Actually, although the rationale of this always escaped me, what you wrote is not quite so: I indeed received two years of FLAS funding to study Sanskrit with you in the 1980s! The story I always heard is that someone found a census of India in which some village claimed Sanskrit as their everyday tongue, and this qualified it under title VI. Whatever the truth of the story was, it would indeed be difficult to make the case that Sanskrit is a 'strategic language' in any normal sense of that expression!

Very best, Jonathan

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Madhav Deshpande <mmdesh@umich.edu> wrote:

Hello Tim,

Sanskrit has never been funded through the federal title VI money, since it was restricted to modern languages only. For the sake of the modern languages of South Asia, we are all concerned about these cuts, and hope that the Congress will reinstate the money. But given the political situation in the US Congress, I am very pessimistic. Hope I am wrong.

Madhav Deshpande

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Ulrich T. Kragh <utkragh@hum.ku.dk> wrote:

Dear members of the Indology List,

I have heard and read that the US Congress in 2011 made a nearly 40% (ca. $50 Mill.) cut in the federal Title VI funding to all language programs and Area Studies in the USA. For background information, see for example:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/15/international_education_takes_hit_in_2011_budget

I would like to know, especially from the American members of the list, whether and how these cuts have affected programs of Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, and Indian studies in the USA and/or in the study-abroad programs.

Further, is there any news as to whether the lost funding will be reinstated in the 2012 budget now being negotiated in the Congress or are the cuts likely to remain?

From a concerned European colleague,

Tim

Dr. Ulrich Timme Kragh

IIAS, Leiden University

--
Madhav M. Deshpande
Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
202 South Thayer Street, Suite 6111
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608, USA

--
J. Silk
Instituut Kern / Universiteit Leiden

Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, LIAS

Johan Huizinga Building, Room 1.37

Doelensteeg 16

2311 VL Leiden

The Netherlands