Karnataka - Hindutva: Vedic studies, Sanskrit vs Kannada

Outlook Magazine, July 14, 2009

BANGALORE BYTE

An Ideological Ace

On the one hand the Karnataka government is battling the High Court order that disallows it from imposing Kannada as the medium of instruction in primary schools across the state, and on the other, it is actively pursuing the setting up of a varsity for Vedic studies and the Sanskrit language. ......

by Sugata Srinivasaraju

Instead of calling it a messy situation, I would rather call it a funny situation. On the one hand the Karnataka government is battling the High Court order that disallows it from imposing Kannada as the medium of instruction in primary schools across the state, and on the other, it is actively pursuing the setting up of a varsity for Vedic studies and the Sanskrit language. If in the popular imagination Kannada is to receive primacy in Karnataka then, the first effort is politically correct, while the second one is off the line. It is funny to watch Kannada activists pressure and support the government on the medium of instruction issue, but oppose and sulk on the other initiative. Interestingly, some months ago, this very government with the unanimous backing of the state legislature had lobbied with the centre to get a 'classical' tag for the Kannada language and place it, in some sense, at par with Sanskrit.

Such contradictions are always at the heart of all governments. As a local proverb goes, what the left hand does in a government, the right hand would undo. By way of normal explanation, such contradiction exists because the beast called government is too huge with multiple visions and each of its visions would drag it in a different direction. This is especially true if the person at the helm of government is unable to coordinate the various visions. But the case of the Sanskrit varsity is slightly more complicated than pure dichotomy and clashing visions. In this case, the BJP government is quite conscious of what it is doing. It has clearly scored an ideological or rather a Hindutva point.

The saffron party won the May 2008 Assembly elections by securing votes of many backward communities and Dalits in the state, yet it wants to send out the message that it hasn't forgotten its true base and identity. This Sanskrit varsity, like condoning the attacks on Christians in coastal districts and women in a Mangalore pub, is about telling its upper caste supporters: 'Here's proof that we are still loyal and please wait until we Sanskritise the others'. It is also a move in line with this government handing over the centuries-old Mahabaleshwara Temple in Gokarna, a public temple, to the privately-owned Ramachandrapuram Math, which is avowedly into protection of cows. How can one allow the shining symbolism to escape here? That of pushing all that is public back to the exclusive domination of a particular people and community. The Sanskrit varsity is not merely a language university, but is actually 'Karnataka Veda mattu Samskruta Mahavidyalaya'. The title builds a natural alignment between Vedic studies and the Sanskrit language.

The motive of the government is clear on three counts.

One, it has not bothered to convincingly explain why it is spending crores of public money on a Sanskrit varsity when a dozen of them already exist across the country and almost all the regular universities in the state have a Sanskrit department. With no growing body of knowledge in Sanskrit, the mandate for this new university is hazy. Would this institution be another one to dig up the past and write a skewed exegesis? Surely, no sensible person will ever run down the wealth of knowledge available in the ancient language and the heterogeneous worldviews the many texts written in it offer. But the issue before us is: will the diversity of knowledge expressed in the language ever be counted for study here? Or will we be offering institutional cover, yet again, to some frenzied souls to express their rabid thoughts on presumably the Vedas? If this university were about a bigger mission to recover Sanskrit from the communal gorges it has been pushed into over the centuries, it would be a welcome revolutionary measure.

However, this project does not offer any such hope because the government has made its preference clear by cleverly prefixing the word 'Veda' to the title of the varsity.

The second reason for me to read an ulterior motive is the indifference with which the government is treating public criticism on the project. No minister or the chief minister has condescended to respond to the doubts being raised. They seem to think that silence will solve the 'unnecessary haggling' going on about such an 'innocuous' decision in an 'unimportant' corner of our public space. To turn a deaf ear to the debate and allow time to kill the issue is a clever ploy. Intellectuals may not lead an insurrection and this may not be a 'roti-kapda-aur-makkan' issue that will shake the government at its roots, but it is still the responsibility of an elected government to acknowledge all public debates.

The third count is employing a Dalit as the special officer to do the spade work for the university. Given the caste sensitivities involved, this makes it all the more difficult for any concrete opposition to build up against the project. This is the kind of Chanakyan finesse that the RSS is known to operate with and the BJP government has borrowed a trick or two from its parent organisation.

The Kannada activists, scholars and intellectuals have woken up a tad too late to resist the Sanskrit varsity. The orders for the varsity were passed in late 2008, but they are speaking up only when a Bill for legislative sanction has come up before the current session of the state Assembly. At the outset, they have questioned the total absence of debate before the setting up of the varsity and have pointed out to the prolonged discussions that had preceded the setting up of the Kannada University in the late 80s. The irony cannot be missed here: when a university for the state's official language had to pass several tests, how is it that the Sanskrit varsity has had such a smooth ride?

Kannada scholars have also argued that the government should make it clear as to what would this university's level of engagement be with the rest of the languages in the state, such as Tulu, Konkani, Kodava, Urdu, besides Kannada. Since enormous research and voluminous writing has already taken place on ancient Sanskrit texts and the Vedas, they want to know what unique research perspective the university would adopt to revisit these texts. But by far the most important suggestion has been to alter the very structure of Sanskrit university.

Kannada scholars feel the varsity should extend its scope to include the study of classical texts written in Pali, Prakrit, Persian (Farsi) and other ancient languages too. All these languages, they have highlighted, have had an influential presence in the Kannada geographical space over the ages. Kannada has had the most vibrant interactions with these languages as much as it has negotiated for its own identity with Sanskrit. Some scholars rightly feel that Kannada's crucial interactions with Persian, Pali and Prakrit have been neglected simply because they have been identified with Islamic, Buddhist and the Jain traditions respectively.

A few others have suggested that it would be a worthwhile effort if this varsity is mandated to study the reports, letters and literature penned by European missionaries and travellers to the Kannada country in the earlier centuries. This valuable material has not been accessed as yet, primarily because they are in European languages. In other words, the scholars want the university to become a classical studies centre rather than a Sanksrit studies platform. They want it to be Kannada-centric and enrich Karnataka's worldview rather than serve the narrow traditions of Brahminical Sanskrit.The BJP government is pretending not to listen to all this because if it does, its Hindutva agenda would be subverted.