Shashikant Joshi The Audacity of Sanskrit 2367WORDS33 Why we need to study the mother of all languages. Lately, Sanskrit has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. “Smriti Irani defends Sanskrit replacing German as third language in Kendriya Vidyalayas”, “Third language change in CBSE schools upsets parents”, “Merkel raises German language issue with Modi at Brisbane”, “Basic Sanskrit likely for Std VIII KV students”, “Dumping German to hurt KV students” These are some of the headlines by a certain media house, better known for keeping abreast of Bollywood Divas. To add to this, some ministers even mentioned words like plastic surgery, and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in the same sentence as Sanskrit, India or Hinduism—all of which are incidentally synonymous to political pundits and laymen alike, albeit for different reasons. Another headline related to languages that came to my attention was on November 9th: “Teaching them young: Tots learn to say ‘ni hao’ to Mandarin”. Apparently in Mumbai, over 200 kids, with around 90 of them between 3 and 6 years, are learning Mandarin. One parent said “These lessons are a gift to my daughter for her future”, and Mandarin is the “language of the world’s fastest growing economy”. This made me think much more than what media is discussing regarding languages. A recap of the reasons floating on both sides. One side says that foreign languages must be taught because the world is a global economy; it helps find more lucrative jobs abroad; Sanskrit is a dead language; Sanskrit is a communal reminder; etc. On the other side, Sanskrit is the mother of all languages; it is the best language for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence; Sanskrit has all of modern scientific knowledge in it—plastic surgery, aeroplanes, atomic bombs… you name it! A quick note on the plastic surgery issue, which has been ridiculed a bit. It is well known that Sushruta did rhinoplasty, and his instruments were sharp enough to split a hair lengthwise. That is tool-making technological advancement besides just medicinal feats. Even if we think that it was all theoretical, 1794 CE has hard historical evidence. “In the 18th century, during the Third Anglo–Mysore War (1789–1792) of colonial annexation, by the British against Tipu Sultan, the East India Company surgeons Thomas Cruso and James Findlay witnessed Indian rhinoplasty procedures at the British Residency in Poona! In the English-language Madras Gazette, the surgeons published photographs of the rhinoplasty procedure and its nasal reconstruction outcomes; later, in the October 1794 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine of London, the doctors Cruso and Findlay published an illustrated report describing a forehead pedicle-flap rhinoplasty that was a technical variant of the free-flap graft technique that Sushruta had described some twenty-three centuries earlier.” (History of Rhinoplasty) . An Italian army surgeon ten years later did the surgery purely by reading the text and seeing the pictures, and was successful. This was the start of plastic surgery in modern Western world. Note that this was not just academic knowledge; it was in practice even after 2,000 years; this one apparently done by a cobbler as a side job! Anyway, I digress. Going by media reports alone, one can never know what the full truth is, so let us explore the topic with that disclaimer. First of all, “Kapil Sibal-led UPA ministry surreptitiously swapped Sanskrit out and swapped German into the curriculum in 2011”, so read one article. If it is true, it was wrong. And if the recent reversal has happened mid-session that is also wrong. Or is it just that the decision has been made now, but it will take effect next session? If German was part of the three-language syllabus (mandatory rather than optional) instead of Sanskrit, that is also wrong. Why should a foreign language with no connect to the culture be mandatory? Let us consider some more points that have been missing from the debate. Who will benefit? Learning Chinese or German is not going to benefit India, it will benefit China and Germany and potentially the individual in economic ways, if he or she is smart in other subjects as well. So what should be the reason to offer it in government schools, that too mandatorily? The learning is not for strategic national issues, like what the US is doing since 9/11 in learning foreign languages to better understand, and hence manipulate and control, other cultures. In India, it is being proposed for better job opportunities abroad! An inscription in Grantha script Language carries its culture with it. English books will have Shakespeare, Wordsworth and others whom I have not read. I am yet to finish many great Indian authors. Chinese books will have works of their own thinkers. But sadly, even in Hindi, translated Russian stories are included in the CBSE Class X syllabus. Where did Premchand go? When I was learning Sanskrit in my schooldays, we had excerpts from Upanishad, though simpler ones like ‘satyam vada | dharmam chara | bhootyai na pramaditavyam’ etc. That exposed the mind to some world class thoughts delivered at the earliest existing recordings of human kind, which even if doesn’t make sense in your schooldays, would be available for contemplation at a later stage of life. Today’s CBSE Sanskrit textbooks have ‘This is a television. It shows pictures from far away.’ While it is great to show that Sanskrit can be used to communicate modern ideas, the richness of its original ideas should not be sidelined. Thousands of Swarajya readers receive the evening dispatch. Have you subscribed? Learn other languages while learning ours as well. When a German learns English or French, or a Chinese learns Korean, do they do it by ignoring or ridiculing their own language? Have you seen a headline like, ‘Germany dumps Latin in favor of Malayalam’ ‘Chinese favour Spanish over Mandarin’? No one neglects their own stuff to learn something new. You master your own language, then go ahead and master others. Experts say that learning should first happen only in the mother tongue, so that the child develops mastery over one language. There are many articles (Example 1, Example 2) available on the net on this subject. Forget about Sanskrit, modern students and parents alike are neglecting their own mother tongues. Bollywood stars who earn crores from Hindi cinema read dialogues written in Roman script. What shame and what disrespect to one’s own profession! One can’t even learn the script of the language that makes them stars? Ads abound in Roman script using Hindi. Learning of foreign languages should not be at the stake of Indian languages. We already learn one foreign language mandatorily—English. Will learning a language make the difference? Did Germany make progress by learning Swahili or China by learning Finnish? If you want to succeed like Germany or China, then adopt their work ethics, their systems of justice, governance, transparency or whatever suits your situation. When someone says “Learn Sanskrit for its wisdom”, a counterargument is “Even if we suppose that there is some useful wisdom in Sanskrit, why not translate it all in all the modern languages and be done with it. Why learn Sanskrit?” So even if there is some great scientific content in German or Chinese, I am sure it is all available in English at least for the entire college-level curriculum for mere mortals. Post-doc? You are on your own! So there is no need to learn foreign languages just for its content. Then, the only reason remaining is to connect culturally, socially and economically to the people. Then why not learn our own languages with the same sincerity and passion, before we embark on other languages? Connect to our own culture, before connecting to others’? Is Sanskrit less of a language linguistically? There is enough material out there for anyone who cares and is able to read, about the undisputed superior nature of the way Sanskrit grammar, and hence the language, developed. There is nothing over-patriotic about this claim. International linguists agree on this. The entire field of modern linguistics owes its origin to the study of Indology in the last few centuries. The only Spelling Bee contest in Indian languages, thanks to Sanskrit’s genes, is Can you hear properly?, since there is no guess work from sound to letter. The concept of forming conjugates, samyukta akshara is due to a deep linguistic principle that one sound should have one letter/character. In the last few years, the government of India has decimated Devanagri script in its attempts to simplify it. Instead of lifting the students’ standard, they chose to lower the standard of the language. But Sanskrit is the language of oppression and oppressors. There is also a posse of bright motivated people that will tell you that Sanskrit is the reminder and remainder of Brahminical oppression beyond compare, of the caste system and what not. So is English the reminder and remainder of British colonialism! But consider for a moment: for centuries, the whole world was going crazy trying to get to India; to do commerce with the only powerhouse of world economy till 1857! You don’t build empires just on spirituality and religion. You need practical wisdom, knowledge, science; of course the policy can be guided by spirituality. And you don’t need to concoct spiritual eclectic wisdom to oppress people; the West did so with simple sword and gun! So if Sanskrit should be shunned because some ‘priestly class’ [sic] misused their power while speaking in Sanskrit, then please don’t forget that Hitler spoke German while doing what he did, and Communism and suspension of liberty happened while the Premier spoke Mandarin, and the South and Central Americas were butchered while the Cross was held as witness, and the Middle East was bloodied while Koran was used as a guide. If one finds some lines of some scripture to be incorrect or unjust or corrupted, one can simply go further back in time to find the purer truth, since society was not as corrupted then as it is today. It is like the Ganga—at Howrah it is a toxic pit, but as you go towards the source, to Allahabad, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Gangotri, it keeps getting purer and purer. Is Sanskrit an artificial language? This is another misconception among partially aware people. It is said that Panini invented the language in about 500 BCE, or at least invented its grammar, or froze it into rigid rules. Panini didn’t invent the language or the grammar. He gave a way of describing the entire language of his time in precise, concise formulae (sutra), and not prescribing what the language should be. The majority of Vedic vocabulary can be easily understood even today. Vedic compositions are the oldest surviving human utterances (words, not pictures). This means that this social group of Vedic times developed a simple thing like language into the most systematic, logical and computer-ish human invention, naturally! And even kids spoke this language at that time. There was no one to oppress. This is a feat one must try to comprehend properly. In 500 BCE, when societies were fighting to survive, here is one man who undertakes a project of analyzing linguistics, does a perfect job that has not yet been matched by computer grammarians. And they haven’t fully utilized all of Panini’s gyaan yet. What is it about Sanskrit that is well-suited for computers? Many internet Hindus thump their chests at this, without knowing deeply the reasons and meaning of this statement. But that is what happens with masses everywhere. Since some parts of this have been covered elsewhere, I will give a single example. Simplistically put, modern computer language grammars are defined as a bunch of definitions (like axioms of Maths) and a bunch of generative rules. For example, in English, a story is a bunch of paragraphs; paragraph is a bunch of sentences; sentence is a bunch of phrases, words, letters etc. There are 26 letters. A sentence must have a subject, verb and optionally an object. You get the idea. Simplistically, Panini gives basic definitions, and then goes on with sutras of the basic format: “A becomes B if C is true”. To understand the power, take just one sutra: iko yaNachi (Panini 6.1.77) (ik + yaN = ach, i.e. ik become ach when yaN follows). It says in just three syllables the sandhi rule: “when i, u, Ri (of rishi), lRi (all called ik) are followed by any other vowel (all called ach) then i becomes y, u becomes w, Ri becomes r, lRi becomes l (all called yaN)”. Now you know why they say ‘The vowels are a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y’, because y come from i + a! But since Sanskrit was a living language at his time, his rules couldn’t cover some known ‘aberrations’ (to his formulated rules) already in use. For these, he uses exception rules. For example, we may say “1. All birds fly”. “2. Except emu, ostrich, kiwi, dodo and a dead duck.” Imagine someone who has even partially mastered Panini by Class XII, how easy the complier design course will be in third year Computer Science! And what new algorithms he or she may discover at a younger age? When my high school-going daughter asked: “What is the point of learning calculus or trigonometry which I will probably never use?” I said, “If nothing else, then learn from mathematics its way of expressing concisely, precisely and logically. If you even pick just that and never actually use rest of it, you have gained a lot.” Same goes for Sanskrit. A proper study of it, even preliminary, gives you new ways of thinking that are unique to the language. Later, you encounter ideas that are unique to the subcontinent. To conclude, surely not all will find esoteric stuff useful, like discussing finer points of grammar, even if it is of C++, Java or .NET. They will be merely happy to get a job in Germany. But that should not mean that these topics should lose their place from academia, and pursuits of knowledge. Is there anything in Plato that we don’t know now? Then why study it anymore? Is there anything that Aryabhatt found in mathematics that we don’t know today? Probably a few of his coded messages may still be out there undiscovered! 2367WORDS33 Related Posts POLITICS PM’s Marital Status None of Our Business POLITICS Astrology, Scientific Temper and Pandit Nehru POLITICS Reforms 2.0: 9 Things Arun Jaitley Can Do To Unleash The Economy EDITORS PICK, POLITICS The CBI’s Dangerous Credibility Crisis COLUMNS, FEATURED, OFFSITE Finding NaMo BUSINESS, COLUMNS, EDITORS PICK Singular: The Future of Employment Sam Yes, learning in mother tongue helps students. But then whose mother tongue is Sanskrit? And learning mother tomngue is mandatory in our educational sysytem. Now English has become a global language and it has become a language we can’t do away with. So stop this chauvinist idea of “English is foreign so we can’t have one more foreign language” line. RajivChandran Well no one’s mother tongue is english either – but we still learn it don’t we ? If we follow the apologia for english – we should start learning mandarin because it may well become a global language. Nothing against learning another language but following the prevailing fashions of the day does not a policy make. Language policy should be such that it is able to nurture the nations innate and historical strengths to pursue economic and geopolitical goals. This is exactly what english speaking west, non-english speaking west (germany, france, spain etc), arabic speaking islamic world, persian speaking islamic world, mandarin/cantonese speaking chinese are doing. For language carries ideas and values innate to the culture from which the ideas have sprung. But our own brown-angrez-sahibs have difficulty understanding this. Agneya China, Germany, Arab countries, Spain and France have one mother tongue for the whole nation; so it is possible for the whole country to accept and learn their mother-tongue. English is learnt there as an additional advantage only. In India, people have thousands of languages as mother-tongues. Even in Hindi belt, people have languages other than Hindi as mother tongues. Among these mother-tongues Sanskrit is not found a place i.e. it is nobody’s mother tongue. How do you say that learning in a language like Sanskrit which is not the mother tongue of any India, will bring a cultural awakening in the Indians ? Murali Venugopal Sanskrit is the mother of mother tongues; thats how we will benefit from it. Vangal Kavuniyan The answer is quite simple. Pick any field of human endeavor – music, dance, drama, literary theory, aesthetics whatever. You will find that Indians across the subcontinent used this language (even as late as 17th c.) to publish, debate and criticize. That is how learning Sanskrit will bring a cultural awakening. Google “aatish taseer sanskrit” if you really want to know more. desicontrarian.wordpress/ Contrarian Awesome essay. As a Comp. Science student, I need more of your essays, especially on pANini. Any links on the sutras and related compiler grammars in our father language – English ? ;-0 Agneya To learn English is slavery, it is generally pointed out. Only the Brtiish colonised us; and, the French, the Dutch and the Danish too colonised, but only a small part of our country. Except the Portuguese and the French, other two colonised us for a brief while. French language is read and spoken in Pondicherry and the citizens there enjoy dual citizenship. They vote in French elections. In Goa, portugues is taught and they too enjoy a free welcome in Portugal. English language is not the language of Britain only to enable us to say if we learn it we are learning the coloniialist language. English is the state language of many countries: US, Australia, Gibraltar, Falklands, New Zealand and many other countries. Further, it is spoken and understood throughout the world as the lingua franca of the world. Therefore, it is out of reality to argue that to learn it is to be a slave. Agneya English continues here only because it continues to be used in many walks of life: sciences, law, international banking, engineering, medicines and in official matters of the Union. It is possible to replace it in official matters of the Union with Hindi, as the BJP is doing now, but it will isolate the South and NE Region where people don’t know Hindi. There is resistance to it even in Maharashtra. In other walks of life like sciences, to replace it with Hindi will be impossible unless each and every Indian can understand Hindi. To replace it as the language of law with Hindi is possible but will face the same difficulty as mentioned above. In Punjab, a committee of 60 doctors have been set up to write books on medicines in Punjabi, but that will help only the Punjabis learn medicines in their mother tongue. In India, every State people are fiercely proud of their mother tongue. Where is Hindi there? So, the fine point is this: Hindi is still not the one and only language of the India, and the link language continues to be English for common as well as special purposes. As regards Sanskrit, the less said is the better because it is understood by a minuscule proportion of Indian population and the question of making it as a language for the masses may take 100 of years to answer positively, that too, if only the BJP, or any other party interested, continues to be in power and consistently promote Sanskrit for more than a century. Right now, BJP is promoting Hindi fast; but it has to face the isolation of South Indians consequently. Meantime, the world will move on in all areas of life and Indians, with the knowledge of Sanskrit only, will find themselves in an island, or have to live on borrowed technology or anything. RajivChandran Shri Rajiv Malhotra yesterday posted the following succinct background about the current anti-sanskrit debate. It explains the geopolitical background along with implications of choosing a side on the debate. In my view a careful evaluation of whats written here would be useful to those interested in meaningful debate (not acrimony) on the same. Sanskrit 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: 1- 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. 2- These control mechanisms are diverse: prestigious awards, elitist institutional affiliations, jobs, financial grants, foreign travel, access to media channels, etc. 3- The intellectual capital includes Eurocentric historiography, literature, philosophy, sociology, human rights theories, art history, and school curricula. 4- The institutional backbone of the West that propagates this superiority includes government agencies, multinational religious institutions, academic establishments and private funding agencies. 5- In this new inter-civilizational competition, everyone is equally invited to play; however, the rules, referees and rewards are often controlled by a few. 6- 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): a- Attack on China’s human rights b- Demands for internal reforms c- Critiques of Mandarin as hegemonic d- Denigration of Chinese culture and the hierarchies embedded in Confucianism as the basis of China’s human rights abuses. e- 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 China’s strength as a geopolitical force. But let us not forget that the linking of China’s 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, India’s domestic relationship with its Sanskrit-based heritage is mixed up in petty short sighted politics: 1. Sanskrit phobia has become a weapon for identity based vote banking, often under the guise of imported ideologies and funding for “human rights.” 2. India’s 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 India’s intellectuals, media, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and other mechanisms of influence. 3. 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 India’s geopolitical influence by breaking apart its social fabric and identity at the grass roots. 4. Such fragmentation has energized the anti-Sanskrit movement. Search author Featured Authors Abhinav Agarwal Forgive Now and Fight Later? Aravindan Neelakandan Astrology, Scientific Temper and Pandit Nehru Arnab Ray The Voice of God—And His Silences Bikram Vohra Finding NaMo Praveen Patil Is Terrorism Really Dead? Tweets about @swarajyamag Editor’s Pick 1 The CBI’s Dangerous Credibility Crisis 2 Singular: The Future of Employment 3 [Swarajya Exclusive!] Anna tries to rise again? Most Shared 1 Astrology, Scientific Temper and Pandit Nehru 2 PM’s Marital Status None of Our Business 3 Reforms 2.0: 9 Things Arun Jaitley Can Do To Unleash The Economy 4 The Audacity of Sanskrit 5 Singular: The Future of Employment About Swarajya Swarajya - a big tent for liberal right of centre discourse that reaches out, engages and caters to the new India. editor@swarajyamag Useful Links About Swarajya Jobs Advertisements & Business Enquiries Press Kit Privacy Policy On Social Media Twitter Facebook Linkedin Google+ Copyright: Swarajya. All Rights Reserved.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 10:56:35 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015