Perfect Language-II
R K Dasgupta
The Statesman
June 26, 1999
Title: Perfect Language-II
Author: R K Dasgupta
Publication: The Statesman
Date: June 26, 1999
Roots Of Our Culture In Sanskrit
THE East India Company had a policy of encouraging both Sanskrit and
Arabic by way of pleasing both the Hindus and the Muslims and this was
the beginning of that bifurcation of learning which was a danger to
the growth of a common intellectual culture in India in the 19th
century. Lord Cornwallis established the Benares Sanskrit College in
1791 as an answer to the Calcutta Madrasah founded by Warren Hastings
in 1781. The foundation stone of the Sanskrit College, Calcutta, was
laid on 25 February 1824 and its present grand edifice came up on 1
May 1826. First-rate Sanskrit pundits of Bengal came together to teach
the various branches of Sanskrit learning at this college.
Iswarchandra Vidyasagar who was a product of this college was its
Principal from 1851-1858. There were, however, plans to abolish the
college when Macaulay was President of the East India Company's
Education Committee.
I do not wish to go into the details of this Anglo-saxon vandalism
which are very well summed up in Brajendranath Bandyopadhaya's
Kalikata Sanskrita Kalejer Itihas 1824-1858 (1945). But it is
important to remember that it was a British Sanskritist, Horace Hayman
Wilson (1786-1860) who saved the college. He was a visitor to Sanskrit
College until he left Calcutta for England. When Macaulay proposed the
abolition of Sanskrit College Premchand Tarkobagis wrote a letter to
Wilson in Sanskrit verse in which he called the institution a kurangah
Krishanga (a sickly deer) about to be speared by "mecale byadharaja"
(Macaulay the king of huntsmen).
NEW SYSTEM
Wilson answered the letter in Sanskrit verse saying that durva na
mriayte" (grass does not perish) chhagadaishcha vicharpitapi (even
when chewed by goats). Wilson likened Sanskrit to the perennial green
grass of the Indian soil. The verses are quoted in full by Ramakshay
Chattopadhya (1829-1914) in his Premchandra Tarkavagisher jivancharit
o kavitavali (1892).
In the new education system that emerged with the foundation of our
three presidency universities, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857
Sanskrit had its position, there being departments of Sanskrit in all
our schools, colleges and universities. When I entered high school in
1927, at the age of 12, after two years in a primary school, I had to
do a course in Sanskrit and for my matriculation two of my seven
three-hour papers were Sanskrit (compulsory) and Sanskrit
(additional). I did not find it burdensome. I knew that a Hindu Indian
was born in Sanskrit, he would marry in Sanskrit and finally would die
in Sanskrit.
But although the university produced first-rate Sanskrit scholars like
Haraprasad Sastri, Ramendra-sundar Trivedi, Suniti Kumar Chatterji,
and Sukumar Sen we felt that Sanskrit had no strong presence in our
intellectual temper. Europe dominated our mental life and we had no
notion of the spirit of Sanskrit as an active element in our life.
While we had scholars to explain to us the wisdom of the Vedas and the
Upanishads where was there a scholar to produce a work on the ideals
of ancient India like SH Butcher's Some Aspects of the Greek Genius
(1891) or Gilbert Murray's Hellenism and the Modern World (1953) or CM
Bowra's The Greek Experience (1958).
Somehow we thought that the language of ancient India was not so
relevant to modern life, while most intellectuals of Europe, howsoever
committed to Christianity, were essentially pagans "suckled in a creed
outworn". Suniti Kumar Chatterji's Indianism and the Indian Synthesis,
his Kamala Lectures delivered in Calcutta University in 1959 and
published in 1962, did not really create an Indianism like the
European's creation of Hellenism. Suniti Kumar's earlier work on the
subject, "Indianism and Sanskrit" published in the Annals of the
Bhandarkar Research Institute in 1957 too had little influence on the
modern Indian mind's response to Sanskrit as the language of a great
culture.
We must, however, realise that a modern culture must be rooted in a
classical past. The Latin mind which created modern Europe was nursed
on the Greek classics. So devoted were the ancient Romans to Greek
literature that Horace (65-8 BC) wrote in his Epistles: Graecia capta
ferum victorem cepit et artes/ intuilit agresti Latio (captive Greece
took captive her savage conqueror, and brought civilisation to
barbarous Latium). In spite of this heavy debt to Greece Rome had a
culture of her own, a fact sometimes denied by modern scholarship.
Thus the French classicist HI Marrou says in his A History of
Education in Antiquity (Eng tr, George Lamb, 1964) "a genuinely
autonomous Italian civilisation had no time to grow up, because Rome
and Italy were snatched up into the civilisation of Greece".
FOUNDATION
This is not true. Virgil had a voice of his own although he had made
Homer his master. Clive Bell did not see this when he wrote in his
Civilisation (1928, Pelican 1938) that there is nothing in Latin
literature which "is not a dull echo of Greece". If we strive to give
a classical base to our culture and turn to Sanskrit for discovering
that base we will not lose our originality. But how to turn to
Sanskrit to make it the foundation of our culture? What is the place
of Sanskrit in our education? The Radhakrishnan Commission Report on
Education (1949) made a plea for more attention to Sanskrit.
But this did not really establish the importance of Sanskrit in our
education. On 1 October 1956 the Government of India appointed a
Sanskrit Commission with Suniti Kumar Chatterji as chairman, who
presented his report on 4 November 1957. The very first recommendation
of the commission was that the government "make an adequate provision
for the study of Sanskrit in the scheme of general education in
schools". This has not been done. The other recommendations urge
public expenditure on the promotion of the subject. It is the last
recommendation urging creation of Sanskrit universities which I think
is a danger to the future of Sanskrit in our country. Some Sanskrit
universities have already come up and they are only isolating Sanskrit
from the main stream of our academic life.
Our government has done a good deal to affirm the supreme importance
of Sanskrit. It is one of the languages in the eighth schedule of the
Constitution although we do not know if there is any Indian who does
his shopping in Sanskrit or quarrels with his wife in that language.
Sanskrit is one of the languages in which news is broadcast. Let us
remember that in Greece news is not broadcast in the language of Homer
and Rome does not broadcast news in the language of Virgil. Satyameva
Jayate is our government's motto although truth has been a rare
commodity in our public life since independence.
What is to be done now? I think it is still not too late to realise
that the roots of our culture is in the spiritual and moral tradition
which is embodied in Sanskrit. And if we must now try to find our
place in the modern world, the world of Bacon, Newton, Hume and Mill,
the world of Marx and Freud, we must go back to the Vedanta. Sri
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo, have
brought to us the message of the ancient India.
Our medieval religious poets were rooted in the Vedanta though they
wrote their poems in their vernaculars. It is true that Kabir
(1440-1518) disparages Sanskrit in one of his songs saying Kabira,
Sanskrita kupoajala bhasha bahata nir (O Kabir, Sanskrit is the water
of the well, vernacular is a running stream.)
VERNACULAR
What the medieval mystic says is true: but this does not mean
rejection of Sanskrit. The words in this verse are Sanskritic words
and Kabir's philosophy has a Vedantic foundation. What he disliked was
pedantry, which destroys bhakti. Actually in our middle ages there was
a strong link between Sanskrit and the vernacular and the Alwar poets
composing Vaishnava songs in Tamil are said to be the originators of
the bhakti movement. Both Radhakrishnan and Surendranath Dasgupta find
in Alwar poetry the source of the philosophy of Ramanuja's Sribhashay
of the 12th century. The British editor of Alwar songs, JSM Hooper,
says: "The Alvars provided the soil out of which Ramanuja's teaching
naturally sprang and in which later it could bear fruit" (Hymns of the
Alvars, 1929).
It is true that since our middle ages we have a kind of vernacular
Vedanta but to keep it alive we must cultivate Sanskrit. In his
address "The Future of India", Vivekananda was bold enough to assert
that "the great Buddha made one false step when he stopped the
Sanskrit language from being studied by the masses" (Selections from
Swami Vivekananda, 1944). Sri Aurobindo urged the cultivation of
Sanskrit and our vernaculars to "establish a vivid continuity between
the still living power of our past and yet uncreated power of our
future". Rabindranath was so keen to introduce Sanskrit in our primary
schools that he wrote a Sanskrit primer called Sanskrita Shisksha in
1896. We may not be able to take Sanskrit to our masses; but we may
make it a compulsory subject in our schools. And we will succeed in
this effort if we lay more stress on learning languages than on
knowing the world.
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