archive: Perfect Language-I
Perfect Language-I
RK Dasgupta
The Statesman
June 25, 1999
Title: Perfect Language-I
Author: RK Dasgupta
Publication: The Statesman
Date: June 25, 1999
Sanskrit Can Renovate The Indian Mind
AT the beginning of this year the Government of India declared 1999 as
the year of Sanskrit. Official dedication of a particular year to
something means that funds from the public exchequer could be made
available for its promotion when it has been languishing through
public neglect. Let us not attribute this gesture of the government
just dislodged by secular forces to a special feeling for the sacred
tongue of the exponents of Hindutva. That would be a very unfair view
of a measure which we must welcome as a first step towards a
renovation of the Indian mind.
Sir William Jones (1746-1794) who, as president of the Asiatic
Society, which he had founded in 1784, said, in his third anniversary
discourse delivered to the Society on 2 February 1786, that the
"Sanscrit (sic) language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin
and more exquisitely refined than either". I do not take these words
as a Western testimonial for India's ancient language. They are
important as the 18th century European enlightenment's view of an
ancient language of Asia.
Only a few 18th century Euro-peans knew Sanskrit. Still there was an
European perception of Indian wisdom embodied in Sanskrit. Voltaire
(1694-1778) said in a letter to his friend that "everything came to us
from the Ganges". (quoted by A Aronson, Europe Looks at India, 1946)
Warren Hastings (1732-1818) was not an intellectual, but he was an
educated 18th century Englishman who was the first King's Scholar at
Westminster in 1747.
GITA
His remark on the English Bhagavadgita of Charles Wilkins (1750-1836)
published in February 1785, less than a year before Jones's third
anniversary address, is memorable as an 18th century Euro-pean view of
one of the greatest Sanskrit classics. In is foreword to Wilkins's
translation of the Gita Hastings said that the work "will survive when
the British dominion in India shall have long ceased to exist, and
when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to
remembrance".
Jones's view of Sanskrit as a language superior to Greek and Latin
entered into the historiography of human language as it emerged in
Britain in the last decade of the 18th century. Thus Lord James
Burnett Monboddo says in the sixth volume of his Of The Origin and
Progress of Language (1792) that "there is a language still exist-ing,
and preserved among the Brahmins of India which is a richer and in
every respect a finer language than even the Greek of Homer".
This is the view of Sanskrit in 18th century Europe. What, we may now
ask, was the 18th cen-tury Indian view of the language? Not even in
Calcutta was there a Bengali who knew enough of the English language
to have a sense of a new pride in his ancestral language created by
the views of Jones, Hastings and Monboddo. But Sanskrit was then a
living language in our learned community, the last great Vedantic
texts written in Sanskrit being Govindabhasya of Baladeva who lived in
the 18th century. Although Baladeva Vidya-bhushan belonged to Orissa
he became one of the philosophers of the Chaitanya or Vaishnava
movement in Bengal.
Actually in the 18th century we have a continuation of the tradition
of Sanskrit writing in Bengal since the days of Raghunath Siromani,
the great exponent of Navyanyaya in the 15th century and Raghunanda
Bhattacharya, the author of Ashtavingsatitattvasmiri-tigrantha of the
16th century. But at the beginning of the 19th century a great change
took place in the intellectual life in Bengal. Naba-dvip began to
decline as a centre of Sanskritic learning and in the new learning
that emerged in Calcutta in the early decades of the century Sanskrit
lost its importance. The new religious movement, the Brahmo reform,
initiated by Raja Rammohun Ray (1772-1833) had its philosophical
foundation in the Vedanta, Rammohun himself translating several
Upanishads and the Brahmasutra both into English and Bengali.
But when Rammohun made a plea for a new system of education in his
letter to Lord Amherst in 1823 he wrote: "The Sanskrit language ... is
well known to have been for ages a lamentable check to the diffusion
of knowledge, and the learning concealed under this almost impervious
veil, is far from sufficient to reward the labour of acquiring it."
What is even more curious is that Rammohun disparaged the wisdom
embodied in that language. "Neither can much im-provement arise," he
added "from such speculation as the following which are the themes
suggested by the Vedanta - in what manner is the soul absorbed in the
Deity".
MACAULAY
Obviously it is a sling at the monism or advaitavad of Shankaracharya.
But Rammohun founded a Vedanta College in Calcutta in 1825, less than
two years after this letter. Evidently his passion for Western
learning obliged him to be unduly harsh on Sanskrit and the philosophy
presented through that language. I have no doubt that Macaulay
(1800-1859) saw this letter while drawing up his minute on education
which Bentinck signed on 2 February 1835. In that minute Macaulay
mentions "persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the
Hindoos all the uses of kusa-grass and all the mysteries of absorption
into the deity" (H Sharp, Selections from Educational Records, 1920).
Just a decade later the intellectually emancipated Derozians, in their
enthusiasm for Bacon, Hume and Mill, showed little regard for our
ancient tongue. In Europe the Renaissance of the 16th century created
a love of Latin which was kept alive till the days of Mill when no
English student could get a university a degree without some knowledge
of Latin.
What we call our 19th century renaissance took place during British
rule. It was not therefore a renaissance leading to a revival of our
ancient learning. It was an intellectual resurgence caused by our
English learning. Even Vidyasagar (1820-1891) a great Sanskrit scholar
was called by Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay (1838-1903) Ingrajir ghiye
bhaja Sangskrita dish" (a dish fried in English lard). Vidya-sagar
himself called Sankhya and Vedanta "false systems of philosophy" in
1853. In the same year Vidya-sagar read a paper on Sanskrit which was
published as Sanskrita Bhasha O Sahitya Vishayak Prastab (1853) which
appears to rate Sanskrit literature below the literature of Europe
when he says that Sanskrit authors are not skilled in describing the
sublime.
In his essay "Bengali Literature" published in the Calcutta Review in
1871, Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) speaks of two schools of
Bengali writers, Sanskrit and English. "The former" he says,
"represents Sanskrit scholarship and ancient literature of the
country; the latter is the fruit of Western knowledge and ideas. By
far the greater number of Bengali writers belong to the Sanskrit
school; but by far the greater number of good writers belong to the
other." This was our view of Sanskrit some 50 years after the
introduction of English learning in Bengal.
DISPARAGE
A spirited attack on Sanskrit came from one who was the first
spokesman of our economics of swadeshi. Bholanath Chandra (1822-1910)
presented his radical views on British exploitation of India in a long
review of the three volume A Brief History of Bengal Commerce (1872)
by Krishna-mohan Malik (1801-1883). Bhowmik wrote in the Mookher-jee's
Magazine urging his countrymen to "non-consume the goods of England"
to "dethrone the King Cotton of Manchester". But Bholanath was no less
strong in his words disparaging Sanskrit. In the first volume of his
two-volume The Travels of a Hindoo (1869) published in England with a
foreword by Talboys Wheeler, Bholanath says about Sanskrit: "rich as
the Sanskrit language is, the vocabulary of the Brahmin has no word
for patriotism... In the whole compass of (its) literature, there is
no spirit-stirring warsong like Burns' Bannockburn or Campbell's
Battle of the Baltic. "The Hindoos may have produced the first
law-givers in the world," he adds "but in their political
jurisprudence there is not the slightest exposition of the principle
on which are based the Magna Carta, the Petition of Right and the
Habeas Corpus Act". (p 276) And Bholanath's conclusion is that
"Sanskrit is the setting sun, English is the rising sun". We can take
this as an eloquent Indian testimony to Macaulay's views on Sanskrit
in his Minute on Education.
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