INDIA, January 21, 2011: Sheldon Pollock, a renowned scholar of Sanskrit and Indian literary history, warned that in literary terms, India is on the verge of becoming a country as brand-new as America. He gave the keynote speech opening the Jaipur Literature Festival Friday morning. ‘It is now entirely legitimate to ask, if dismaying and disturbing, if within two generations there will be anyone in India who will have the capacity of reading Indian literature produced before 1800,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling that that number is slowly approaching a statistical zero.’
Of India’s ancient languages, it is only classic Sanskrit that is not endangered.
Mr. Pollock’s concern is over the loss of the treasury of literature that already exists and has been preserved over thousands of years. The scholar, who teaches at Columbia University, says he has become gravely concerned over 40 years of coming and going from India and learning its classical languages, including Hale Kannada, or ancient Kannada, in Mysore and Bangalore.
‘Over the 35 or 40 years coming to India…it’s been the same in classical Assamese, it’s the same in Bangla, it’s the same in Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya and all the way down the long list,’ he said. ‘India is on the verge of a potentially cataclysmic cultural ecocide.’
As general editor of Harvard’s Murty Classical Library, he’s trying to do his bit. A $5.2 million initiative aims to translate a variety of works from a slew of Indian languages. But he said a lot more needs to be done.