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Geopolitics And Sanskrit Phobia

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  Geopolitics And Sanskrit Phobia Overview This paper discusses the historical and contemporary relationship between geopolitics and Sanskrit, and consistsof the following sections:I. Sanskrit is more than a language. Like all languages, its structures and categories contain a built-inframework for representing specific worldviews. Sanskriti is the name of the culture and civilization thatembodies this framework. One may say that Sanskriti is the term for what has recently become known asIndic Civilization, a civilization that goes well beyond the borders of modern India to encompass South Asiaand much of Southeast Asia. At one time, it included much of Asia.II. Interactions among different regions of Asia helped to develop and exchange this pan-Asian Sanskriti.Numerous examples involving India, Southeast Asia and China are given.III. Sanskrit started to decline after the West Asian invasions of the Indian subcontinent. This had adevastating impact on Sanskriti, as many world-famous centers of learning were destroyed, and no singlemajor university was built for many centuries by the conquerors.IV. Besides Asia, Sanskrit and Sanskriti influenced Europe’s modernity, and Sanskrit Studies became alarge-scale formal activity in most European universities. These influences shaped many intellectualdisciplines that are (falsely) classified as “Western”. But the “discovery” of Sanskrit by Europe also had thenegative influence of fueling European racism since the 19th century.V. Meanwhile, in colonial India, the education system was de-Sanskritized and replaced by an English basededucation. This served to train clerks and low level employees to administer the Empire, and to start theprocess of self-denigration among Indians, a trend that continues today. Many prominent Indians achievedfame and success as middlemen serving the Empire, and Gandhi’s famous 1908 monograph, “Hind Swaraj,”discusses this phenomenon.VI. After India’s independence, there was a broad based Nehruvian love affair with Sanskrit as an importantnation-building vehicle. However, successive generations of Indian intellectuals have replaced this with whatthis paper terms “Sanskrit Phobia,” i.e. a body of beliefs now widely disseminated according to whichSanskrit and Sanskriti are blamed for all sorts of social, economic and political problems facing India’sunderprivileged classes. This section illustrates such phobia among prominent Western Indologists andamong trendy Indians involved in South Asian Studies who learn about Sanskrit and Sanskriti according toWestern frameworks and biases.VII. The clash of civilizations among the West, China and Islam is used as a lens to discuss the future of Sanskriti across South and Southeast Asia.VIII. Some concrete suggestions are made for further consideration to revitalize Sanskrit as a living languagethat has potential for future knowledge development and empowerment of humanity. I. Sanskrit and the Multicultural Sanskriti (Indic Civilization) In modern Westernized universities, Sanskrit is taught primarily as a language only and that too in connectionwith Indo-European philology. On the other hand, other major languages such as English, Arabic and Mandarinare treated as containers of their respective unique civilizational worldviews; the same approach is not accordedto Sanskrit. In fact, the word itself has a wider, more general meaning in the sense of civilization. Etymologically,Sanskrit means “elaborated,” “refined,” “cultured,” or “civilized,” implying wholeness of expression. Employed by 1 of 30  the refined and educated as a language and a means of communication, Sanskrit has also been a vehicle of civilizational transmission and evolution.The role of Sanskrit was not merely as a language but also as a distinct cultural system and way of experiencingthe world. Thus, to the wider population, Sanskrit is experienced through the civilization named Sanskriti, which isbuilt on it.Sanskriti is the repository of human sciences, art, architecture, music, theatre, literature, pilgrimage, rituals andspirituality, which embody pan-Indic cultural traits. Sanskriti incorporates all branches of science and technology– medical, veterinary, plant sciences, mathematics, engineering, architecture, dietetics, etc. Pannini’s grammar, ameta-language with such clarity, flexibility and logic that certain pioneers in computer science are turning to it forideas is one of the stunning achievements of the human mind and is a part of this Sanskriti.From at least the beginning of the common era until about the thirteenth century, Sanskrit was the paramountlinguistic and cultural medium for the ruling and administrative circles, from Purushapura (Peshawar) in Gandhara(Afghanistan) to as far east as Pandurang in Annam (South Vietnam) and Prambanam in Central Java. Sanskritfacilitated a cosmopolis of cultural and aesthetic expressions that encompassed much of Asia for over a thousandyears, and this was not constituted by imperial power nor sustained by any organized church. Sanskriti, thus, hasbeen both the result and cause of a cultural consciousness shared by most South and Southeast Asiansregardless of their religion, class or gender and expressed in essential similarities of mental and spiritual outlookand ethos.Even after Sanskrit as a language faded explicitly in most of Asia, the Sanskriti based on it persists and underpinsthe civilizations of South and Southeast Asia today. What Monier-Williams wrote of India applies equally toSoutheast Asia as well: “India’s national character is cast in a Sanskrit mould and in Sanskrit language. Its literatureis a key to its vast religious system. Sanskrit is one medium of approach to the hearts of the Indians, however unlearned, or however disunited by the various circumstances of country, caste, and creed” (Gombrich 1978, 16). Sanskrit unites the great and little traditions: A bi-directional process facilitated the spread of Sanskriti in South and Southeast Asia. The top-downmeta-structure of Sanskrit was transmitted into common spoken languages; simultaneously, there was abottom-up assimilation of local culture and language into Sanskrit’s open architecture. This is analogous toMicrosoft (top down) and Linux (bottom up) rolled into one. Such a culture grows without breaking down, as itcan evolve from within to remain continually contemporaneous and advanced.Pan-Indic civilization emerged in its present composite form through the intercourse between these two culturalstreams, which have been called the “great” and “little” traditions, respectively. The streams and flows betweenthem were interconnected by various processes, such as festivals and rituals, and scholars have used these“tracers” to understand the reciprocal influences between Sanskrit and local languages.Marriott has delineated the twin processes: (i) the “downward” spread of cultural elements that are contained inSanskrit into localized cultural units represented by local languages, and (ii), the “upward” spread from localcultural elements into Sanskrit. Therefore, Sanskrit served as a meta-language and framework for the vast rangeof languages across Asia. While the high culture of the sophisticated urbane population (known as “greattradition” in anthropology) provides Sanskriti with refinement and comprehensiveness, cultural input produced bythe rural masses (“little tradition”) gives it popularity, vitality and pan-Indian outlook.Once information about local or regional cultural traits is recorded and encoded in Sanskrit, they become part of  2 of 30  Sanskriti. On the other hand, when elements of Sanskriti are localized and given local flavour, they acquire adistinct regional cultural identity and colour. Just as local cultural elements become incorporated into Sanskriti,elements of Sanskriti are similarly assimilated and multiply into a plurality of regional cultural units.Sanskriti includes the lore and repository of popular song, dance, play, sculpture, painting, and religiousnarratives. Dimock (1963, 1-5) has suggested that the diversity to be found in the Indic region (i.e. South andSoutheast Asia) is permeated by patterns that recur throughout the country, so that each region, despite itsdifferences from other regions, expresses the patterns – the structural paradigmatic aspects – of the whole. Eachregional culture is therefore to be seen as a structural microcosm of the full system.Sanskrit served two purposes: (1) spiritual, artistic, scientific and ritual lingua franca across vast regions of Asia,and (2) a useful vehicle of communication among speakers of local languages, much as English is employedtoday.Early Buddhist scriptures were composed and preserved in Pali and other Prakrit (local) languages, but laterstarted to also be composed in what is known as “hybrid Sanskrit.” There was a trend using elegant, PaninianSanskrit for both verbal and written communication. Tibetan was developed based on Sanskrit and is virtually amirror image of it.By the time of Kalidasa (600 C.E.) Sanskrit was mastered diligently by the literati and was, therefore, never a deadlanguage. It is living, as Michael Coulson points out, because people chose it to formulate their ideas inpreference to some other language. It flourished as a living language of inter-regional communication andunderstanding before becoming eclipsed first by Persian and then by English after the military and politicalconquest of India.Refuting the habit of dividing the Prakrit languages of India into two structurally separate “North” and “South”independent families, Stephen Tyler explains that “[M]odern Indo-Aryan languages are more similar to Dravidianlanguages than they are to other Indo-European languages” (Tyler 1973: 18-20).There is synergy between Sanskrit and Prakrit: A tinge of Prakrit added to Sanskrit brought Sanskrit closer to thelanguage of the home, while a judicious Sanskritization made Prakrit into a language of a higher cultural status.Both of these processes were simultaneous and worked at conscious as well as subconscious levels (Deshpande1993, 35). As an example of this symbiosis, one may point to various Sanskrit texts in medieval India which wereinstruction manuals for spoken or conversational Sanskrit by the general public (Deshpande 1993; Salomon 1982;Wezler 1996).Understanding this leads us to a vital insight about Sanskriti: Given this relationship between Sanskrit and locallanguages, and that Sanskriti is the common cultural container, it is not necessary for everyone to know Sanskritin order to absorb and develop an inner experience of the embedded values and categories of meaning it carries.Similarly, a knower of the local languages would have access to the ideas, values and categories embodied inSanskriti.Unlike the cultural genocides of natives by Arabic, Mandarin and English speaking conquerors and colonizers,Sanskrit had a mutually symbiotic relationship with the popular local languages, and this remained one of reciprocal reinforcement rather than forced adoption through coercion or conquest.This deeply embedded cultural dynamism could be the real key to a phenomenon that is often superficiallymisattributed to the British English: how modern India despite its vast economic disadvantages is able to produceadaptive and world-class individuals in virtually all fields of endeavour. This dynamism makes the assimilation of  3 of 30  “modern” and “progressive” ideologies and thought patterns easier in India than in many other developingcountries. In fact, it facilitates incorporating “modern” innovations into the tradition. It allows India to achieve itsown kind of “modernity” in which it would also remain “Indian,” just as Western modernity is built on distinctlyEuropean structures despite their claim of universality. This is why Indians are adaptive and able to competeglobally compared to other non-Western traditions today. II. Pan-Asian Sanskriti “India is the central link in a chain of regional civilizations that extend from Japan in the far north-east to Ireland inthe far north-west. Between these two extremities the chain sags down southwards in a festoon that dips below theEquator in Indonesia.” (A.J. Toynbee) Centuries prior to the trend of Westernization of the globe, the entire arc from Central Asia through Afghanistan,India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam and all the way to Indonesia was a crucible of a sophisticatedpan-Asian civilization. In A.L. Basham’s “A Cultural History of India,” it is said that: By the fifth century CE, Indianized states, that is to say states organized along the traditional lines of Indian politicaltheory and following the Buddhist or Hindu religions, had established themselves in many regions of Burma,Thailand, Indo-China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. (Basham 1975, 442-3) However, unlike the violent spread of Europeanism in recent centuries, this Sanskritisation of Asia was entirelypeaceful, never resorting to physical force or coercion to subvert local cultures or identities, or to engage ineconomic or political exploitation of the host cultures and societies. Its worldviews were based on compassionand mutual exchange, and not on the principle of conquest and domination. This is not to say that politicaldisputes and wars of conquest never occurred, but that in most instances, neither the motive nor the result wasthe imposition of cultural or religious homogeneity.The following passage from Arun Bhattacharjee’s “Greater India” elaborates this point clearly: The unique feature of India’s contacts and relationship with other countries and peoples of the world is that thecultural expansion was never confused with colonial domination and commercial dynamism far less economicexploitation. That culture can advance without political motives, that trade can proceed without imperialist designs,settlements can take place without colonial excesses and that literature, religion and language can be transported without xenophobia, jingoism and race complexes are amply evidenced from the history of India’s contact with her neighbors…Thus although a considerable part of central and south-eastern Asia became flourishing centers oIndian culture, they were seldom subjects to the regime of any Indian king or conquerors and hardly witnessed thehorrors and havocs of any Indian military campaign. They were perfectly free, politically and economically and their  people representing an integration of Indian and indigenous elements had no links with any Indian state and looked upon India as a holy land rather than a motherland – a land of pilgrimage and not an area of jurisdiction.(Bhattacharjee 1981, 1-3) This Sanskritisation in Asia provided an adaptive and flexible unity to those regions it influenced. For example, inThailand you can find the city of Ayodhya and Thai versions of the Ramayana. In Java, a local forest inhabited bymonkeys is thought to have been the home of Hanuman at some point and the current residences hisdescendents. Every polity influenced by this Sanskritization was able to incorporate the vast Sanskriti culture intoits own. This malleability provided a non-invasive and unimposing diffusion. Sanskriti and Southeast Asia: The establishment of trade (of goods and mutual material benefit) between India and Southeast Asia was the 4 of 30