Sanskrit and the modernists baggage

When my daughter would go for her Sanskrit classes with the best of teachers, a friend would tell her, "Oh my, Sanskrit ! You are so strange !". My daughter having learnt to ignore random comments persisted and benefitted vastly.

That friend, herself good in Sanskrit, dropped out as she was getting ragged by her friends who were proud to speak only English !

The pathetic modern eduated indian.


Their self hate. Their hatred for their heritage, their local languages, their clothing, their gods ... and also for the local indians rooted in all of this.
Rajeev R. Singh Language is a language. Wonder why people object to others wishing to learn any language of their choice. If they wish to learn Sanskrit, it's their choice. Anyone else could be wishing to learn German or Bangla or Brajbhasha or Tamil or Gujarati or whatever language they wish to! Now a days we hear Urdu has become assigned more as a religion than a language. Very unfortunate, all this ....
Aparna Krishnan Hatred for roots. And self.
Mohammad Chappalwala I think sanskrit and english to be the same. Language of the rulers 


Vishwanath Srikantaiah Your ability to take one random comment and then sweepingly generalise is fabulous. The occupation of a moral high ground is also wonderful. There are children around the neighbourhood who are learning Sanskrit , some pick French too. There maybe some who sneer but many encourage too. Why bring strong stuff like hatred for roots and self ? What is roots for someone whose entire generations of forefathers have not spoken the language ? I am baffled.
Chitra Sharan Never thought learning a language was about being rooted. Anyways what is the definition of being rooted? Children comment, rag, snigger and say a lot of things to their friends and reading such deep meaning, may not be warranted. Sanskrit is strongly associated with a community and is seen as leaning towards religion and God, which probably has distanced people from it. We have Jabali an aetheist in Ramayana and therefore believing in God does not indicate rootedness. So what is being rooted? 


Aparna Krishnan Vishwanath Srikantaiah Seeing that you don't seem to understand, I will leave it to another who serves more straight. Yes, you may find him also in your category of 'moral high ground'. Yet, maybe you will understand the point at least.

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, writes in The Dance of Shiva,

“It is hard to realize, how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.”
Mohammad Chappalwala Yes please watch achooling the world the white mena last burden. And u will get that we are on the same page. However promoting Sanskrit or for that matter the language of dominant or ruler caste does not justify ur post. Same goes for urdu. 
 
Aparna Krishnan We are not in n the same page. You are unable to see the realities and richness and difficulties of people except through your lenses of oppressor and oppressed. And so you see just your conceptions, and miss reality. The same incidentally holds for those sold to any ideology, over reality. 


Mohammad Chappalwala how does this argument hold in what we are discussing about sanskrit 


Aparna Krishnan Move to a village. Live there. Immerse. Understand religion as they see it. Understand Sanskrit as they see it.

I have no other path to suggest. Namaskaram. 


Subramani Reddy Modernism = English education = affixing to doctrine is equivalent to my way or no way kind, which is derived from monothiest faith system. State is also of the same kind. 


Manohar Kamath If we loose Sanskrit and the local languages, we lose the knowledge and wisdom in them. I am working with Ayurvedic doctors to dig deep into ancient knowledge and discovering how most don't know good Sanskrit (to understand and interpret ancient texts). We can build a case against anything, but loss of knowledge and wisdom is a real loss.
Once we loose our ancient wisdom (& I don't care who created them, they are for humanity now) we have nothing much to offer other than labour and consumption...


Aparna Krishnan Yes. I have ceased to engage with those who cannot see beyond limited understandings of oppression and depression.

Also all folk stories speak of the poor Brahmin priest. The very ideal of brahminical was poverty and learning, a learning to be used for society. This whole brouhaha of the oppressive brahmin of yore ... And then to seek to throw our Sanskrit, Ayurveda etc, along with this notional oppressor ... Is self centred irresponsiblity at its extreme. 


Rajeev R. Singh This is a narration that I had seen a while ago. a bit long to read but useful in the context:- Contemporary languages and dialects, as they figure in the lives of most Indians, are a far cry from the stylized literary forms of Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages. North India especially can be viewed as a continuum of village dialects. As a proverb has it, "Every two miles the water changes, every four miles the speech." Spoken dialects of more distant villages will be less and less mutually understandable and finally become simply mutually unintelligible outside the immediate region. In some cases, a variety of caste dialects coexist in the same village or region. In addition, there are numerous regional dialects that villagers use when doing business in nearby towns or bazaars.

Since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, regional languages, such as Bengali, Punjabi, and Marathi, have become relatively standardized and are now used throughout their respective states for most levels of administration, business, and social intercourse. Each is associated with a body of literature. British rule was an impetus for the official codification of these regional tongues. British colonial administrators and missionaries learned regional languages and often studied their literatures, and their translations of English-language materials and the Bible encouraged the development of written, standard languages. To provide teaching materials, prose compositions, grammars, and textbooks were often commissioned and, in some cases, were closer to everyday speech than was the standard literary language. Industrialization, modernization, and printing gave a major boost to the vocabulary and standardization of regional tongues, especially by making possible the wide dissemination of dictionaries.

Such written forms still often differ widely from spoken vernaculars and village dialects. Diglossia--the coexistence of a highly elaborate, formal language alongside a more colloquial form of the same tongue--occurs in many instances. For example, spoken Bengali is so divergent from written Bengali as to be nearly another tongue. Similarly, Telugu scholars waged a bitter battle in the early twentieth century over proper language style. Reformers favored a simplified prose format for written Telugu, while traditional classicists wished to continue using a classical literary poetic form. In the end, the classicists won, although a more colloquial written form eventually began to appear in the mass media. Diglossia reinforces social barriers because only a fraction of the populace is sufficiently educated to master the more literary form of the language.

The standard regional language may be the household tongue of only a small group of educated inhabitants of the region's major urban center that has long exercised politico-economic hegemony in a region. Even literate villagers may have difficulty understanding it. The more socially isolated--women and Dalits (see Glossary)--tend to be more parochial in their speech than people of higher caste, who are often able to use a colloquial form of the regional dialect, the caste patois, and the regional standard dialect. An educated person may master several different speech forms that are often so different as to be considered separate languages. Western-educated scholars may well use the regional standard language mixed with English vocabulary with their colleagues at work. At home, a man may switch to a more colloquial vernacular, particularly if his wife is uneducated. Even the highly educated frequently communicate in their village dialects at home.

Only around 3 percent of the population (about 28 million people in 1995) is truly fluent in both English and an Indian language. By necessity, a substantial minority are able to speak two Indian languages; even in the so-called linguistic states, there are minorities who do not speak the official language as their native tongue and must therefore learn it as a second language. Many tribal people are bilingual. Rural-urban migrants are frequently bilingual in the regional standard language as well as in their village dialect. In Bombay, for example, many migrants speak Hindi or Marathi in addition to their native tongue. Religious celebrations, popular festivals, and political meetings are typically carried on in the regional language, which may be unintelligible to many attendees. Bilingualism in India, however, is inextricably linked to social context. South Asia's long history of foreign rule has fostered what Clarence Maloney terms "the linguistic flight of the elite." Language--either Sanskrit, Persian, or English--has formed a barrier to advancement that only a few have been fortunate enough to overcome. 


Ramanan Jagannathan It is unfortunate that Sanskrit is just looked at as the language of Hindus.People forget that just as Latin was Lingua academica among other things, Sanskrit was the lingua academica. Just ditching it citing the same means that we lose all the treasures that are there.
 
• Aparna Krishnan I more and more feel that many modern 'activists' actually care less for the land than for their notions. They will  sacrifice anything to protect their theoritical notions. What is Sanskrit, or the cornucopia of inherited learnings. Far more than that they will be happy to jettison.