Dear Professor Karp,
The question of "resistance" arises in a a given political context, which those of us who live and work in India, and happen to care about Sanskrit, whether for cultural, scholarly,
religious, educational or other reasons, experience here on a daily basis for the past 2-3 years, but especially since May 2014.
In this environment, as I am sure you must know from news of current affairs in this country, everything, from the most innocuous name of a street or square that no one had paid attention
to for decades, to prestigious national institutions of higher learning; from what people eat to what people wear; from founding fathers to government holidays; from textbooks to novels and policy reports to poetry -- every single aspect of civic life is aggressively
being appropriated and painted with a saffron brush by the ruling dispensation. Minorities have never been so vulnerable at any time since Partition and Independence, nor has media discourse been so muted and stifled. (This reportedly happened during the Emergency
in the mid-1970s as well -- but at least then, it was a properly declared period of emergency, and people were aware that the rule of law had been suspended in favour of a state of exception).
It is in this very particular and increasingly suffocating situation that Sanskrit too, has become yet another weapon in the armoury of the Hindu Right, which it selectively "promotes"
(or rather, deploys) -- not because of love of the language or a genuine understanding of its historical significance and its wealth of knowledge -- but in order to further a majoritarian and communal agenda. Scholars and intellectuals -- like others in public
life -- have to resist this climate of intimidation and censorship, not because they may or may not have this or that linguistic preference or pedagogical skill, but because Sanskrit is now much more than an ancient, classical, dead or living language. It's
part of everything that has to be fought over to protect the diversity and inclusiveness of India, its secular state and its egalitarian Constitution. This is a difficult proposition when it happens to be a democratic mandate that has installed a Hindu nationalist
party in the Centre, with a majority vote.
My point was that as Indologists, philologists, historians and educators, we cannot allow the architecture of the Hindu Rashtra to rest on a scaffolding of Sanskrit. In failing to
be aware of the flaws and contradictions within the complex history of this rich language, in curbing our criticisms of the way it is implicated in caste ideologies and social inequality, and in abandoning its pedagogy and cultivation to inept if not malign
government bodies, we are remiss in our responsibility towards the very thing we claim to love the most.
With best regards,
Ananya Vajpeyi.