indias intellectuals, media, NGOs (Non-Governmental
Organizations) and other mechanisms of influence.
While powerful top down economic forces (such as foreign capital in business, infrastructure
development and export growth) are integrating India, simultaneously, other sociopolitical
forces are potentially trying to downgrade Indias geopolitical influence by breaking apart its
social fabric and identity at the grass roots.
Such fragmentation has energized the anti-Sanskrit movement.
VIII. Leveling the Civilizational Playing Field
Kapil Kapoor explains that literary theories embed culture-specific thinking and experience and
that the trendy Indian intellectual application of Western theories to Indian culture is
dangerous:
Theories are culture specific they are codes of a communitys expectations from the art form /
forms and therefore more adequately account for that communitys response to the artifacts.
Cultural specificity of theories can therefore be problematic if the theories of one culture are
applied uncritically to the empirical reality of another culture. There are the Indian habits of
mind and there are the western habits of mind nurtured over time by the specificity of the
communitys experience and these may differ crucially. It is these habits of mind that are
imbricated deeply in the respective conceptual frameworks. The western linearity of time and
thought with its in-built evolutionary imperative that is implicit in such structures as pre-X-post
A (pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial) contrasts sharply with the Indian schema of cyclic and
simultaneity. Similarly, the western binarism and the search for certainty differs from the eitheror/both schema and the uncertainty schema of the Indian mind. The list is long the teleological
anxiety, the apocalyptic vision, the wait for the millennium, the redeemer expectation, the
anthropological centrism, the conception of man as a sinner, a vengeful God, an ethics
contingent on a personal God all these western constructs offer conceptual opposition to the
Indian habits of mind, at least to the non-Hebraic habits of mindThe world-view / philosophy
of a culture cannot be ignored in any discussion of an appropriate aesthetic. The Indian worldview therefore has to be taken into account. The critics of an Indian aesthetics rooted in Indian
philosophy reduce Indian philosophy to simple idealism and ignore the tremendous inner
differentiation
and
range
of
Indian
philosophical
thinking
As global competition becomes increasingly knowledge based, it becomes important for each
civilization to excavate its intellectual assets that lie embedded within its non-translatable
categories, frameworks and literature.
What will be the future of the Sanskrit-based Indic and pan-Asian civilization in this emerging
global theater?
This issue has great relevance to many Asian nations, including Thailand, which regard Sanskrit
with the same respect with which Westerners regard Latin and Greek.
India and Southeast Asia share this magnificent ancient, yet modern and postmodern,
civilization. It deserves to be nurtured and presented to the world on par with the other
civilizations competing for global market share, i.e. civilizations that are based on European
thought, Chinese thought, and Arabic-Persian thought.
India and other countries with Sanskrit based cultures should form joint projects to reinvigorate
this discipline. Some principles to consider are the following:
European Christians created a great Renaissance from heathen Greek and Latin texts which led
them eventually to establish cultural equations with many other ancient languages and develop
modern philology. South and Southeast Asians must also look at their own classical heritage for
creative solutions while at the same time assimilating Western thought.
There must be parity between the positioning of Sanskrit and other major classical languages:
India and Southeast Asia should give Sanskrit a status comparable to the status given to Latin by
the West, Arabic by the Arabs, Persian by Iran, and Mandarin by China.
Objective, multi-disciplinary scholarly efforts must be funded and undertaken to engage and
challenge biased scholarship based on trendy theories of suppression of vernaculars and
oppression of marginalized people by Sanskrit.
Dalits and other under privileged Indic peoples should be encouraged to study Sanskrit as a
possible path to self re-discovery, and should be promoted as leaders of learning.
Asian countries should sponsor the study and teaching of the history of Asia that would be less
tainted by Eurocentrism than is the case today.
Freudian and other trendy theories to analyze Sanskrit texts should not get privileged over
indigenous interpretations, to restore balance and respect for the tradition as is the norm for
other classical languages.
Over 25 million Westerners (including almost 18 million Americans) are yoga enthusiasts.
Sanskrit inhabits their bodies as a result of practices such as mantra, asanas, chakras, prana,
kundalini etc. all terms that cannot be translated into other languages because they are
discoveries of embodied states unknown to most other cultures. This latest Sanskritization of
the inner world could expand to over 100 million Westerners in the next ten years. Indian
authorities should see this as a form of cultural capital, and Indians should reclaim this heritage
rather than allowing others to appropriate and remap it into Christian Yoga, Kabala Yoga,
Islamic Yoga, Western science, etc.
There should be a fresh challenge the colonial divide-and-rule scholarship that has created
tensions between Buddhism and Hinduism. For instance,
Challenge the Orientalist theory that Buddhism was eradicated in India by Hinduism
Challenge the exaggeration of disconnects between Hinduism and Buddhism
The recent archeological findings in Raipur show once again that Shaivism, Vaishnavism,
Buddhism
and
Jainism
thrived
peacefully
together,
under
Hindu
rulers.
(See:http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050621/asp/frontpage/story_4896126.asp)
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Published: 2005
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author.
Jagrit Bharat is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any
information on this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts
or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Jagrit Bharat and Jagrit Bharat
does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.
Endnotes
(1) Paninis thought flowed over to Structuralism via Saussures students. This is discussed in
the following. (1) Singh, Prem. 1992. Rethinking history of linguistics: Saussure and the India
Connection. In Language and Text: A Kelkar Festschrift. Ed. by R. N. Srivastava. Delhi: Kalinga
Publishers. Pages 43-51. Also, (2) Ivanov, Vyacheslav V. 1974. Growth of the Theoretical
Framework of Modern Poetics. In Current Trends in Linguistics edited by T. A. Sebeok. Vol.
12. The Hague: Mouton. Pages 835 61.
(2) Also see Kunjunni Raja, Indian Theories of Meaning (Adyar, Madras). He is the topmost
scholar in this.
Acknowledgments
Many scholars have contributed to this paper, most notably Dr. Shrinivas Tilak, Jay Patel and
Aditi Banerjee.
An earlier version of this paper was presented as the opening plenary at the International
Conference on Sanskrit in Asia: Unity in Diversity, held in Bangkok in June, 2005, sponsored by
The Infinity Foundation and organized by Silpakorn University, Thailand, with Her Royal
Highness the Crown Princess of Thailand as its chief patron. The earlier paper is published in the
Sanskrit Centre Journal, Silpakorn University, Volume 1, 2005. Feedback received at that event
has further helped to shape the final version.
References
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Arun Bhattacharjee, Greater India. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Private Limited, 1981,
New Delhi
Acharya, Poromesh. 1996. Indigenous education and Brahminical hegemony in Bengal. In The
Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics
edited by Nigel Crook, 98-118, Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Bhate, Saroja. 1996. Position of Sanskrit in public education and scientific research in Modern
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Overview

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absolutely permeable to the God who chose them (Olender: 109-110).

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5: Sanskrit has no value to non-Hindu traditions. It would compromise secularism.

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Sanskrit Phobic Arguments

Sanskrit has been the instrument

This is missionary/colonial lens imposing Western social

The depth and breadth of Sanskrit literature covers

Sanskrit does not have the

The depth and breadth of Sanskrit thought encompasses

Sanskrit has no value to nonHindu traditions. It would

Numerous Jain and Buddhist scriptures are composed in

As a dead language, Sanskrit has

Sanskrit, just as it contributed to Western thought, has

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Attack on Chinas human rights

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Unfortunately, Indias domestic relationship with its Sanskrit-based heritage is mixed up in

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