Spot the H-word

Thanks to Sh Nachiketa Tiwari for spotting this and Sh Kak for emailing it to me.

Although this is a fairly long excerpt from an exchange of emails re. learning Sanskrit, pl. try and read in full. It shows how some western academics tarnish any attempt(s) at learning more about our ancient heritage (including language) with labels such as “fundamentalism” and of course, “Hindutva”.

I have taken out email addresses of  the respondents to protect privacy.

By the way, many of you would remember that learning Sanskrit is now considered to be a “communal” activity.

*** Excerpts from the email exchange ***

Comment by Stella Sandahl:

In the current debate about “spoken Sanskrit” I believe we are talking about two different things. It is one thing when for example a Bengali pandit speaks to Telugu pandit in Sanskrit in order to debate finer points in a text, or a philosophical issue, a literary allusion and so forth. Sanskrit is then their common language, a language of learning, of elegance and wit. And this is quite wonderful.
 
 It is an entirely different matter to try to revive and ‘modernize’ Sanskrit. Lying on a table in our university library I found a typical example of the latter. There were new-fangled “Sanskrit” words for money order, check-out counter, bus station, bank draft – as if one finds these things in classical Sanskrit texts!

**These manuals are quite ridiculous…: I found a sentence like ahaM sevaphalAni khAdAmi which was supposed to mean ‘I eat apples’. First, as far as I know there were no apples in classical India (weren’t they brought in by Babur?), second the word seva is obviously modeled on Hindi seb ‘apple’ from the Persian sib with the same meaning. This is exactly in line with the examples given by Professor Nair: “adya kati iddali bhakshitam?” “adya chayam piitam kim?”, equally ridiculous.  My niece in Delhi once asked to help her with her Sanskrit homework. She had to translate the sentence “Kings live in palaces” into Sanskrit. The word given by the teacher for palace was ‘mahala’ !!!  I tried to convince the little girl that there was no such word in Sanskrit. In vain. The girl said :”teacher says it is mahala”, and that was what it had to be.
 
 It is very sad to se how the ignorant Hindutva forces demean and make the wonderful classical language into something trivial and ridiculous. How do we stop them? How can we rescue Sanskrit from these vandals?

I doubt that the sevaphalAni-eating student in his mahala can read and understand even one line by Kalidasa or Bana or Jayadeva. But he can cut the throat of those who cannot speak his so called Sanskrit. When he is not busy demolishing mosques and raping nuns.

Response by Phillip Maas:

Dear Prof.  Sandahl,
 
I think that we should be careful not to be discriminatory against those who use Sanskrit in a creative, modernist fashion. The use of Sanskrit as a spoken language, whether as standard Sanskrit or as a vulgarized idiom, is not per se a political statement and it does not per se reveal a tendency to approve of or even to commit political violence.

In spite of everything that Sanskrit may symbolize, it remains a language that serves the purpose of expressing thoughts. And the freedom of thought includes, of course, the freedom to choose one’s language.

Response by Adheesh Sathaye

Dear Profs. Hart, Nair, and Sandahl, and colleagues,
 
With all due respect, I find it hard to accept that the construction of neologisms like ‘seva-phala’, ‘iDDali’ or even misuses like ‘mahAla’ are in any way indicative of ‘ignorant Hindutva forces’. It is not at all uncommon  to see vernacular words or forms used within medieval Sanskrit manuscripts, and particularly when the concept does not occur in classical Sanskrit.

…contemporary spoken Sanskrit is quite obviously and self-consciously a simplification of classical Sanskrit, and this has been done in order for the language to be more accessible and appealing to young, twenty-first century students, who WOULD like to express their thoughts about riding the bus, eating apples, using computers, and other modern-day activities. It’s actually quite a fun thing to do.
 
…may I respectfully suggest that the idea that the ancientness of Sanskrit somehow debilitates this language from accepting neologisms, or makes it useless for expressing modern ideas, itself might be construed as an act of intellectual violence on par with ‘cutting throats’, ‘demolishing mosques’, or ‘raping nuns’?

Response by George Hart

…The problem is that spoken “Sanskrit” is incapable of expressing a complex thought — “How many Idlis did you eat today” is not exactly a profound idea.  Real languages are highly complex because they need to be used to express complex ideas.  Sanskrit is no exception.  As Prof. Nair notes, languages such as Malayalam can make use of the entire Sanskrit vocabulary to express thoughts that are extremely complicated (one might also remark that Malayalam, which was a dialect of Tamil 1000 years ago, also retains a huge inherited Dravidian vocabulary).

If people enjoy learning it in a rudimentary way to express simple things, obviously there’s nothing wrong with that.  The problem as I see it lies in the fact that these “Sanskrit” speakers often think that just because they use the language in a rudimentary way, they are somehow connecting with the great intellectual tradition that the language contains.  Or, worse, that they are embodiments of some “Hindu-ness” that is inherent in the language.  Their rudimentary use of the language fosters a kind of arrogance and sense of superiority that is unwarranted….

Saying “How many idlis did you eat today?” in neo-Sanskrit may be fun, but it’s hardly grounds for the sort of overweening pride that such speakers often seem to project.

Response by Ganesan

…the ‘agenda’ of the so called Hindutvavadi is not to ‘demolish mosques or to rape nuns’. With all their obvious mistakes in some of their views they can not be outrightly condemned and they never resort to such demeaning acts.

It is so strange that even after such horrific and barbaric terrorist acts being perpetrated in Kashmir still the Hindutvavadi is condemned for those crimes (‘demolishing mosques or raping nuns’) with which he has been proved subsequently to be not at all associated. !!

Response by Alberto

It is quite amazing how muted the responses have been to Dr. Sandahl’s inflammatory assertions about “spoken Sanskrit.”  I believe Drs. Sathaye and Maas, in cautioning against the linkages of a group of people encouraging the revitalization of a language culture with political violence, have let the vitriolic offense of Stella Sandahl’s initial comments go unaddressed.  Is the Spoken Sanskrit movement really the cause of nuns’ being raped or mosques being destroyed?

While teachers of Sanskrit sit in some corner of North America pontificating about the politics and social life of a place they probably have very little familiarity with on the ground, how much are they doing to support the cause of Sanskrit in India — which they so easily pooh-pooh from a distance when others not to their liking are doing it? 

Is Dr. Sandahl raising funds or offering service to go to India to train people in Sanskrit the “right way,” that is the Orientalist way of controlling knowledge in a scientific, clinical way that leaves all of the emotional and cultural aspects of a linguistic culture to rot?  Are you going to teach Bana and Kalidasa to millions of people in India who have been cut off from their pre-imperialist pasts?  Some of the Spoken Sanskrit groups are also trying to reach people who were traditionally left out of the Sanskrit scene — people of all classes and castes. 

Are the Western guardians of Sanskrit (and their Indian friends) against this?  Do they want Sanskrit to remain a Brahminical enterprise forever?  Sure, Sanskrit may only mean a career for many of you but for many it is still symbolic of a prestige and holds a link to a self-esteem to a large group of people who feel that some of the best things that their part of the world produced were created in that language. 

Why shouldn’t a mass of people get re-introduced to their traditions? Are you against the Jews “revitalizing” a simplified Hebrew — in fifty years, a whole new language population was created? Are you against madrassas teaching modern Arabic?  What about Modern Greek?  And should one let stand Dr. Sandahl’s reductive sense of politics — that everything having to do with spoken Sanskrit is somehow linked with violence. 

If that is the case, what hope is there that Sanskrit will ever be something other than a relic — if people like you are killing any impulses for it to live?  And why does Drs. Hart and Nair get off the hook?  Isn’t Tamil and Malayali Nationalism (Tamilatva and its like all over the country) more to do with mobilizing violence than a group of people speaking Sanskrit?

Also, I am curious, since you mentioned it — are you in favor of missionaries’ repeating that only Jesus or Islam is the way to God and that Shiva and Kali are demons or that Vishnu is a false god?  Because you should wake up: many are saying that!  Where is your umbrage in that?  What about the millions raised in North America by Evangelicals to “save” the heathens — are you as incensed about that as you are about spoken Sanskrit? 

One gets a sense again that non-Muslim and non-Christian Indian (i.e. Hindus) are easy targets for the “conscience-driven” scholars of the West.  It appears more like cowardice than conscience by the selectivity of their anger.  By the way, how do you feel about the actions of the University of Texas professor of Islamic History — do you have any comments about that?

Additional Recommended Reading:

Stray Thoughts on Indology: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 

Related Posts:

Unintended or deliberate? The missing H-word and

The dreaded H-word – excerpts