The Death of Sanskrit*

In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India’s past. Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the dominant culture language of precolonial southern Asia outside the Persianate order. Hindutva propagandists have sought to show, for example, that Sanskrit was indigenous to India, and they purport to decipher Indus Valley seals to prove its presence two millennia before it actually came into existence. In a farcical repetition of Romantic myths of primevality, Sanskrit is considered—according to the characteristic hyperbole of the VHP—the source and sole preserver of world culture. The state’s anxiety both about Sanskrit’s role in shaping the historical identity of the Hindu nation and about its contemporary vitality has manifested itself in substantial new funding for Sanskrit education, and in the declaration of 1999–2000 as the “Year of Sanskrit,” with plans for conversation camps, debate and essay competitions, drama festivals, and the like.1 This anxiety has a longer and rather melancholy history in independent India, far antedating the rise of the BJP. Sanskrit was introduced into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India (1949) as a recognized language of the new State of India, ensuring it all the benefits accorded the other fourteen (now seventeen) spoken languages listed. This status largely meant funding for Sanskrit colleges and universities, and for a national organization to stimulate the study of the language. With few exceptions, however, the Sanskrit pedagogy and scholarship at these institutions have shown a precipitous decline from preIndependence quality and standards, almost in inverse proportion to the amount of funding they receive. Sanskrit literature has fared no better. From the time of its founding in 1955, the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) has awarded prizes in Sanskrit literature as one of the twenty-two officially acknowledged literary languages. But the first five of these awards were given for