The story of my Sanskrit

ANANYA VAJPEYI
OPINION LEAD

August 16, 2014

Updated: August 16, 2014 10:17 IST

Sanskrit must be taken back from the clutches of Hindu supremacists, bigots, believers
in brahmin exclusivity, misogynists, Islamophobes and a variety of other wrongheaded characters on the right, whose colossal ambition to control Indias vast
intellectual legacy is only matched by their abysmal ignorance of what it means and
how it works
An article in this paper on July 30 revealed that Dina Nath Batra, head of the Shiksha
Bachao Andolan Samiti, had formed a Non-Governmental Education Commission
(NGEC) to recommend ways to Indianise education. I had encountered Mr. Batras
notions about education during a campaign I was involved with in February and March
this year, to keep the American scholar Wendy Donigers books about Hindus and
Hinduism in print. His litigious threats had forced Penguin India to withdraw and
destroy a volume by Prof. Doniger, and this was even before the national election
installed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the ruling party in Delhi.
Ever since Mr. Narendra Modis government has come to power, Mr. Batra has become
more active, zealous and confrontational in stating his views about Indian history,
Hindu religion, and what ought to qualify as appropriate content in schoolbooks and
syllabi not only in his native Gujarat but in educational institutions all over the country.
He is backed up by a vast governmental machinery, by the fact that Mr. Modi himself
has penned prefatory materials to his various books, and of course by the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which he has been a member and an ideologue for over
several decades.
Anything but ordinary

Its unclear what the status or authority of Mr. Batras proposed NGEC is to be, but I was
struck by the mention of one of my former teachers as a potential member of this
commission. Seeing the name of Prof. Kapil Kapoor took me back to my days as an M.A.
student in English and Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Prof. Kapoor
first introduced me and my classmates to traditions of literature, language philosophy,
literary analysis, poetics, semiotics, grammar and aesthetics in Sanskrit. Many of us
went on to write doctoral dissertations about these subjects, deviating from British,
American and postcolonial literature, and the European literary and critical theory that
constituted the bulk of our coursework.
Prof. Kapoor ended up becoming dean and rector, and later, during the National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime, setting up the Centre for Sanskrit Studies at JNU.
He and I lost touch, partly because I went away overseas and partly because of our

political disagreements that were becoming increasingly apparent. But encounters with
other scholars like the philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti, the Panini expert George
Cardona, and the Sanskritist, and eventually my doctoral supervisor, Sheldon Pollock
made me decide to pursue more seriously the path that I had glimpsed in Prof. Kapoors
classroom: I took up the study of Sanskrit for real.
One of the reasons this did not seem outlandish to me was because my father is a poet
and writer in Hindi, and I had been exposed to Indian literary and intellectual traditions
at home from a very young age. Along the way I had studied Romance languages as well,
so that adding Sanskrit to the repertoire did not feel at all counter-intuitive. At Oxford, I
wrote an M.Phil thesis about how the study of Sanskrit had shaped the ideas of
Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics in Europe. But after that, when
I entered the South Asian Languages and Civilizations doctoral program at the
University of Chicago, I did not properly realise what I had signed up for.
Learning philology and Indology at Chicago was intensely challenging, yet also
proportionately gratifying. We had the best scholars of South Asian studies in the world
for our teachers. Along with a small group of classmates, most of whom are professors
now in Americas top universities, I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours at the
Regenstein Library, painstakingly unpacking sutras, verses, commentaries and
arguments in a range of Sanskrit texts, increasingly difficult as we moved to more
advanced levels.
Encountering prejudice

Its hard to describe the peculiar pain and pleasure of this language, so strict are its
formal rules, so complex the ideas it allows one to formulate, express and analyse.
Sanskrit enables thought at a level distinct from ordinary thinking in the languages of
everyday life. This is not to say that one cannot have a perfectly ordinary conversation in
spoken Sanskrit: one can, of course, and in Sanskrit pedagogical environments, this is
normal. But most of the vast literature available in this amazing language is specialised,
technical and anything but ordinary. D. Venkat Rao estimates that some 30 million texts
in various forms exist in Sanskrit at this time, the largest textual corpus of any extant
human language.
Half of my long years as a doctoral student were spent away from Chicago, in India. For
my dissertation, I read a small body of late medieval Sanskrit dharmashastra works.
These were texts of a legal and normative nature that were specifically about shudradharma: the rituals, duties and constraints associated with shudras, the social category
that constitutes the fourth stratum of the orthodox brahminical fourfold varnavyavastha, what we now normally designate as the caste system. I read with pandits
and professors, at mathas, Sanskrit colleges, Oriental institutes and Sanskrit
departments within regular universities, in places like Mysore, Bangalore and Pune. I
even studied Kannada and Marathi to ease my passage.
Nothing in my experience or education up to that time had prepared me for the sheer
wall of prejudice that blocked the access of someone like me to the particular aspects of

the history, ideology and politics of Sanskrit that I was interested in. Here I was
female, a north Indian in south India, a student enrolled at a foreign university, a Hindispeaker, and only tenuously and dubiously of a caste that pandits considered acceptable.
My teachers and I struggled to communicate, but in the end, most things were lost in
translation. A well-known Sanskrit professor in Maharashtra told me that only
perverted women became scholars, a pronouncement that brought several months of
our readings to an abrupt close one afternoon, and ensured I never again returned to
meet him.
The caste hierarchy and sexism, the inequality and misogyny that the social worlds of
Sanskrit engender and proliferate are shocking to a modern sensibility. For a decade, my
teachers in India and abroad had taught, tended, scolded and moulded me like their
own child. Now I was confronted with a shrinking community of Sanskrit scholars left in
a few places in India. They felt embattled inside collapsing institutions that had no space
for their learning, demeaned by democratic politics and secular public life that
stigmatised their orthodox beliefs, threatened by gender equality that resisted the
patriarchy inherent in their practices, and humiliated by their sheer marginality in the
economy of new knowledge systems, communication technologies and political common
sense. They were bitter and resentful, and the occasional interloper like me that too
someone with an obviously critical agenda had to face the brunt of their frustration.
Another journey

After about three years of fighting a losing battle, I decided to make what I could of
the dharmashastramaterials on my own. The dissertation got completed, and later,
when I was writing my first book on an unrelated subject, I returned with joy and
pleasure to the classics of Sanskrit literature, like Kalidasas long poem, the
Meghaduta, sections of the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the
Bhagavad Gita. In the safe cocoon of another great American institution, this time
Harvard Universitys Widener Library, I could bracket for a few years the dark side of
Sanskrit, its complicity with the power dynamics of caste and gender that make modern
India the most confounding contradiction of on-paper political equality and lived social
inequality.
But now that India is ruled by the Hindu nationalist government of Mr. Modi, with
grandiose and historically baseless announcements being made all the time by the likes
of Mr. Batra, it seems the time has come to deal with everything that is wrong with
Sanskrit, yet again. A language is only a means to an end. Sanskrit is a powerful tool, but
whether its uses are salutary or destructive depends on whose hands it happens to fall
into. Its rigour and beauty are undeniable; so are its rigidity and elitism, in certain
circumstances.
My former professor, Kapil Kapoor, was knowledgeable and passionate about Sanskrit,
which is what made him such a memorable teacher. I cannot believe that he would
endorse the ridiculous claims made by some Hindutva spokespersons that there were
airplanes and cars in ancient India, and that the Vedic culture invented stem cell
research. One of the things I remember about him most vividly was his earthy sense of

humour. If Panini was at Takshila, he often joked, that probably means he was a
Punjabi, like me. We would all laugh, transported for a moment to the vanished
classrooms of remote antiquity, when one of the most astonishing works of systematic
knowledge of all-time, Paninis Sanskrit grammar, theAshtadhyayi, was probably
composed somewhere on the plains of north-western Punjab.
Its up to liberal, secular, egalitarian, enlightened and progressive sections of our society
to preserve and protect this unique civilisational resource. Kapil Kapoor opened a
window for his students, from where they could see a breathtaking vista of Indias past,
filled with traditions of philosophy, religion and literature unparalleled in almost any
other language. Scholarship like that of Sheldon Pollock and his colleagues helps us to
understand the history, the power, the circulation and the importance of Sanskrit
knowledge systems in the pre-modern world, not just in India but across Asia. We learn
to really read texts, to carefully unpack their meaning in complex historical contexts of
production and reception, rather than merely brandish them as false tokens of identity
and imagined superiority in our own times.
Sanskrit must be taken back from the clutches of Hindu supremacists, bigots, believers
in brahmin exclusivity, misogynists, Islamophobes and a variety of other wrong-headed
characters on the right, whose colossal ambition to control Indias vast intellectual
legacy is only matched by their abysmal ignorance of what it means and how it works.
(Ananya Vajpeyi is the author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, HUP,
2012. E-mail: vajpeyi@csds.in)