[INDOLOGY] Where can you do a BA in Sanskrit?

[Dominik Wujastyk]

The rationale was just curiosity.  I was chatting with a colleague about
student numbers and wondering why universities can't fill their classes
while online courses like yours can.  The question arose out of that.
Perhaps the online options are popular partly becausestudents can't
actually do a degree in Sanskrit at a university these days.  Instead of a
focus on language - for which there is a student appetite - they see a ton
of stuff that might seem irrelevant to them (at least at first
impression).

There's more to discuss about all this and about how Sanskrit degrees
worked in the past and how they might in the future, but email maybe is too
pedestrian and monologue-prone a medium.  When I did the Oxford BA, there
was the idea in the air that we were catching up with students doing Greats
who came to university with eight years of Latin and Greek already, from
their school years. I think the idea was that it was premature to dive into
culture and history if we didn't have the language.  That was perhaps
flawed.  The system was so different anyway, that it's hard to compare.  It
was a tutorial system, and there were no lectures.  Not one, in the whole
three year degree.  I vividly remember the first lecture on Hinduism I
attended, by Richard, and it was wonderful.  But it was in the first or
second year of my PhD.

Best,
Dominik
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