Peddling Sanskrit infused with Hindu supremacist rhetoric

Summer Camps Revive India's Ancient Sanskrit
Language Effort Is Part of Bitter Debate

by Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 14, 2008; Page A01

NEW DELHI -- Hemant Singh Yadav, a lean and sprightly 15-year-old, was sent by his parents to a summer camp to learn to speak Sanskrit, or what he calls the language of the gods.

He had studied the 4,000-year-old classical Indian language at school for six years. He knew its grammar and could chant the ancient hymns. But he could not converse in it. During a two-week course at the camp, Sanskrit Samvad Shala, he had no choice: He was forbidden to speak any other language.

"At first I thought it was impossible. The teachers and attendants spoke to us only in Sanskrit, and I did not understand anything," said Hemant, one of the 150 students gathered inside a Hindu temple on the outskirts of New Delhi. "I knew big, heavy bookish words before, but not the simple ones. But now Sanskrit feels like an everyday language."

Such camps, run by volunteers from Hindu nationalist groups, are designed to promote a language long dismissed as dead, and to instill in Hindus religious and cultural pride. Many Sanskrit speakers, though, believe that the camps are a steppingstone to a higher goal: turning back the clock and making Sanskrit modern India's spoken language.

Their endeavors are viewed with suspicion by many scholars here as part of an increasingly acrimonious debate over the role of Sanskrit in schools and society. The scholars warn against exploiting Indians' reverence for Sanskrit to promote the supremacy of Hindu thought in a country that, while predominantly Hindu, is also home to a large Muslim population and other religious minorities.

"It is critical to understand Sanskrit in order to study ancient Indian civilization and knowledge. But the language should not be used to push Hindu political ideology into school textbooks," said Arjun Dev, a historian and textbook author. "They want to say that all that is great about India happened in the Hindu Sanskrit texts."

One of the oldest members of what is known as the Indo-European family of languages, Sanskrit is a beleaguered language in India today, caught in a web of widespread apathy and questions about its utility.

Mainstream Indian schools teach the 49-letter language unimaginatively through tedious grammar lessons, and children learn by rote. Many parents see little use in encouraging their children to pursue a language that is not in any official use.

"Some people are constantly saying that Sanskrit is a dead language. It cripples our psyche to hear that, because we are nothing without Sanskrit," said Vijay Singh, 33, a teacher at Sanskrit Samvad Shala. "In the name of so-called secularism, it has become fashionable to attack any attempt to promote Sanskrit."

In January, government funding for a major Sanskrit program in schools was abruptly cut, prompting the program's managers to allege that officials were biased against the language.

The program, which encouraged immersive methods and developed computer-aided teaching tools and games, had been set up in 2003 by a Hindu nationalist government. One of the recommendations of the project included translations of English nursery rhymes such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" into Sanskrit.

When a new government was sworn in two years later, it ordered a massive review of the program, as well as other initiatives that were seen as being infused with Hindu supremacist rhetoric.

"The Sanskrit project was initiated by the previous government. They had their own priorities. The project was so-so. How many people really speak Sanskrit in India?" said Ramjanam Sharma, head of languages at the National Council of Educational Research and Training, a government body that designs school curriculums. Defending the decision to cut the funding, he said it was not appropriate for schools to teach children how to converse in Sanskrit. "We cannot replicate the teaching methods of traditional religious schools in our mainstream schools."

Although Sanskrit is one of the 22 official Indian languages, census figures show that only about 14,100 people speak it fluently, in a nation of more than a billion people. Still, it is prevalent in the hymns and chants at Hindu temple rituals, as well as at birth, marriage and death ceremonies. Not unlike Latin in the West, Sanskrit was long the language of intellectual activity in ancient India.

"Some people oppose anything that promotes Sanskrit because of its association with Hinduism. We were just trying to make the language a fun experience for students," said Kamla Kant Mishra, a Sanksrit professor and a member of the government project.

"To talk about Sanskrit is very political in India today," Mishra added. "That is the plight of the language."

The Indian government funds many colleges and universities that teach Sanskrit literature and scriptures, but it is not uncommon for even PhD students in the language to be unable to speak it. State-run schools offer a choice between a regional Indian language and Sanskrit. Many private schools offer Sanskrit, French, German and Spanish.

"I tell my students to opt for French, because it is useful if they choose to work in the hotel industry, or fashion or legal field. But there is no tangible use for Sanskrit except that they will learn an important part of our culture," said Vishakha Sharma, 40, a French teacher who teaches fifth- through eighth-graders in a private school. She said her school begins each morning with a Sanskrit chant. "It feels good to the ear, but students don't understand the meaning."

Meanwhile, some scholars are developing computer programs for Sanskrit and translating its rich repository of children's stories online. Last month, an alliance of international scholars from the United States, France and Germany was formed for Sanskrit computing.

"Sanskrit is very suitable for computing, because its grammar is complete with 4,000 rules and has a regular structure," said Girish Nath Jha, assistant professor of computational linguistics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. His students blog in Sanskrit, and he hopes to do away with programming languages such as Java and make Sanskrit a computer language someday.

At Sanskrit camp, a 19-year old undergraduate said that Sanskrit is in her blood.

"When I learn any language, I learn about its history and its literature," said Jaya Priyam. "But when I study Sanskrit, I learn who I am. It is my identity."