Washington Post Bashes Sanskrit
Saturday, June 14th, 2008WASHINGTON, D.C. June 14, 2008: [HPI note: We were surprised to see this negative report on the "Speak Sanskrit" movement in India and Sanskrit in general, which includes statements including, "Such camps, run by volunteers from Hindu nationalist groups, are designed to promote a language long dismissed as dead...." "Dismissed as dead" is an inaccurate statement given that Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Hinduism and in daily use by hundreds of thousands of priests in tens of thousands of temples, including those in the Washington, DC area itself. The Post should have made more effort to understand the place of Sanskrit in Hindu religious life before running such an article.]
The article opens:
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.”
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