11-01-2014, 02:38 PM
Relevance of Sanskrit in Contemporary Society
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Introduction
I have chosen to talk about the relevance of Sanskrit in today’s society. In fact I have
been thinking about this often, for the last 10 years. To tell you the truth, until I was
doing my PhD, I was learning, writing examinations and talking about Sanskrit using
several other languages such as Tamil, English and Hindi. That is what most of us do
when it comes to Sanskrit. Yet we pass judgments about Sanskrit, we discuss about how
important Sanskrit is, we discuss as to what is good in Sanskrit and what is not good in
Sanskrit – everything in some other language, usually in one’s own ‘Matrubhasha’ and
predominantly in English. I was also doing that.
Only when I was doing my PhD I happened to acquire some knowledge in Sanskrit, and
ever since then, after I finished my PhD, the first question that naturally came to my mind
was – ‘why do we need Sanskrit?’ I personally liked it; I personally enjoyed whatever
little I have understood. I am not a Sanskrit scholar – let me clarify. But whatever little I
have understood and have gone through in the last 10-12 years – there was one question
that was ringing in my mind all the time, ‘Do we need Sanskrit? And, if we need
Sanskrit, what do we need it for?’
Role of Sanskrit – Alternative perspectives
Let me start by telling you that one can get a good idea of the dominant view by
arranging a panel discussion on the lecture theme. Arrange a panel discussion on this
theme – ‘Role of Sanskrit Today’, and invite the best set of people for the panel, it can be
well known personalities, the who’s who of India...it can be politicians, it can be
intellectuals from various professions, it can be people whom you can call the ‘common
man’. I am connected in a very small way, with several sets of these people...not the
politicians of course. I have been able to elicit their views on this subject in an informal
sense.
I would think that six or seven dominant patterns are likely to emerge from such a
discussion. Let me first state what those are. I am interested only in stating all these...I
am not here to discuss it one way or the other...that is not my stated objective, but I
would like to show to you as to what kind of treatment we have for Sanskrit.
The first and the most important and dominant theme, in the last two to three years is that
if you talk anything about Sanskrit, then it is immediately branded as the saffron agenda –
saffronising the society, or that you are communalising the society – probably there is a
political spectrum to that. You know, there is one dominant group, which talks about it –
I suspect that the general public does not talk about it. So if you put that group into the
discussion, sooner than later, you will see that that is one stream of thought and a possible
direction that the discussion will go into.
Futility of using translated works
The first one is, “Yes, there seems to be something interesting, although personally I do
not know. I have reasons to believe that there is something very useful, something very
interesting. But after all you know, you can translate everything into English, or you
translate into some other language, Kannada, Marathi or Tamil or Malayalam or Telugu,
and we can solve the problem.” This is one dominant argument. Until three years back I
thought that there was some merit in this argument. But slowly I started losing my belief,
and lost the charm of accepting this argument and to cap all these, I attended a two-day
conference on Ayurveda, last year in Bangalore, in the Rajiv Gandhi Medical University,
Bangalore. It was a big eye-opener for me.
Sanskrit is hard to learn, revive?
There are the other two dimensions, about which let me briefly touch upon before I take
up the first dimension for an elaborate analysis. There is this mindset among a majority
that Sanskrit is dead. We never pause for a while, stop for a while, and think about this
issue. Six years back we wanted to take Sanskrit to USA in a big way. At that time some
efforts were on to gather some statistics about the status of Sanskrit. It was mind boggling
for myself. I was involved in that with a few well wishers and I hope I can share with you
some of the facts we had gathered at that time on another occasion. However, the
exercise helped us to show that Sanskrit is still very much alive. We have not talked
about it, we have not looked at it in that perspective before.