Spoken / modern Sanskrit

[Robert Zydenbos]

I have followed the multi-threaded 'modern Sanskrit' discussion with 
interest, and here come my two cents' worth on a few of the issues that 
were raised --

1. Indian census reports: they are certainly useful, but they cannot be 
taken seriously literally (cf. the strangely large number of listed 
languages spoken in India by one single person, or the number of castes 
with only one member). The census merely records what people claim about 
themselves. If someone claims to be a Sanskrit mother tongue speaker, 
nobody will check to see whether this person has made a truthful 
statement. Hence also the bizarre fluctuations in the numbers of 
Sanskrit speakers from one census to the next.

2. Mother tongue speakers of Sanskrit:  I know persons who have claimed 
they are. These persons are simply Kannada speakers with a special love 
of Sanskrit, and they want Sanskrit to figure in the census reports. 
Surely the same applies to the vast majority of others (if not all of 
them) who have claimed the same.

3. The 'Sanskrit-speaking village in Karnataka': this is something of a 
hoax; but as long as wishful thinking among romantics persists, queries 
about the village and claims that it exists will also persist. I know of 
a college teacher of Sanskrit (real Sanskrit) in Bangalore who is from 
that place, and he finds it rather embarrassing to say where he is from.

4. Politics: regrettably, the activities of organizations like Akshara 
have a polarizing effect. Some persons feel attracted, others feel 
repelled by the political message. In one issue of their monthly 
magazine, years back, I read an ultra-short story about a woman who had 
lost her three sons in a war with Pakistan, and when asked whether she 
was sad, she replied: "yes, I am sad that I could not send more sons to 
give their lives for the sake of the motherland". This more or less 
illustrates the general atmosphere.

5. Dead or not: the popularity of Sanskrit as an exam subject in high 
schools, in my own observation, is that it is thought to be (and 
apparently indeed is) a way to score high marks and thus raise the final 
average. And this is precisely because practically nobody (teachers 
included) considers Sanskrit a language of which active mastery is 
required or even desirable. The popular view is that it is quite dead, 
only spoken by respectable priests and pundits, and by a few less 
respectable dazed political right-wingers. I have heard reports of a 
renowned American Sanskritist [name suppressed] who travelled through 
Karnataka and Goa and wanted to speak Sanskrit to just about everybody 
he met. He could; but he was barely understood, and those who could 
answer in Sanskrit could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

6. Eternal intelligibility: the same applies to other dead languages, 
esp. Latin, Europe's equivalent to Sanskrit (for a passionate plea to 
revive the active use of Latin, see the recent bestselling book [!] by 
Wilfried Stroh, _Latein ist tot, es lebe Latein!_).

7. Usefulness: it can be really useful to speak some Sanskrit. More than 
once I have been in a situation where the only language in which I could 
communicate with a person (these persons were always scholars or temple 
priests) was Sanskrit even if in Karnataka it is, let us say, enhanced 
with Kannada, and in Pondicherry with Tamil and Telugu and English. The 
obvious reason for these additions is that Sanskrit is so little spoken 
that no uniform vocabulary for terms from modern and everyday life has 
developed. If one compares bilingual X-Sanskrit dictionaries, one finds 
that the compilers either declare neo-Sanskritic words from language X 
to be Sanskrit, or they think up new words (words that may become 
current in a geographically limited area, if at all).

8. Future: who knows? In the first issue of the Münchener Indologische 
Zeitschrift (to appear later this year), an interview in Sanskrit will 
appear which I did with a senior scholar in Udupi. This is an 
experiment, and I hope that it will actually be read. The man's Sanskrit 
is delightful: real (not the simplified stuff) and alive. The experiment 
aims at (a) creating an awareness that Sanskrit is still used, (b) 
encouraging people to help revive Sanskrit, so that it may become a 
medium of scholarly communication that eliminates the language barriers 
between various non-Indian and traditional Indian scholars.

Finally, for those who are interested: a few years ago I have written an 
article about the imperishability of Sanskrit, and its modern use: 
"Sanskrit: Ewige Sprache der Götter, wiedergeboren und noch immer da," 
in P. Schrijver and P. Mumm (eds.), _Sprachtod und Sprachgeburt._ 
Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2004, pp. 278-300.

RZ

-- 
Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Department fuer Asienstudien - Institut fuer Indologie und Tibetologie
Universitaet Muenchen
Deutschland
Tel. (+49-89-) 2180-5782
Fax  (+49-89-) 2180-5827
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~zydenbos