The battle for Sanskrit
By
Rajiv Malhotra
HarperCollins Publishers, India.
468pp

I am an Indian American.  I do feel sensitive to how India is portrayed in the media and the society.  I feel proud when a person of Indian descent achieves high office or is recognized for professional excellence.  I imagine the future of thousands of immigrant children who try to accommodate their parents’ heritage in their lives.  I reflect on the condition of my old country and occasionally remember my friends and relatives.  While I serve the country of my choice with my skills and talents, little do I know that my old country could be getting a new coat of unseemly colors from my own neighbors in the new country! 

Rajiv Malhotra’s new book The Battle for Sanskrit is an eye-opener.  As immigrants in the US join the work force and make efforts to get adjusted to the new society, there is not enough time available to address the issues of sociology or anthropology.  It pains me to discover that there could be organized efforts to belittle my mother culture and attempts to erode the foundation of my heritage.  One has a right to go into a denial mode because such maneuvers are unheard of in the Indian intellectual tradition.  You then open Rajiv’s book to discover that it is not only real, but that it happens right under your nose!  The question then arises: why?  Rajiv Malhotra analyzes the answer.

Rich in agriculture, India helped create arguably the first urban civilization.  She proceeded to express man’s imagination in song and lyrics and preserved these as the tradition of human knowledge.  She compiled books on conduct, statecraft, medicine, grammar, prosody and astronomy.  She invented the language of Sanskrit in order to provide a framework for its search of the comprehensive cosmology.  She built on the old human tradition that all life is sacred.  She declared that “man is not unique, that there is a larger cosmos out there.”  The cosmos is infinite, unbounded and the human is a small speck in this massive expanse. Nobody is special, and yet all are!

India created the philosophy of human thinking.  The beauty of her thoughts thrilled anyone who heard it. Rarely one had the time to examine how such grandiose analysis dawned on the human mind.  The tranquil period for a sustained examination never came by.  Only extensions and new creativity blossomed.  Nobody had the need of a father.  The poets of the Vedas collectively were taken as the guardians of this unbeatable architecture.  The Buddha took pieces of this large fabric and tried to contain it to an earthly group.  His technique worked.  The infinite time received boundaries. Books were compiled, open architecture found space in the libraries.  But Indian thought had formed.  “Each life is divine, man is free.  You are equal to anyone.  Knowledge is in man, not in books!”

India’s cosmological discovery of freedom is stunning.  It is analytic and scientific.  Consciousness is a field. It pervades the universe and beyond.  One has the ability to draw from it, imagine through it; create arts and literature by riding through it.  Language created a word “paramartha” for the concept.  Every person has the ability to soar in life, and reach the heights of “paramartha”.   “Paramartha” is the purpose in life. It is wholesome and accepts one’s existence; it is the joy of life, it is the security.

Then we have the inter-personal relationship, our profession and the local living.  Here the word was “vyavahara”; how does one tune oneself to a given setting.  We can make strategy, and compete. We might succeed while someone else might fail.  Some get rich, some stay poor.  It is worldly and material. Such distinction disappears in the “paramartha” realm.  You live your life in the worldly plane, never forgetting that “paramartha” is the goal.  You achieve it by excelling in what you do.  If singing is “vyavahara”, then “rasa” is the “paramartha”.

Armed with this balance of philosophical thinking in her day to day life, India produced magnificent works of dance, music, poetry and drama.  She stunned the world with opulence and scholarship.  Her model of mutual respect and existence spread round the world and attracted people to visit her.  She became a destination for various kinds of traders, scholars, seekers, travelers, and yes, looters!  Students and scholars loved every bit of India’s soil.  Some invaders plundered, some homeless came to stay.  India sheltered all.  “Paramartha” demands that you do not deny shelter to anyone.

Mahmud came to loot, Al Beruni came with him to study.  The scholar studied Sanskrit and was bedazzled to observe India’s life and society.  He appreciated India’s balance of the spiritual with the mundane.  Babur and Humayun butchered Indians, but Akbar melded into the Indian style.  His grandson learned enough Sanskrit to translate Indian knowledge into Persian.  But the Englishmen got confused.  They had come in search of wealth.  They plundered and enslaved.  When they discovered that India was larger than what they thought, they tried to write a new history! 

Rajiv Malhotra has as the cover picture of his book Indologist William Jones seated at a desk with three Indian pundits squatting on the floor. The picture is taken from an actual frieze in an Oxford chapel in England. Mr. Jones is seen writing something that the Indian pundits are picking up from books.  Mr. Jones would go on to eventually publish what he wrote and would not acknowledge where he got it from.  I suppose we have to put it down to the courtesy of British liberalism that the pundits are not altogether forgotten.  Though not by names, they are shown in shapes.  This disease of lack of acknowledgement of India’s knowledge and wisdom is what bothered Rajiv in his early scholarship.  He discovered to his credit that the pattern of not acknowledging was a ploy to deny ownership and facilitate eventual repackaging.  Repackaging as a concept is an absolute violation of India’s ideal of “paramartha.”  One is divine any way, knowledge is there to be cultivated, not to be abused!

Through his own talents, Mr. Jones discovered that German, Greek, Latin and Persian appeared to have word similarity with Sanskrit.  He is credited to have started a discipline of studies called “Philology” where words are dissected to discover their etymology.  The discipline had actually originated in India several thousand years ago, grammarian Panini having used it to create the list of “stems” and “roots” of words.  The new discipline however is lately engineered to discover word migration with a view to reconstruct history.  While European language families were created, Sanskrit remained a powerful elder sister.

Entered the scholar Mr. Max Muller, a man of German descent who lived in England.  Supported by the British East India Company he translated the Vedic corpus of material into English for the clergy. Like the previous scholars, he marveled at India’s creative contributions.  Either on a whim or under pressure, he made the sweeping “authoritative” statement that India was a land influenced by some tribes who galloped in onto her soil on horses from the northwest.  Creative writers are known for imaginary statements and thought-provoking metaphors.  But Mr. Muller was no creative writer. He was  taken as an authority on the topic.  His manufactured myth was taken as the genesis of Sanskrit. 

The British used Mr. Muller’s myths to justify their rule and loot of India.  Efforts were already under way to replace Indian language education with an English medium one so that Indian culture could be purged of the wholesomeness of her thoughts. Rajiv calls it Orientalism 1.0.  The effort succeeded in its goal of dividing people.  European scholars defined India through their meager understanding, mostly mapping the vast land under some economic and political models. The latter could not encompass the enormity of her culture.  Religious rivalries were fomented.  A new youth was created who would disbelieve the majesty of Indian thoughts.  Discarding tradition became the fashion. I am not a scholar of this.  Rajiv Malhotra is a master researcher on the topic.  

Rajiv observes in the book that Orientalism 1.0 crossed the Atlantic and moved on to the United States. He calls it Orientalism 2.0.  While I do not know all the nuances well, I have heard that the US helps with “nation building.”  Many nations in the world fail to govern themselves because of a history of a long period of subjugation under foreign powers or local dictatorial control.  The US prides itself on the vibrancy of its democracy and the freedom of its citizens.  It believes so much in its own democratic ideals that it tries to establish “democratic” societies wherever in the world it perceives there’s a problem, though it does not succeed all the time.  In the journey in democracy, India is an older sister
for the US.  It is a far more populous country than the US, and it prides itself on its free speech.  India has the largest multiplicity of religions and people possible on earth. It is the culture that binds India, not any religion or political system.  It took thousands of years to develop this cultural unity.

India’s spectrum of colors is maintained by “paramartha”.  The person’s local habitat has little to do with his/her cosmic voyage.  All colors are only outside.  There is a joy in caring, hugging and celebrating.  All colors live side by side, all share food and resources.  But there is poverty.  India today, is not what it was five hundred years ago.  While some forces are trying to destabilize the country through military incursions and terrorism, some others are using a softer approach to erode the foundation of the nation.   This second group is subtle and they are among my neighbors in the US.  I only know of their activity through Rajiv’s book.  I had sympathy for the members of this group earlier because they study India.  I did not know of the intent to hurt India until I read Rajiv’s book.

I came across Prof. Sheldon Pollock about four years ago when looking for a Ramayana book in order to be able to tell stories to my granddaughter.  I procured his translated text from the library and tried to read through.  It was a total disappointment.  There was no story.  There were lines of arbitrary sentences defensively put together without any real context or respect to the text.   Valmiki’s magnum opus was slaughtered to low quality choppy lines.  I felt bad and worried.  I have been running a group called South Asia Poets’ Group for twenty years.  I felt deceived by the lack of poetic dignity in a translation.  The book had an essay which went along with it.  The essay rambled on in an effort to convince the reader why the Ramayana was a bad text to begin with! I wondered: “Why should one translate a text if it was bad”?

I still do not understand why so called modern “Orientalism” Indologists study India if they do not like her story and her people.  Many of them have scant knowledge of Sanskrit, but they pretend to be experts in the profession.  They have been taught that their meager knowledge could be more than that of an average Indian, hence they are equipped to teach Indians about India.  While I thought it was a joke, Rajiv thinks it is orchestrated.  He brings in a Sanskrit word adhikara”authority.”  Rajiv argues that any scholar who wishes to interpret India’s traditions, culture and language, should do it with due diligence and in association with the scholarly circles in India that are invested in the topics.  I agree. Rajiv’s goal is to communicate to the traditional institutions that a whole army of low level slaves are out to denigrate and demonize India’s culture, while the scholars were busy meditating in their insulated abodes.  Rajiv is a Paul Revere riding solo on a horse back to alert the villagers in Concord!

It appears to me that Professor Sheldon Pollock is a political commentator and not an objective scholar.  A scholar enjoys “paramartha”, he or she is not looking for dots to connect.  A scholar does not interpret according to his/her preferred ideology.  There is a joy in scholarly discovery.  Prof. Pollock dissociates himself from the “rasa” of the material he reads. He operates with a local static dictionary and is unable to measure the imagination of the human mind.  He has little to do with discovery.  He is an analyst with a made-up artificial model.  His scalpel injures the patient.   He makes sweeping statements and turns defensive if one asks him to explain his stand.  His assertion that Ramayana was written to uphold the royal tradition in India is not only wrong but shows that he possibly never read the text fully.  For instance, Valmiki lets Dasaratha die in his sleep lonely, not attended to by any one.  The King lies dead for several hours and nobody even knows it! So much for upholding the pride of the royals! If Valmiki reads Prof.  Pollock, he would laugh at the latter’s misreading and the political slant. The assertion that there was no Sanskrit literature before Buddha is equally bogus.  And his theory that knowledge begins with of the advent of writing is the most concocted refuge in objective scholarship.   

I had read an essay called “Death of Sanskrit” by Prof. Pollock a couple of years back.  He wanted to show in that essay that Hindu kings had killed the Sanskrit language by encouraging vernacular languages.  He appeared unaware of the scholarly works in Sanskrit that were continuously being produced.  From his deconstructive analysis, he theorized that Sanskrit language was engineered to create subjugation in Indian society.  Lucky he is that in spite of saying these rabid things, he has managed to be rewarded by the Government of India. Prof. Pollock is like that ash tree growing stealthily on the temple of India’s culture as people forgot to watch. The pain is that it is now he who seems to be holding the crumbling walls according to his own pet theories and interpretations. Prof. Pollock has been able to canvass and get the Indian media on his side when India could be recovering from the colonial legacy!

As a student of Sanskrit and India’s traditions, I have come to feel that the arbitrary use of “philology” is a dis-service to the culture.  The meaning of words do change with time.   While the original concept can be studied in depth, it is not obtained by superficial morphological analysis.   I learned the phrase “political philology” through Rajiv’s book.  I thought it was a dangerous unscientific tool used to prove unfounded assumptions.  I do not know if the technique is used at large to assert subjugation.

In spite of Pollock’s obituary notices on Sanskrit, the language remains alive and well. Not only is it taught in secondary schools, there are hundreds of institutions of higher learning in Sanskrit in India now.  There does exist disconnect between traditional scholars and modern youth because of the lack of fluency in English among members in the former group.  Rajiv advocates the creation of a new breed of bilingual scholars who may be called upon to engage in “purvapaksha” with the west-based detractors.  He has choice words for young Indian scholars who get easily bought over with trips abroad or recognition through controlled publications.

Professor Pollock knowingly or unknowingly conducts himself as Sage Visvamitra of Ramayana who spent all his life to debunk the “paramartha” until finally conceding that it existed.  I request him to get on a debate with Rajiv Malhotra who has been forceful in his findings and has been thorough in his research.  Such a debate might help Prof. Pollock understand why his path is incorrect.  My personal interest lies with my granddaughter.  I am deeply troubled by the cavalier work presented with shallow knowledge of the Ramayana text and its arbitrary interpretation.

Translating a poet is a dignified job.  My father was a poet.  It took years of effort to gain the insight in order to begin translating his work.  A poet has a thought and an expression and a translation cannot be done by using dictionaries.  A translator understands the language, the idioms, reflects what the poet might be conveying and why.  It is like conducting Beethoven at a concert.  It is not words, it is an environment.  This is called rasa, and rasa is the “paramartha.”  Prof Pollock might need many further decades to taste the “rasa” of poetry. In my view, his thinking of rasa coming through convoluted textual analysis is faulty.  “Rasa” is freedom.

I admire Rajiv Malhotra for having undertaken the task of writing this book and bringing these topics into public discussion.  As an immigrant, I have a responsibility towards my children and grandchildren.  To paint India as a nation where culture is designed to subjugate people is the most atrocious attack on my  Indo-American community here in the US.  I hope Prof. Pollock will explain his part of the story as a part of this discussion. Rajiv’s book points to a new chapter in the life of an Indian immigrant to the US.  I am grateful that I was made aware of these softer pitfalls in my new abode.  The book is a must-read for all lovers of India and for those who cherish Indian traditions.