THE HINDU
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 27, 2008

The real classical languages debate
Sheldon Pollock

A Sanskrit proverb tells us that it is far easier to tear down a house than
it is to build it. The great edifice of Indian classical language study and
literary scholarship has been nearly torn down. Is it possible, at this late
hour, to build it up again?

I have been observing with extreme bemusement the debate over the classical
status of Indian languages, since the issue was first raised in these pages
in 2006 in the case of Kannada. Yes of course, it is dangerous to introduce
invidious distinctions among languages, and yes of course, the scholarship
upon which these distinctions are founded is often empirically thin and
theoretically weak. But with respect to the core problem of the debate, I am
reminded of what the great poet Bhartrhari said: One should not wait until
the house is burning to dig a well (sandipte bhavane tu kupakhananam
pratyudyamah kidrsah). And the house of Indian classical language study is
not only burning, it lies almost in ashes.

Who cares if language X, Y, or Z is given “classical” status if there is no
one who can read it? And if the award of classical status is a means to
ensure serious scholarship, then there are a dozen or more languages in
India — indeed, the entire pre-modern literary past — that is in desperate
need of this recognition.

At the time of Independence, and for some two millennia before that, India
was graced by the presence of scholars whose historical and philological
expertise made them the peer of any in the world. They produced editions and
literary and historical studies of texts in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and
Telugu — and in Apabhramsha, Assamese, Bangla, Brajbhasha, Gujarati,
Marathi, Oriya, Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Urdu — that we still use today.
In fact, in many cases their works have not been replaced. This is not
because they are irreplaceable — it is in the nature of scholarship that
later knowledge should supersede earlier. They have not been replaced
because there is no one to replace them.

Two generations of Indian students have been lost to the study of classical
Indian languages and literatures, in part due to powerful economic forces no
doubt, but in part due to sheer neglect. The situation is dire. Let me offer
a few anecdotes. A great university in the United States with a long
commitment to classical Indian studies sought for years to hire a professor
of Telugu literature. Not one scholar could be found who commanded the
tradition from Nannaya to the present; the one professor of Telugu
literature in the U.S. who does have these skills will soon retire, and when
he does, classical Telugu studies will retire with him. The same can be said
of many other languages, such as Bangla, where the number of scholars who
can actually read not just Tagore, but Vaishnav pads or the great
seventeenth century biography of Caitanya, the Caitanyacaritamrta, are few
and far between.

For several years I studied classical Kannada with T.V. Venkatachala Sastry
of Mysore, a splendid representative of the kind of historically deep
learning I have mentioned. During all my time in Karnataka I did not
encounter a single young scholar who had command over the great texts of
classical Kannada — Pampa, Ranna, Ponna — to say nothing of reading
knowledgeably in the extraordinary inscriptional treasure house that is
Karnataka.

Today, in neither of the two great universities in the capital city of
India, is anyone conducting research on classical Hindi literature, the
great works of Keshavdas and his successors. Imagine — and this is an exact
parallel — if there were no one in Paris in 2008 producing scholarship on
the works of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Not coincidentally, a vast
number of Brajbhasha texts lie mouldering in archives, unedited to this day.

This is even truer of Indo-Persian literature. Large quantities of
manuscripts, including divans of some of the great court poets of Mughal
India, remain unpublished and unread. When I ask knowledgeable friends about
the state of the field, I hear them speak of great scholars in their 80s –
and almost no one younger.

Two year ago, I attend a large conference in Udaipur on the present state
and future prospects of the humanities in India. I asked the more than one
hundred delegates there, some of the best literary scholars in the country,
how many of them actually train their students to read literary texts in an
Indian language. Three people raised their hand, all Sanskrit teachers.

Nine years ago, H.C. Bhayani, the great scholar of Apabhramsha, passed away.
With his death, so far as I am able to judge, the field of Apabhramsha
studies itself died in India. To my eyes, the situation with Apabhramsha is
symptomatic of a vast cultural ecocide that is underway in this country. And
not just language knowledge is disappearing but all the skills associated
with it, such as the capacity to read non-modern scripts, from Brahmi to
Modi to Shikhasta.

To be sure, I have not systematically canvassed every university in India,
and there are undoubtedly some exceptions to the trend I am sketching. But
by no means do I think it even remotely an exaggeration to suggest that
within two generations, the Indian literary past – one of the most luminous
contributions ever made to human civilisation – may be virtually unreadable
to the people of India.

There is another Sanskrit proverb that tells us it is far easier to tear
down a house than to build it up (asakto ham grharambhe sakto ham
grhabhanjane). The great edifice of Indian literary scholarship has nearly
been torn down. Is it possible, at this late hour, to build it up again?
India has shown itself capable of achieving pre-eminence in anything it sets
its mind to. Consider the Indian Institutes of Management, of Science, and
of Technology. Universities and companies and organisations around the world
compete for the graduates of the IIMs, IISs, IITs. Why should India not
commit itself to build the same kind of institute to serve the needs of its
culture — not just dance and art and music, but its literary culture? Why
should it not build an Indian Institute of the Humanities devoted not just
to revivifying the study of the classical languages, but to producing
world-class scholarship, as a demonstration of what is possible, a model for
universities to follow, and a source of new scholars to staff those
universities? It is not too late. The reward of success would be
incalculable; the cost of failure would be catastrophic.

(Sheldon Pollock is Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies,
Columbia University, New York, Editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library, and
author of, among other books, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men.)