Sanskrit, taught well, can be as rewarding as economics
Now I feel that each blade has its unique
spot on the earth from where it draws its life and strength. So is a man
rooted to a land from where he derives his life and his faith.
Discovering one’s past helps to nourish those roots, instilling a quiet
self-confidence as one travels through life. Losing that memory risks
losing a sense of the self.
With this conviction I decided to read
Sanskrit a few years ago. I knew a little from college but now I wanted
to read the Mahabharata. Mine was not a religious or political project
but a literary one. But I did not want to escape to ‘the wonder that was
India’. I wanted to approach the text with full consciousness of the
present, making it relevant to my life. I searched for a pundit or a
shastri but none shared my desire to ‘interrogate’ the text so that it
would speak to me. Thus, I ended up at the University of Chicago.
I had to go abroad to study Sanskrit
because it is too often a soul-killing experience in India. Although we
have dozens of Sanskrit university departments, our better students do
not become Sanskrit teachers. Partly it is middle-class insecurities
over jobs, but Sanskrit is not taught with an open, enquiring,
analytical mind. According to the renowned Sanskritist, Sheldon Pollock,
India had at Independence a wealth of world-class scholars such as
Hiriyanna, Kane, Radhakrishnan, Sukthankar, and more. Today we have
none.
The current controversy about teaching
Sanskrit in our schools is not the debate we should be having. The
primary purpose of education is not to teach a language or pump facts
into us but to foster our ability to think — to question, interpret and
develop our cognitive capabilities. A second reason is to inspire and
instill passion. Only a passionate person achieves anything in life and
realizes the full human potential. And this needs passionate teachers,
which is at the heart of the problem.
Too many believe that education is only
about ‘making a living’ when, in fact, it is also about ‘making a life.’
Yes, later education should prepare one for a career, but early
education should instill the self-confidence to think for ourselves, to
imagine and dream about something we absolutely must do in life. A
proper teaching of Sanskrit can help in fostering a sense of
self-assuredness and humanity, much in the way that reading Latin and
Greek did for generations of Europeans when they searched for their
roots in classical Rome and Greece.
This is the answer to the bright young
person who asks, ‘Why should I invest in learning a difficult language
like Sanskrit when I could enhance my life chances by studying economics
or commerce?’ Sanskrit can, in fact, boost one’s life chances. A
rigorous training in Panini’s grammar rules can reward us with the
ability to formulate and express ideas that are uncommon in our
languages of everyday life. Its literature opens up ‘another human
consciousness and another way to be human’, according to Pollock.
Teaching Sanskrit under the
‘three-language formula’ has failed because of poor teachers and
curriculum. Mythological comic books such as Amar Chitra Katha and TV
cartoons in Sanskrit with captions might at least catch the imagination
of children. But the debate is also about choice. Those who would make
teaching Sanskrit compulsory in school are wrong. We should foster
excellence in Sanskrit teaching rather than shove it down children’s
throats.
The lack of civility in the present debate
is only matched by ignorance and zealotry on both sides. The Hindu
right makes grandiose claims about airplanes and stem cell research in
ancient India and this undermines the real achievements of Sanskrit. The
anti-brahmin, Marxist, post-colonial attack reduces the genuine
achievements of Orientalist scholars to ‘false consciousness’. Those who
defend Sanskrit lack the open-mindedness that led, ironically, to the
great burst of creative works by their ancestors. In the end, the
present controversy might be a good thing if it helps to foster
excellence in teaching Sanskrit in India.
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