Help preserve cultural diversity (Was: Language barriers --- financial barriers)

[Paolo Magnone]

Dear friends,

As this thread lingers on, I cannot help being baffled by the fact that 
the aspects of the problem that loomed large in my thoughts right from 
the first announce of it, to wit its broadly cultural, pedagogic, indeed 
even political implications, have not ever been so much as barely 
mentioned by anyone. I wonder whether this avoidance has been 
deliberate, as a potentially troublesome topic, or whether there is 
simply no widespread sensitivity to those aspects. But as more or less 
subtle insinuations that only English is worth being THE language of 
indological scholarship — and indeed, why not, of any scholarship — 
multiply, I thought I should “give my two cents”, to use an expression 
that would never occur to me if I were writing in Italian (we do not use 
money metaphors — or for that matter, we do not refer to money — nearly 
as pervasively as they do in (American) English).

This example helps to make my point: at the risk of stating the obvious, 
language is not a neutral instrument, but is integral with the world 
view it opens up. In Gadamer’s well-known words, “erst mit der Sprache 
geht die Welt auf”. Or, to use another expression only roughly 
translatable into English, language is die “Zusammengehörigkeit” (the 
interconnection or mutual pertinence) of the subject and the world. To 
some extent, the thinking and /ipso facto /speaking subject is “spoken” 
by the language as much as he speaks it. He can never transcend the 
linguistic world, but through other languages he can gain access to the 
worlds of others.

Now, like all other objects, India is different — was opened up 
different — in the different worlds. While I don’t want to belabour this 
point (who does not admire the pioneering work of the English fathers of 
indology?) I certainly would not like to give up — just as an example — 
a world envisioning India as a “Land der Sehnsucht... [ein] 
Wunderreich... eine verzauberte Welt... [ein] gesuchtes Land,  ein 
wesentliches Moment der ganzen Geschichte” (Hegel), in favour of 
another, where we are made to ask ourselves whether “we shall 
countenance, at public expense”, preserving the culture of a land with 
an “Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding 
school, History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns 
thirty thousand years long, and Geography, made up of seas of treacle 
and seas of butter” (English politician, historian and /poet/ Macaulay, 
only some fifteen-twenty years later). Of course, it would be unfair to 
the extreme to put a Macaulay up against Hegel (and a politician up 
against a philosopher); still, apart from the two personalities in 
themselves, I suspect there is as much typically Anglosaxon 
matter-of-factness speaking in Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian 
Education” as there is  typically German longing for the ineffable 
transfactual in Hegel’s winged eulogy of India. (By the way, Macaulay 
would have seconded the motion that indologists should give up writing 
in their respective mother tongues in favour of English, a language 
which in his opinion “stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the 
west”, embodying a literature “of far greater value than all the 
literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages 
of the world together”).

To leave that heroic age of the beginnings (the age of the “Renaissance 
orientale”, contributed to by many but eminently embodied by German 
Romanticism and bringing final fulfilment to that ideal of integral 
Humanism which was the promise of the first Rinascimento of Italian 
make) and to come to present day indology: all due allowance being made 
for the personalities and even idiosyncrasies of the individual 
scholars, there are unmistakably different flavours of indological 
scholarship that find expression in the different linguistic worlds. 
Whatever one may think of their respective worth, linguistic uniformity 
subtends cultural uniformity, which to me is an evil in itself, to be 
averted at all costs (and at that, I daresay the world is not faring 
particularly well with the globalized angloamerican monoculture :-). Let 
us preserve bio-diversity, let us preserve the rare indigenous varieties 
of cultural crops!

--
Paolo Magnone
Lingua e letteratura sanscrita
Università Cattolica di Milano

Jambudvipa  - Indology and Sanskrit Studies (www.jambudvipa.net)

PS - As for the concern raised by the very title of this thread, that 
the babel of tongues might constitute a barrier to the propagation of 
indological knowledge I cannot do better than quote the well-known 
/subhāṣita/: /anantapāraṃ kila śabdaśāstraṃ svalpaṃ tathāyur bahavaś ca 
vighnāḥ sāraṃ tato grāhyam apāsya phalgu haṁsair yathā kṣīram 
ivāmbumadhyāt. /Someone else may fancy that he would positively peruse 
/all/ literature relevant to his field /if only/ it were written in 
English; as for me, I candidly admit to being unable to attain 
omniscience anyway; there are sure huge amounts of knowledge that escape 
my grasp in spite of being couched in English (or Italian, or...); on 
the other hand, I may go for something that I regard as really /sāravat/ 
even if it is enshrined (I would say, rather than concealed) in some of 
the more out-of-the-way tongues.