Living outside heritage

But this was well before the nineteenth century when Enlightenment came to us and much before we were bitten by the bug of secularist-iconoclasm. In the conference, if it had been a matter of objection to preferentialtreatment to a Hindu goddess, there could have been a demand for including in the ceremony verses in praise of the knowledge or the Word from the Bible, the Koran or the Granth Sahib. But the disease is deeper. It has taken the form of turning away from one8217;s own heritage and disregarding spiritual and ethical commitments that ancient and medieval vehicles of all religions and cultures symbolised.

India alone excels in belittling its classical heritage as it has unfortunately codified it as its 8220;Hindu past8221;. This classification began in the colonial period when non-European cultures were primarily seen in religious denominations as non-Christian coloured races further divided into two broad categories, primitive and static cultures. Within the western world these approaches were countered first by orientalists and later by modernists, both opponents of Newtonian rationalism. The orientalist contributed to the discovery of the East by the West. In spite of the orientalisits, administrators like Macaulayforged for India an education system which had little or marginal place, not only for Sanskrit literature, but for all the traditional arts and sciences.

This dichotomy continued well into the semi-century of independence and flourishes strong as ever. Even now, on one side we have the Indologists with unquestioned faith in the growth of native culture, and on the other hand we have the socialists, rationalists, scientificists, pluralists and globalists equally assured of its auto-built resilience and auto-ge-nerative capacity. But neither side thinks that a formal educative system should have any role to play in the formation of culture. For them, as for Macaulay, culture can be extra-curricular.

The problem of giving Sanskirt its due place in Indian education is, therefore, not just a matter of giving concession to a particular language. It is the task of using five thousand years of all the textual wealth produced in this subcontinent. And all who believe that these texts, the bulk being in Sanskrit,are not required for maintenance of cultural identity have little knowledge of civilisational rise and decline in history. Regarding classical heritage and Sanskrit, in particular, there are many misconceptions.

For instance, it is necessary to get rid of the notion for some a phobia, for others a faith that Sanskrit is the language of Hindus for promotion of Hinduism. The 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.

But in India it is presumed that the study of Sanskrit, far from generating a utility for its texts along with those of Prakrits, Persian and Arabic, will only result in their devaluation. So much for looking at history with religious spectacles only.

Indifference to Sanskrit and other classical languages is nurtured in no small measure by the bias of Indian anglophiles who live under the illusion that availability of ancienttexts in English translations is sufficient for an understanding of ancient ways of thought and feeling. They admire orientalists but forget that the orientallist enterprise was not to inform the Indian readers but to interpret a colonised culture for proselytising and governance. They also forget that no culture can do things for another culture; one has to seek meaning in one8217;s own past oneself.

For those anglophiles who may doubt this even after Edward Said8217;s work on orientalism, one may remind them of T.S. Eliot8217;s dictum that ancient texts have to be studied and translated not only by each culture but by each generation of a culture. So what Max Mueller did for Europeans needs to be done by Indians for themselves today.

In a combative contrast to the secular berating of Sanskrit, there is the Hindutva dream that Sanskrit can be taught like a work-out at the gymnasium. It is presumed that if pupils are subjected to its role for five to seven years at school, the language shall be widely understood andread and even spoken in a couple of generations. There could be no surer way of doubling its pitiful state by making it a target of aversion of the common man who still holds the language in distant respect.

Enhancing contemporary utility of ancient and medieval texts should be the aim of bringing them into the curriculum at all levels from school to college. It means revision of curriculum and expansion of resources for interdisciplinary participation. Instead of compulsion there should be a wide choice for the young to familiarise themselves with traditional arts and disciplines. What needs to terminated is the artificial gap created between the lived culture and the pedagogic role-model of global yuppyism.

These measures require sustained efforts and careful planning and they can make classical learning and Sanskrit worthwhile rather than an object of pious obeisance. They can make it a useful passport for a sizable modern educated class to travel through many ages of Indian history and check thingsfor themselves.

The writer is an associate professor of English at Delhi University