The Great War rang the death-knell on multi-ethnic Empires. A War between Imperial cousins led to a great decline in the power and authority of the traditional landed aristocracy. In the short run, a military caste- e.g. the Junkers of Prussia- could gain a subsidy (e.g. the Osthilfe which President Hindenburg was so fond off) but, long term, they too were doomed.
Paul Valery, in 1919, wrote 'All civilizations are mortal'- which had been fucking obvious since the time of the Visigoths- and 'We now know that we are mortal'. Sadly, Valery wasn't one of the 1.3 million Frenchmen killed in the Great War. What didn't die in the trenches was the immortal souls of the patriots. States may crash and burn. But Religions are made of sterner stuff.
European supremacy was undermined and then extinguished by two World Wars and the rapid economic & military rise of non-European polities. But European Christianity did not disappear. Those who consider Religion the true basis of Civilization had no reason to mourn its death.
Sheldon Pollock, being a deeply silly man, wrote an article some 25 years ago titled 'the death of Sanskrit'. It takes, as its epigraph, Valery's fatuous pronouncement. Pollock may have hoped that Hinduism was dying in India and its death would bring about the death of Sanskrit. Pollock was wrong. Two States- Uttarakhand & Himachal- have made Sanskrit the second official language. As Hinduism gains in strength and resources, Sanskrit, along with the various Prakrits in which great Saints have composed hymns, has gained in prestige, influence and accessibility. On the other hand, it is true that academic Indology has turned to shit. But so have a lot of other sub 'Humanities' which have turned into Departments of Wokeness or Grievance Studies.
In the age of Hindu identity politics
which began with the Rg Veda.
(Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party)
The Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1916. The Jan Sangh separated from it after Independence. The BJP was formed when the Janata party (which came to power in 1977) split on the dual membership (of the RSS) issue. By 1997, people realised that 'dual-membership' wasn't a big deal. The BJP was able to come to power as part of a coalition.
and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad),
there are plenty of other constituents of the 'Sangh Parivar'. Thanks to Modi, the RSS is primus inter pares.
Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India’s past.
Shithead Pollock knows shit about the past of any country. He is too stupid to even be a historian. Since Indology was adversely selective of imbecility, it was in Indology that he got a chair or hammock to shit in.
Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the dominant culture language of precolonial southern Asia outside the Persianate order.
It is wholly irrelevant. Hinduism is separate from Jainism and Buddhism and is not dependent on Paninian Sanskrit even if it does have Sanskrit scriptures. Back in the Fifties & even the Sixties, there were some people who thought Catholicism would collapse because 'Latin was being abandoned'. But, it wasn't really abandoned at all. Similarly, though Hinduism is independent of any particular language though, no doubt, Brahmanism can't be divorced from Sanskrit Scripture.
Hindutva propagandists have sought to show, for example, that Sanskrit was indigenous to India, and they purport to decipher Indus Valley seals to prove its presence two millennia before it actually came into existence.
No. They have sought to show that Muslims, Communists, Christian Missionaries & shitheads like Pollock are enemies of Hinduism and thus should be 'cancelled'. This is a successful strategy. Nobody gives a fuck any more about Western Sanskrit Professors. Yet, when I was born (in Benares-on-the-Rhine) in 1963, German Indology was respected. Why? At one time it attracted smart people. Hermann Grassmann is now counted as one of the greatest of mathematicians. He translated the Rg Veda. By comparison Pollock & Witzel have the IQ of a cockroach. True, their students are stupider yet. But that's because only imbeciles will accept tutelage from cretins.
In a farcical repetition of Romantic myths of primevality, Sanskrit is considered—according to the characteristic hyperbole of the VHP—the source and sole preserver of world culture.
Which is why it is successful. It is in the interest of a Professor of Sanskrit to pretend it is super-duper. Saying 'the thing is shit' means only shitheads will want to study it.
I suppose Pollock thought that once Rahul returned to India, Congress would return to power & he might get rewarded for shitting on Hinduism by Sonia.
The state’s anxiety both about Sanskrit’s role in shaping the historical identity of the Hindu nation and about its contemporary vitality has manifested itself in substantial new funding for Sanskrit education, and in the declaration of 1999–2000 as the “Year of Sanskrit,” with plans for conversation camps, debate and essay competitions, drama festivals, and the like.
This shithead is a Professor of Sanskrit. He should be welcoming this initiative even if he is a Jewish American racist cunt who wanks while watching news coverage of the 'war on terror' in which over a million Muslims were killed.
This anxiety has a longer and rather melancholy history in independent India,
A Sanskrit Professor should feel sad (melancholy) when the language is down-graded. This cunt is weeping that independent India raised its status.
far antedating the rise of the BJP.
The BJP has its roots in Jugantar & other Hindu anti-colonial movements stretching back to the mid nineteenth century. Pollock knows nothing about Indian politics or history.
Sanskrit was introduced into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India (1949) as a recognized language of the new State of India, ensuring it all the benefits accorded the other fourteen (now seventeen) spoken languages listed. This status largely meant funding for Sanskrit colleges and universities,
The Brits had funded Sanskrit colleges- e.g. Benares Sanskrit College, established in 1791, Poona (1821) & Calcutta Sanskrit College, (1824). So had various Princes. Then came Malviya founding the Benares Hindu University at around the same time that the Mahasabha was formed. That funding continued. This shithead doesn't understand this. Still, it was only after 1960 that new Sanskrit colleges were founded as power shifted from an Anglicized barristocracy/bureaucracy to dominant agricultural castes.
and for a national organization to stimulate the study of the language. With few exceptions, however, the Sanskrit pedagogy and scholarship at these institutions have shown a precipitous decline from pre0Independence quality and standards, almost in inverse proportion to the amount of funding they receive.
The decline was equally steep in other disciplines. Just recently a Sanskrit PhD scholar in Kerala could not defend this thesis (written in English) in either English or Sanskrit or even manipravalay Malayalam!
Sanskrit literature has fared no better. From the time of its founding in 1955, the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) has awarded prizes in Sanskrit literature as one of the twenty-two officially acknowledged literary languages.
If they had given the award to praise poems for specific national heroes or projects (e.g. Bhakra Nangal), then there would have been a steady stream of such things. But, at that time, it was felt this smacked of feudal sycophancy rather than Socialist, Secular arse-licking.
But the first five of these awards were given for works in English or Hindi on Sanskrit culture,
No. It was given to profound scholars of Sanskrit who were the best in their field- e.g. P.V Kane history of Dharmashastra. Why were purely literary works not chosen? The answer is primarily political. Once the Left established its hegemony people like K.N Ezhutachan could be rewarded for a mahakavya on the history of Kerala.
while the first literary text honored was a book of pattern poems (citraka¯vya), an almost metaliterary genre entirely unintelligible without specialized training.
A medical doctor, Dr. Shankar Rajaraman has written works based on Citrakāvya,-specifically Devīdānavīyam and Citranaiṣadham. He got the President's medal. Shithead Pollock may not have the 'specialized training' to understand such works. But Rajaraman, who got Gold Medal for Sanskrit MA 5 years after Pollock wrote this shite, has enough training to say Pollock is ignorant of रूढि (emic custom or idiom) and hence can't understand the texts he studies.
Such disparities between political inputs and cultural outcomes could be detailed across the board.
State support for the 'Humanities' or 'Arts & Culture' is generally counterproductive. But this is also true of private Universities or Foundations.
What it all demonstrates—the Sanskrit periodicals and journals, feature films and daily newscasts on All-India Radio, school plays, prize poems, and the rest—may be too obvious to mention: that Sanskrit as a communicative medium in contemporary India is completely denaturalized.
Sanskrit means the opposite of Prakrit. It has always been 'denaturalized'. Pollock is a cretin.
Its cultivation constitutes largely an exercise in nostalgia for those directly involved,
Pollock may have nostalgia for a time when Professors of Sanskrit in the West weren't low IQ shitheads.
and, for outsiders, a source of bemusement that such communication takes place at all.
Why is Pollock saying 'my subject is dead. Don't study it.'? The answer was that he doesn't want smart Hindus- like Dr. Rajaraman- to denounce his ignorance, stupidity and anti-Hindu bigotry.
Government feeding tubes and oxygen tanks may try to preserve the language in a state of quasi-animation, but most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead.
While Hinduism lives, so does Sanskrit. What Pollock means is 'I wish Hinduism would just fucking die already.' That way Indian Doctors, Engineers and IT & FinTech billionaires will stop jeering at me for the stupid shit I write.
Although we often speak of languages as being dead,
which is the case when nobody speaks them & they aren't even used in any ritual context.
the metaphor is misleading, suggesting biologistic or evolutionary beliefs about cultural change that are deeply flawed.
Fuck does this cretin know about evolution.
The misconception carries a number of additional liabilities. Some might argue that as a learned language of intellectual discourse and belles lettres, Sanskrit had never been exactly alive in the first place.
Sanskrit, for Hindus, is a language of religion. Do Sadhus, Sadhvis & Pundits of various types still compose devotional or theological work in Skt? Yes. That's it. That's the whole story.
But the usual distinction in play here
this cunt doesn't know the 'usual distinction'. This is because he is very unusual, not to say special & needs special education.
between living and dead languages is more than a little naive. It cannot accommodate the fact that all written languages are learned and learnèd,
all languages can be written down. There is no difference between a written language and one which nobody has bothered to transcribe.
and therefore in some sense frozen in time (“dead”);
There is no such language.
or, conversely, that such languages often are as supple and dynamically changing (“alive”) as so-called natural ones.
A written computer language is not a natural one. All natural language can be written down.
Yet the assumption that Sanskrit was never alive
which no Hindu has ever made. You need to be a special sort of stupid to study Indology in the West.
has discouraged the attempt to grasp its later history; after all, what is born dead has no later history.
This shithead thinks he has said something truly profound. What is born dead may be revived & go on to have a long, glorious history.
As a result, there exist no good accounts or theorizations of the end of the cultural order that for two millennia exerted a transregional influence across Asia—South, Southeast, Inner, and even East Asia— that was unparalleled until the rise of Americanism and global English.
Nobody gives a shit about that. We are all going to die. Religion says we can have a great afterlife. For Hindus, this is a good reason to preserve knowledge & appreciation of Sanskrit. Since Shithead Pollock is not a Hindu, he hates his own subject and wants it to simply curl up and die already.
We have no clear understanding of whether, and if so, when, Sanskrit culture ceased to make history;
History isn't made by 'culture'. It is made by economic and military forces. Did studying Skt make Pollock stupid? No. He did a bit of donkey work in Skt. because he was too stupid to do anything else.
whether, and if so, why, it proved incapable of preserving into the present the creative vitality it displayed in earlier epochs, and what this loss of effectivity might reveal about those factors within the wider world of society and polity that had kept it vital.
What kept Hebrew vital was Jews. Israel revived that 'dead' language. True, the motivation of the Zionists wasn't per se religious.
Shithead Pollock doesn't understand that the reason West Europe came to dominate the world was because Spain & Portugal had religious zeal while Holland & England needed to develop naval power to keep their own established Churches safe. Religion can cause people to risk death to grow stronger & richer & thus more capable of sustaining a sophisticated literary culture and scalable civilization.
Is there anything he does understand? No. He is as stupid as shit.
In the memorable year of 1857, a Gujarati poet, Dalpatram Dahyabhai,
who was close to the Brits who wanted Gujarati to develop as a vernacular
was the first to speak of the death of Sanskrit:
The Brits were making it compulsory for most Hindu students in their schools to learn Sanskrit as well as their vernacular. People like Swamy Dayanand or Pandita Ramabhai or Shyamji Krishna Varma had risen greatly thanks to their knowledge of Sanskrit. Moreover, European savants were eagerly studyingSanskrit.
All the feasts and great donations King Bhoja gave the Brahmans were obsequies he made on finding the language of the gods had died. Seated in state Bajirao performed its after-death rite with great pomp. And today, the best of kings across the land observe its yearly memorial.
Whereas the Brits set up a Sanskrit college in Pune thirty years ago. From 1861 onward, Gujarat got its own Colleges and the standard of Sanskrit knowledge started to rise. This coincided with a great revival of Hindu religiosity which, quite naturally, soon took a Nationalistic turn. Shithead Pollock doesn't understand this.
The poet sensed that some important transformation had occurred at the beginning of the second millennium, which made the great literary courts of the age, such as Bhoja’s, the stuff of legend (which last things often become); that the cultivation of Sanskrit by eighteenth-century rulers like the Peshwas of Maharashtra was too little too late; that the Sanskrit cultural order of his own time was sheer nostalgic ceremony.
Fuck off! The meaning was 'follow the British policy of promoting vernacular languages- id est Gujarati. But to enrich Gujarati you have to revive Skt. scholarship. This is what the English had done to their own language by following Greek & Latin models. Shithead Pollock thinks there was some magic property associated with Skt. which, at one time, made it super special. Then, for some occult reason, that property was lost. I did suggest to him that it was lodged up his own bum and that he should chop off his own head and shove it up his rectum so he could find it for himself. Sadly, he ignored my sage advise.
This is a remarkable intuition of part of the story,
There is no fucking intuition. This is a Gujarati poem which points out that Hindus had been on the defensive for a thousand years. They must ally with the Brits to rise up. This meant using the vernacular and refining it using Sanskrit. This policy was continued after Independence. There's a good reason that the official language of the country is a highly Sanskritized Hindi.
but it is only part, and only intuition. What follows here is a first attempt to understand something of the death of Sanskrit literary culture as a historical process.
Sadly, Shithead is too stupid to do any such thing. Briefly, if the guys ruling your country speak a foreign language, then gradually, literary culture changes by a process of Tardean mimetics. Then if you get a print (or lithograph) revolution, the market increasingly takes the whip-hand. Remarkably, Shithead doesn't mention either of these two forces in the rest of his crazy article.
Four cases are especially instructive-
No. They have the same explanation. Either the Hindu rulers were shitty (in which case total factor productivity fell) or, in a crucial battle, did stupid shit (with the result that investible funds were confiscated such that general purpose productivity fell). Foreigners kept taking power because as soon as they became indigenized and turned to shit, they were replaced by other, hungrier, hardier, warriors from their ancestral homelands. Meanwhile, the profits from transoceanic trade reduced the fiscal viability of land-based Empires. One can say that Chinese literature too tended to decline without dying for similar reasons.
The disappearance of Sanskrit literature in Kashmir,
because rulers were shitty while Turkish power kept rising
a premier center of literary creativity, after the thirteenth century; its diminished power in sixteenth century Vijayanagara,
The Muslims deserved to win at Talikota. Could Vijaynagar have pivoted to become a naval power? Probably not. Still, Hindus of that area have good reasons to feel pride in their ancestors.
the last great imperial formation of southern India; its short-lived moment of modernity at the Mughal court in mid-seventeenth century Delhi;
which wasn't modern at all.
and its ghostly existence in Bengal on the eve of colonialism.
Not so ghostly that Sir William Jones couldn't learn Sanskrit from a Pandit from Nadiya. This directly led to the extraordinary explosion of Sanskrit scholarship in Europe.
Each case raises a different question: first, about the kind of political institutions and civic ethos required to sustain Sanskrit literary culture;
Culture requires security- i.e. strong defence & provision of law & order- as well as material resources. Where total factor productivity is rising- which may be the result of good institutions or high moral ethos but which may equally be the result of purely economic forces- culture of every 'normal' (i.e. positive Income elasticity) type is likely to burgeon.
Shithead is too stupid to understand Econ.
second, whether and to what degree competition with vernacular cultures eventually affected it;
That which is 'cultured' has always interacted with that which is 'natural'. This is the Sanskrit/Prakrit distinction.
third, what factors besides newness of style or even subjectivity would have been necessary for consolidating a Sanskrit modernity,
That factor is fucking obvious. If Sanskrit was used for 'modern' purposes- e.g. transoceanic navigation or astrophysics- it would be modern. I suppose Hebrew is now modern because the Israeli Army uses it while fighting modern wars.
and last, whether the social and spiritual nutrients that once gave life to this literary culture could have mutated into the toxins that killed it.
i.e. Hinduism killed Sanskrit because Hindus are horrible. Did you know that many of them do well in STEM subjects and then make fun of Pollock & Witzel just because they have shit for brains?
Soniaji should beat all the Hindoooos to death. Then Rahul should marry the Pope and give birth to lots of nice LGBTQ puppies. Pollock will teach them to bark loudly if they catch scent of any beastly Hindu who is keeping Sanskrit alive for some naughty, that is religious, purpose.
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