This paper discusses the historical and contemporary relationship between geopolitics and Sanskrit, and consists of the following sections:

I. Sanskrit is more than a language. Like all languages, its structures and categories contain a built-in framework for representing specific worldviews. Sanskriti is the name of the culture and civilization that embodies this framework. One may say that Sanskriti is the term for what has recently become known as Indic Civilization, a civilization that goes well beyond the borders of modern India to encompass South Asia and much of Southeast Asia. At one time, it included much of Asia.

II. Interactions among different regions of Asia helped to develop and exchange this pan-Asian Sanskriti. Numerous examples involving India, Southeast Asia and China are given.

III. Sanskrit started to decline after the West Asian invasions of the Indian subcontinent. This had a devastating impact on Sanskriti, as many world-famous centers of learning were destroyed, and no single major university was built for many centuries by the conquerors.

IV. Besides Asia, Sanskrit and Sanskriti influenced Europe's modernity, and Sanskrit Studies became a large-scale formal activity in most European universities. These influences shaped many intellectual disciplines that are (falsely) classified as “Western”. But the “discovery” of Sanskrit by Europe also had the negative influence of fueling European racism since the 19th century.

V. Meanwhile, in colonial India, the education system was de-Sanskritized and replaced by an English based education. This served to train clerks and low level employees to administer the Empire, and to start the process of self-denigration among Indians, a trend that continues today. Many prominent Indians achieved fame and success as middlemen serving the Empire, and Gandhi's famous 1908 monograph, “Hind Swaraj,” discusses this phenomenon.

VI. After India's independence, there was a broad based Nehruvian love affair with Sanskrit as an important nation-building vehicle. However, successive generations of Indian intellectuals have replaced this with what this paper terms “Sanskrit Phobia,” i.e. a body of beliefs now widely disseminated according to which Sanskrit and Sanskriti are blamed for all sorts of social, economic and political problems facing India's underprivileged classes. This section illustrates such phobia among prominent Western Indologists and among trendy Indians involved in South Asian Studies who learn about Sanskrit and Sanskriti according to Western frameworks and biases.

VII. The clash of civilizations among the West, China and Islam is used as a lens to discuss the future of Sanskriti across South and Southeast Asia.

VIII. Some concrete suggestions are made for further consideration to revitalize Sanskrit as a living language that has potential for future knowledge development and empowerment of humanity.

In modern Westernized universities, Sanskrit is taught primarily as a language only and that too in connection with Indo-European philology. On the other hand, other major languages such as English, Arabic and Mandarin are treated as containers of their respective unique civilizational worldviews; the same approach is not accorded to Sanskrit. In fact, the word itself has a wider, more general meaning in the sense of civilization. Etymologically, Sanskrit means "elaborated," "refined," "cultured," or "civilized," implying wholeness of expression. Employed by the refined and educated as a language and a means of communication, Sanskrit has also been a vehicle of civilizational transmission and evolution.

The role of Sanskrit was not merely as a language but also as a distinct cultural system and way of experiencing the world. Thus, to the wider population, Sanskrit is experienced through the civilization named Sanskriti, which is built on it.

Sanskriti is the repository of human sciences, art, architecture, music, theatre, literature, pilgrimage, rituals and spirituality, which embody pan-Indic cultural traits. Sanskriti incorporates all branches of science and technology - medical, veterinary, plant sciences, mathematics, engineering, architecture, dietetics, etc. Pannini's grammar, a meta-language with such clarity, flexibility and logic that certain pioneers in computer science are turning to it for ideas is one of the stunning achievements of the human mind and is a part of this Sanskriti.

From at least the beginning of the common era until about the thirteenth century, Sanskrit was the paramount linguistic and cultural medium for the ruling and administrative circles, from Purushapura (Peshawar) in Gandhara (Afghanistan) to as far east as Pandurang in Annam (South Vietnam) and Prambanam in Central Java. Sanskrit facilitated a cosmopolis of cultural and aesthetic expressions that encompassed much of Asia for over a thousand years, and this was not constituted by imperial power nor sustained by any organized church. Sanskriti, thus, has been both the result and cause of a cultural consciousness shared by most South and Southeast Asians regardless of their religion, class or gender and expressed in essential similarities of mental and spiritual outlook and ethos.

Even after Sanskrit as a language faded explicitly in most of Asia, the Sanskriti based on it persists and underpins the civilizations of South and Southeast Asia today. What Monier-Williams wrote of India applies equally to Southeast Asia as well: “India's national character is cast in a Sanskrit mould and in Sanskrit language. Its literature is a key to its vast religious system. Sanskrit is one medium of approach to the hearts of the Indians, however unlearned, or however disunited by the various circumstances of country, caste, and creed” (Gombrich 1978, 16).

Sanskrit unites the great and little traditions:

A bi-directional process facilitated the spread of Sanskriti in South and Southeast Asia. The top-down meta-structure of Sanskrit was transmitted into common spoken languages; simultaneously, there was a bottom-up assimilation of local culture and language into Sanskrit's open architecture. This is analogous to Microsoft (top down) and Linux (bottom up) rolled into one. Such a culture grows without breaking down, as it can evolve from within to remain continually contemporaneous and advanced.

Pan-Indic civilization emerged in its present composite form through the intercourse between these two cultural streams, which have been called the "great" and "little" traditions, respectively. The streams and flows between them were interconnected by various processes, such as festivals and rituals, and scholars have used these “tracers” to understand the reciprocal influences between Sanskrit and local languages.

Marriott has delineated the twin processes: (i) the “downward” spread of cultural elements that are contained in Sanskrit into localized cultural units represented by local languages, and (ii), the “upward” spread from local cultural elements into Sanskrit. Therefore, Sanskrit served as a meta-language and framework for the vast range of languages across Asia. While the high culture of the sophisticated urbane population (known as "great tradition" in anthropology) provides Sanskriti with refinement and comprehensiveness, cultural input produced by the rural masses ("little tradition") gives it popularity, vitality and pan-Indian outlook.

Once information about local or regional cultural traits is recorded and encoded in Sanskrit, they become part of Sanskriti. On the other hand, when elements of Sanskriti are localized and given local flavour, they acquire a distinct regional cultural identity and colour. Just as local cultural elements become incorporated into Sanskriti, elements of Sanskriti are similarly assimilated and multiply into a plurality of regional cultural units.

Sanskriti includes the lore and repository of popular song, dance, play, sculpture, painting, and religious narratives. Dimock (1963, 1-5) has suggested that the diversity to be found in the Indic region (i.e. South and Southeast Asia) is permeated by patterns that recur throughout the country, so that each region, despite its differences from other regions, expresses the patterns - the structural paradigmatic aspects - of the whole. Each regional culture is therefore to be seen as a structural microcosm of the full system.

Sanskrit served two purposes: (1) spiritual, artistic, scientific and ritual lingua franca across vast regions of Asia, and (2) a useful vehicle of communication among speakers of local languages, much as English is employed today.

Early Buddhist scriptures were composed and preserved in Pali and other Prakrit (local) languages, but later started to also be composed in what is known as "hybrid Sanskrit." There was a trend using elegant, Paninian Sanskrit for both verbal and written communication. Tibetan was developed based on Sanskrit and is virtually a mirror image of it.

By the time of Kalidasa (600 C.E.) Sanskrit was mastered diligently by the literati and was, therefore, never a dead language. It is living, as Michael Coulson points out, because people chose it to formulate their ideas in preference to some other language. It flourished as a living language of inter-regional communication and understanding before becoming eclipsed first by Persian and then by English after the military and political conquest of India.

Refuting the habit of dividing the Prakrit languages of India into two structurally separate “North” and “South” independent families, Stephen Tyler explains that “[M]odern Indo-Aryan languages are more similar to Dravidian languages than they are to other Indo-European languages" (Tyler 1973: 18-20).

There is synergy between Sanskrit and Prakrit: A tinge of Prakrit added to Sanskrit brought Sanskrit closer to the language of the home, while a judicious Sanskritization made Prakrit into a language of a higher cultural status. Both of these processes were simultaneous and worked at conscious as well as subconscious levels (Deshpande 1993, 35). As an example of this symbiosis, one may point to various Sanskrit texts in medieval India which were instruction manuals for spoken or conversational Sanskrit by the general public (Deshpande 1993; Salomon 1982; Wezler 1996).

Understanding this leads us to a vital insight about Sanskriti: Given this relationship between Sanskrit and local languages, and that Sanskriti is the common cultural container, it is not necessary for everyone to know Sanskrit in order to absorb and develop an inner experience of the embedded values and categories of meaning it carries. Similarly, a knower of the local languages would have access to the ideas, values and categories embodied in Sanskriti.

Unlike the cultural genocides of natives by Arabic, Mandarin and English speaking conquerors and colonizers, Sanskrit had a mutually symbiotic relationship with the popular local languages, and this remained one of reciprocal reinforcement rather than forced adoption through coercion or conquest.

This deeply embedded cultural dynamism could be the real key to a phenomenon that is often superficially misattributed to the British English: how modern India despite its vast economic disadvantages is able to produce adaptive and world-class individuals in virtually all fields of endeavour. This dynamism makes the assimilation of "modern" and "progressive" ideologies and thought patterns easier in India than in many other developing countries. In fact, it facilitates incorporating "modern" innovations into the tradition. It allows India to achieve its own kind of “modernity” in which it would also remain "Indian," just as Western modernity is built on distinctly European structures despite their claim of universality. This is why Indians are adaptive and able to compete globally compared to other non-Western traditions today.

Centuries prior to the trend of Westernization of the globe, the entire arc from Central Asia through Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, Viet Nam and all the way to Indonesia was a crucible of a sophisticated pan-Asian civilization. In A.L. Basham's “A Cultural History of India,” it is said that:

However, unlike the violent spread of Europeanism in recent centuries, this Sanskritisation of Asia was entirely peaceful, never resorting to physical force or coercion to subvert local cultures or identities, or to engage in economic or political exploitation of the host cultures and societies. Its worldviews were based on compassion and mutual exchange, and not on the principle of conquest and domination. This is not to say that political disputes and wars of conquest never occurred, but that in most instances, neither the motive nor the result was the imposition of cultural or religious homogeneity.

The following passage from Arun Bhattacharjee's “Greater India” elaborates this point clearly:

This Sanskritisation in Asia provided an adaptive and flexible unity to those regions it influenced. For example, in Thailand you can find the city of Ayodhya and Thai versions of the Ramayana. In Java, a local forest inhabited by monkeys is thought to have been the home of Hanuman at some point and the current residences his descendents. Every polity influenced by this Sanskritization was able to incorporate the vast Sanskriti culture into its own. This malleability provided a non-invasive and unimposing diffusion.

Sanskriti and Southeast Asia:

The establishment of trade (of goods and mutual material benefit) between India and Southeast Asia was the mechanism of this culture and knowledge trade:

This Sanskrit based civilization was not centrally developed in what is present day India, but was rather the collaborative effort of Indians with many Asian peoples, especially the Southeast Asians. For example, there were regular scholarly exchanges between thinkers from many diverse parts of Asia.

Many Asian kings sent their best students to centers of learning in India, such as Taksasila and Nalanda, which were ancient equivalents of today's Ivy Leagues in America where the third world now sends its brightest youth for higher education. King Baladeva of Indonesia was so supportive of the university in Nalanda that in A.D. 860 he made a donation to it (Basham 1975, 449). The support given to the university from a foreign king thousands of miles away in Southeast Asian demonstrates how important scholarly exchange was for those regions under the influence of Pan-Asian Sanskriti.

Interestingly, the geographies mentioned in the Puranas, such as Ramayana and Mahabharata, include many countries, especially of Southeast Asia, as a part and parcel of the Indic region. This indicates an ancient link between South and Southeast Asian even before the relatively modern Sanskritization that is being discussed here.

Sanskriti and Thailand:

Sanskriti has an established and obvious influence in Thailand, dating from 1500 years ago to the present day. Sanskrit was used for public social, cultural, and administrative purposes in Thailand and other regions of Southeast Asia.

In Thailand, Sanskrit is highly respected today as the medium of validating, legitimating, and transmitting royal succession and instituting formal rituals.

Furthermore, India and Sanskriti directly influenced aspects of Thai aesthetics such as architecture and art.

Dance and theatre also continue to reflect the underlying influence of Sanskriti.

In linguistic terms, Sanskrit had the same cultural influence on Thai as Latin had on English. In other cases, Pali influenced more than Sanskrit - for instance, a person who knows Pali can often guess the meaning of present day Cambodian, Burmese, Thai and Lao, and this Pali impact was largely from Sri Lanka. Basham points out:

Sanskriti and China:

China and India had a unique and mutually respected exchange. Buddhist thought is the most notable and obvious import into China from Sanskriti influence. The Tang dynasty provided an opening for the Chinese civilization to welcome Sanskriti coming from South and Southeast Asia.

The characteristic of the recipient “pulling” knowledge is typical in the transmission of Sanskriti and is to be contrasted with the “pushing” model of the spread of Christianity and Islam by divine fiat. Unlike Christian evangelists “pushing”, Hiuen Tsang and I-Tsing came from China to “pull” knowledge by learning Buddhism and other disciplines in India and taking them back.

An outstanding scholar who dipped into India's prestigious centers of learning to transfer know-how to China was I-Tsing:

Chinese pilgrims were officially sent to Indian holy sites to pay homage on behalf of the Chinese emperorship. The presence of Chinese pilgrims was a practice of close interaction between the Sanskriti superstructure and the Chinese civilization.

The exchange was by no means unidirectional. Indian gurus and pandits also went to China and were received with honor by the Chinese. These holy men went to China not just to exchange ideas but also for the practical task of translating Sanskrit texts into Chinese.

Buddhism's spread across Asia is well acknowledged, but beyond mere religion, this pan-Asian civilization also become a fountain of knowledge in fields as diverse as arts, language, linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, botany, martial arts and philosophy. For instance, in China:

The arts were also centers of confluence of Chinese culture and Sanskriti. Motifs and styles as well as actual artists were exported to China.

Indian musicians also traveled to China and even Japan to share their talent.

It is little wonder that Hu Shih, former Chinese ambassador to USA is said to have remarked that India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.

Implications:

While today's globalization is largely the Westernization of the globe, the earlier civilizational expansion was a mutually nourishing form of Sanskritisation that made huge impacts on the intellectual and cultural development of India, China, Japan, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, present-day Afghanistan and Central Asia.

As will be discussed later, beyond Asia, Indic civilization profoundly influenced Europe's modernity and the enlightenment movements. While Sanskrit's positive role in world history is well documented, awareness of this is primarily confined to a few narrowly specialized scholars. The current teaching of world history tends to be Eurocentric and ignores the contributions of other civilizations and traditions.

Sanskrit can help generate the necessary knowledge systems in order to explore the objectives, methods, and institutional dynamics of intellectual life in contemporary Asia. Also, the history of Sanskrit and Sanskriti can provide the modern world a model of how cultural diffusion can lead to a harmonious and synergetic flowering of humanity rather than forced assimilation through oppression and subjugation. The colonial and neo-colonial necessity of a master/slave relationship in the spread of influence is neatly refuted by the legacy of Sanskriti.

Since 12th CE, Sanskrit slowly declined in India under political duress and, while remaining an important influence, gradually lost its vitality as the cornerstone for a pan-Asian culture.

While many universities in India were destroyed by invaders from West Asia, it is telling that there was no new major university founded during the entire 500 year Mughal rule over India.

India's valuable lead as knowledge producer and exporter was lost, and India became an importer of know-how from and dependent upon Europeans, a fate shared by much of Southeast Asia.

Europe's “discovery” of Sanskrit:

The European colonial mindset was one of discovery with the goal of appropriating the “discovery.” One need not look hard to find vivid examples of this in the conquest of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The “discovery” of Sanskrit and Sanskriti by European scholars followed this model quite well. European scholarship saw potential in the Sanskrit language not only for exploration on its own terms, but also to take back to Europe and use for imperial purposes.

Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawaii, brought to my attention a colonial wall carving in Oxford which blatantly boasts of the intellectual conquest of Sanskrit by the British. Chakrabarti wrote as follows:

It took me nearly two years to locate the carving in Oxford, which I had to personally visit to see and then to go through a bureaucratic quagmire to get the following picture of it.

The picture symbolizes how academic Indians today often remain under the glass ceiling as “native informants” of the Westerners. Yet in 19th century Europe, Sanskrit was held in great awe and respect, even while the natives of India were held in contempt or at best in a patronizing manner as children to be raised into their master's advanced “civilization.”

In 1794 the first chair of Sanskrit in Europe was established in Copenhagen. In 1808, Schlegel's university had replaced Hebrew and Arabic with Sanskrit. Sanskrit was introduced into every major European university between 1800 and 1850 and overshadowed other classical languages which were often downsized to make way for Sanskrit positions. This frenzy may be compared with today's spread of computer science in higher education. The focus on Sanskrit replaced the earlier focus on Arabic/Persian as the source of intellectual thought.

As a part of this frenzy among Europe's leading thinkers, Sanskrit replaced Hebrew as the language deemed to belong to the ancestors of Europeans – eventually leading to the Aryanization of European identity, which, in turn, led to the cataclysmic events of the following century.

Most of the famous European minds of the 19th century, by their own testimony, were either Sanskritists, or were greatly shaped by Sanskrit literature and thought by their own testimony. Professor Kapil Kapoor describes how Europeans have benefited from Sanskrit:

To this list of “revolutionary” European thinkers who benefited from Sanskrit, one may add many more, such as Bopp, von Humboldt, Grassman, Schlegel, Max Muller, Voltaire and J. S. Mill. Max Mueller's very influential book, “What India can teach us,” gave a strong push for the European assimilation of Sanskrit thought. The French, ranging from Voltaire to Renoir, and the British also learnt a great deal via the Germans. In the 19th century, there was also a shift away from the Enlightenment Project of “reason” as the pinnacle of man, and this was influenced by Sanskrit studies in Europe and eventually led to a departure from Aristotelian thought to structuralism. Many disciplines in Europe got a boost from the study of Sanskrit texts, including philosophy, linguistics, literature and mathematics.

Sanskrit used to boost White Christian Supremacy:

European “discovery” of Sanskrit brought the opportunity to appropriate its rich tradition for the sake of the Europeans' obsession to reimagine their own history. Many rival theories emerged, each claiming a new historiography. The new European preoccupation among scholars was to reinvent identities of various European peoples by suitably locating Sanskrit amidst other selective facts of history to create Grand Narratives of European supremacy. Exploiting India's status as a colony, Europeans were successful in capturing Sanskrit and Sanskriti from India in order to fulfill their own ideological imperatives of reconciling theology (specifically 'Semitic' monotheism, from which Christianity sprouted) with their self-imposed role of world ruler.

One of the leading promoters of Aryan theories, Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) described the inception of his discipline as the starting point for a new science of human origins:

The central theme to this reinvention of European (read “Christian”) narrative was of origins and, thus, implied destinies. Determining what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden was considered central to this. The newly discovered language of Sanskrit and its literature proved to be vast and erudite and the uncovered links between European language and Sanskrit excited the scholars and encouraged an assimilation of this most ancient and profound linguistic culture. At the same time, the perceived spiritual providence that the Abrahamic God had bestowed on Europeans in the form of Christianity had to be incorporated and synthesized into the narrative. The “scientific” and empirical evidence of linguistic survey had to coincide with theological laws.

The formation of two mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed groups of peoples was the device constructed to achieve this need – these were the Semitic 'race' and the mythical 'Aryans'. The Semitics, synonymous with the Hebrews, were portrayed as a sedentary, passive, inclusive, and trapped in time. However, they were a people who were in communication with the one true God and thus held the seed of religion.

The rightful rulers of the world had to have been intelligent, moral, active, and industrious - a people willing to explore and expand, conquer and dominate. The concocted Aryan race was assigned this role. Scholars coined various ethno-linguistic terms such as “Indo-European”, “Indo-Germanic”, and “Aryan” to refer to this newly discovered people, and used these interchangeably to refer to the linguistic family as well as a race.

The key players in the scholastic juggling act who attempted to reconcile the Semitic and the Aryan included several famous European scholars, namely: Renan, Pictet, Max Muller, and Grau. Christian supremacy and Christian manifest destiny was central to the works of these Orientalists.

These scholars' main objective was to use scientific reason to substantiate theological necessities no matter how far the hard facts had to be bent. Max Muller, in reference to comparative philology, explicitly stated the orientation of his research:

Since the paradigmatic expectations of the scholar are exposed as foregone conclusions of his analysis, the bias and subjectivity in the writer's scholarship becomes obvious. Furthermore, the Christian supremacist agenda behind his work is obvious:

He deplored the tactlessness that many Christian missionaries exhibited in their dealings with pagans, and advocated subtlety in asserting superiority:

One large problem about the synthesis was that the Vedic religion had to be shown as barbaric and primitive in order to legitimize the need to colonize Indians. Therefore, it could not have been the beliefs of the ancestors of Christian Europe with its perceived religious supremacy. The scholars were forced to reconcile with the paradox of how the intellectually superior Aryans believed in such a low form of religion. Pictet was forced to ask himself:

The result of such groping in the dark was pathetic and childish. The theories proclaimed with great aplomb fit into a general framework of Aryan people being superior in every way except the spiritual impetus to be world rulers. Therefore, the early Indo-Europeans were said to posses the seed of monotheism which did not sprout until the providence of the Abrahamic God through Christ. Pictet justifies this 'primordial monotheism' as follows:

Christianity was thus deemed to be the destiny for the Aryans to adopt and eventually transmit to the whole world. Grau, a German Christian evangelist, took this idea to a new level by purporting that though the Aryans were “endlessly adaptable”, without Christianity the Aryans were hopeless and lost. In other words, they “suffered a congenital lack of backbone provided by monotheistic Christianity” (Olender, 106). The preservation of Christian dominance was Grau's primary directive.

Parallels with the Self-Appropriation of Judaism by Europe:

An interesting parallel is to examine the colonial mindset of self-appropriation of knowledge in the case of the Jews for the creation of the European identity. Though history-centric monotheism was appropriated by Europe from the Jews to be implemented in the colonial scheme, the Jews were excluded as “others” and even denigrated. For example, Grau is explicit in his distancing Christian Europeans from the Jews.

The theme of feminizing the colonized by the masculine conqueror is also applied to the Hebrew people.

In one fell swoop of the ideological axe, European scholars were able to take ownership of the 'backbone' of monotheism through Christ and the masculine traits of world domination.

Indian Influence on European Linguistics and Postmodernism:

In the early 19th century, Sanskrit grammar, philology, and linguistics were being studied intensely in Europe. One of the basic concepts of Sanskrit grammar is how domains of knowledge, music, language, society, etc. hang together. Every such domain, as per this principle, is constructed such that no unit has meaning by itself, but meaning exists only in a two-dimensional system. Such a system is a network of opposites in two dimensions: paradigmatic (vertical) and syntagmatic (horizontal). Saussure later used this central concept from Pannini's “Astadyhayi” to formulate his Structuralism model. By contrast, Aristotle's morphology is mere taxonomy, i.e. a mere system of enumeration. His system does not show unity via relations, and his world is not a cohesive unified system. Over the following fifty years, there came about a revolution in European thought in the use of this “structuralist” mode of thinking, even though it was much later that Saussure formalized the system and then Europeans gave it the name “Structuralism.”

Around the 1860s, Sir Charles Lyall worked in geology in morphological studies of fossils, which is a special case of what became later known as structuralism. This was a major discontinuity in European thought, and is believed to be the influence of Sanskrit structure of knowledge. Charles Darwin's work in the 1880s was also morphological in method. In the 1890s, Germany developed morphological schools, and Russian formalist schools also came up. Morphological schools came up in Europe in geology, botany, literary theory and linguistics.

A key figure in this East-West influence was Saussure, a Professor of Sanskrit in Geneva, and an ardent scholar of Panini. He later moved to Sorbonne, where he taught the famous lecture series on linguistics. The notes from this series were compiled later by his students into the published work that is still regarded as the “origin” of Structuralism. But it is amazing that this published work by his students did not even mention Panini or Sanskrit or any Indic works at all! What a blackout!(1)

Saussure's own PhD dissertation was on “Genitive case in Sanskrit,” a fact overlooked in today's historiography of European linguistics. It is unclear if Saussure himself suffered any embarrassment about learning from Sanskrit. He published a paper titled, “Concept of Kavi,” for instance. Unfortunately, he did not publish very much himself, and relied on students to do that after him. Saussure's works became the foundation for all linguistics studies throughout Europe.

What gets labeled as "difference" in French postmodern thought via Derrida is actually the Indian Buddhist theory of apohavada which Saussure had researched and taught in France in his Sanskrit seminars.(2)

It is important to note that Pictet mentored and influenced Saussure's understanding of linguistics and philology. Saussure was fifteen when he first began correspondence with Pictet whose work Saussure claimed “took the reader 'to the threshold' of the origin of language and 'of the human races themselves'” (Olender 99-102). It is more than likely that the presuppositions and biases in Pictet's work flowed through the mentor/student relationship down to Saussure's work.

One of the consequences of Saussure's work was that it reduced the need for Europeans to study Sanskrit sources, because Saussure's formulation into French, repackaged by his students without any reference to Sanskrit, meant that subsequent scholars of linguistics could divorce their work from the Sanskrit foundations and origins of the principles of Structuralism.

Structuralism, once formulated and codified by Saussure's students, became the watershed event and gateway through which many developments were precipitated in European thought. For example, Levi Strauss applied Structuralism in the 1930s/40s to the study of societies.

Trubetzkoy, who belonged to the famous Praha (modern Prague) school of Sanskrit, is now called the “Father of Structural Phenology.” Yet today's books on the subject rarely mention his debt to Sanskrit for his ideas. (His PhD dissertation from Moscow University in 1916 was on the Rig Veda.)

Later in the 20th century, Post-Structuralism was developed in response to Marxist critiques of Western society. There was loss of faith in Enlightenment reason after World War I, because going beyond religion into reason had resulted in such massive calamities. TS Eliot and WB Yeats started the inwards movement in literature and history, respectively, going away from exclusive belief in 'reason.' They reinterpreted the classical Eurocentric Grand Meta-Narratives. The new thinking was that a structure is not just an absolute or abstract entity, but is in N number of manifestations.

After World War II, there was a general dislike for Grand Narratives and linear progression theories of all sorts. Post-Modernism became a rejection of all tendencies of Grand Narratives. Hence, the focus is on small stories of small people and centers on the literature of Subaltern peoples, the marginalized sectors of society. Monism/Modernity is replaced by Plurality. However, the relationship between Marxism and Indic frameworks has been too simplistically based on the Marxist critiques of European societies. What has not been adequately examined is that many Post-Modernist principles are deeply embedded in classical Indian thought, i.e. many truths, many ways of telling the truth, and many paths being valid.

European colonizers embarked on ambitious campaigns to assert their cultural and religious superiority. They systematically bred many generations of Indians under their tutelage, making them embarrassed of their own “backward” heritage and pressurizing them to sycophantically mimic the “modern” West for their ideal “civilization.” An example is the famous Macaulay's Minute which became the blueprint to remove Sanskrit from India's education system and replace it with English:

Even more shocking than this is that some19th century Bengali apologists of Hindu renaissance internalized this contempt and became anti-Sanskritists. Ram Mohan Roy's intellectual legacy continues unabated in that science and Sanskrit are still held to be incompatible and mutually exclusive. Sanskrit was dismissed as a dead language of ancient liturgy without a future, its advocates declared a sentimental, nostalgic miserable lot brooding over its lost, past glory. Modern, Westernizing Indians are afraid that Sanskrit learning will undermine the secular and scientific spirit and ideal of independent India. To learn Sanskrit is to oppose progress, evolution, and to reinforce elite, Brahmanical hegemony on the masses. Roy, who is sometimes described as a champion of modern India, strongly protested against the decision of the committee of Public Instruction set up by the colonial authorities to start a Sanskrit college in Calcutta. In a letter written in 1823 he argued,

The long term result of this trend has been to de-intellectualize the Indians, as explained by Prof. Kapoor:

Kapoor contrasts this with the attitude of “the self-respecting voice of an intellectually confident India” as represented by the 5th century philosopher of language, Bhartrhari, who emphasized the importance of understanding others' traditions but without abandoning one's own: "The intellect acquires critical acumen by familiarity with different traditions. How much does one really understand by merely following one's own reasoning only?”

Sanskrit enthusiasm after independence:

Independent India started out with great enthusiasm to preserve and recover its indigenous civilization, including the central place of Sanskrit in it.

Dr Ambedkar zealously worked to promote the composite civilization (Sanskriti) of India characterized by linguistic and religious plurality. A dispatch of the Press Trust of India (PTI) dated September 10, 1949 states that Dr Ambedkar was among those who sponsored an amendment making Sanskrit as the official language of the Indian Union in place of Hindi. Most newspapers carried the news on September 11, 1949 (see the Sanskrit monthly Sambhashan Sandeshah issue of June 2003: 4-6). Other dignitaries who supported Dr Ambedkar's initiative included Dr B.V. Keskar, India's Deputy Minister for External Affairs and Professor Naziruddin Ahmed. The amendment dealt with Article 310 and read:

But the amendment to make Sanskrit the national language of India was defeated in the Constituent Assembly. By way of consolation, (1) Sanskrit was granted a place in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, (2) Sanskritized Hindi to be written in Devanagari script was declared the national language of India, and (3) the slogans appearing on various federal ministry buildings and on the letter heads of different federal organizations would be in Sanskrit, and (4) a citizen of India would be able to make representations to the Government in Sanskrit.

In Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that the ancient past of India belonged to all of the Indian people, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and others, because their forefathers had helped to build it. Subsequent conversion to another religion could not deprive them of this heritage; any more than the Greeks, after their conversion to Christianity, could have ceased to feel proud of their achievements of their ancestors (Nehru 1946: 343). Considered the pioneer of Indian secularism, Nehru wrote:

Such thinking survives in many segments of India's intelligentsia today. In a verdict by the Supreme Court of India on the offering of Sanskrit as an option in the schools operated by Central Board of Secondary Education, the Honorable Judges quoted Nehru, and also drew attention to the "New policy directives on National Education" proposed in 1986 which included the following provision:

The Honourable Judges accordingly instructed the Board to amend its constitution and offer Sanskrit as an option forthwith after concluding:

In 1969, a delegation of members of parliament led by Dr. Karan Singh, met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and impressed upon her the need and the importance of promoting Sanskrit as the cultural lingua franca of India and proclaiming a Sanskrit Day to promote the cultural unity of India. Mrs. Gandhi supported the project. Since then Sanskriti is being promoted through a number of symbolic projects: Sanskrit Day is celebrated every year. A daily news bulletin in Sanskrit is broadcast on the All India Radio. The staging of plays in Sanskrit and production of films and documentaries in Sanskrit is encouraged.

Sanskrit Phobia:

Unfortunately, after a few years of honeymoon with Indian traditions, the marginalization of Sanskrit began in full force in independent India. Kapil Kapoor gives a good introduction to this:

This trend started with the mimicry of the 19th century Orientalist critique of Sanskrit as the language of hegemony and domination, which was based on the normative Western European experience being projected upon others. Not surprisingly, the title of an unpublished paper of Robert Goldman is "The Communalization of Sanskrit and Sanskritisation of Communalism." Lele similarly advises jettisoning of Sanskrit from its position of power, prestige and profit in favour of vernacular languages. The critical, subaltern school champions the local, the indigenous, and the autochthonous seeking the continuity and specificity of 'native' culture. The emphasis is on recuperating cultural authenticity of the subaltern from Sanskritic hegemony.

These attacks against Sanskrit are grounded in the following beliefs:

• There has been no connection between Sanskrit and Prakrit (and/or other vernacular languages of South Asia. This is because Sanskrit was entirely elitist and was never a spoken language and there were never any native speakers of it.
• Sanskrit has been an effective instrument of creating a civilization (Sanskriti) built on Brahmanical hegemony and domination of the subaltern classes.
• Sanskrit is a language of rites and rituals that are devoid of philosophical merit.
• Sanskrit does not have the expressive spirit and temper of science and technology. Hence, to make Indians modern they must abandon it.
• Sanskrit has no value to non-Hindu traditions. It would compromise secularism.
• As a dead language, Sanskrit has no future in the world culture.

While it is true that Sanskrit privileged a small percentage of the population - drawn from many castes and communities - as being learned, the same bias has also existed in every other learned tradition, such as Latin, Persian, Arabic and Mandarin, and is now true of the elitist role of English (Ironically the very scholars who are anti-Sanskrit, use and thrive on the hegemony of English.) Yet these other languages are not subject to the same political attacks as Sanskrit. European classics are respected in modern secular education, even though Socrates kept slaves and many famous European thinkers violated human rights. Likewise, classical scholarship in Persian, Arabic and Mandarin also accepted or even advocated social oppression of the under classes, such as women or non-believers, and yet these classical languages and their respective cultures are respected in the modern academy. This is accomplished by focusing on their positive aspects and downplaying their negative aspects, but the same treatment is not accorded to Sanskrit.

Kapoor explains this prejudice against Sanskrit as compared to other classical languages:

An important equality between Sanskrit and Western classics would also be achieved if we were to decouple the study of Sanskrit from the history of religious privileges and focus on its many positive qualities. In fact, the vast majority of known Sanskrit texts are in disciplines that are nowadays considered secular and not in Hinduism per se. Kapoor continues his comparison with Greek classics as follows:

Nevertheless, the negation of Sanskrit and its replacement by Eurocentric civilizational structures plagues the modern Indian education for several reasons. Orientalist discourse in Indology is based largely on a politics of emphasizing difference and irreconcilable dichotomies with reference to the civilization, religion, society and identity of the people of India – the old divide-and-rule strategy to control people of colour. One such major dichotomy that has been imposed as an intellectual lens is Sanskrit versus Prakrit and the related Sanskritic versus "subaltern" civilization. In its analysis of Sanskrit as an instrument of oppression and domination, Orientalist discourse (e.g. van der Veer 1993: 21) has a two-pronged strategy: (i) the fabrication of a phobia of Sanskrit based on selective analysis of “Brahmanical” ideas, values, and discourse, and the generation of a counter-image of non-Brahmin and non-Hindu groups and their alleged oppression. The result is the charge of Sanskrit as an instrument for creating and sustaining “Hindu Hegemony.”

Western Indologists, such as Sheldon Pollock and Robert Goldman, and their Indian counterparts have embarked on the task to exhume, isolate, analyze, and theorize about the modalities of domination rooted in Sanskrit as the basis of Brahmanical ideology of power and domination. They assume that Sanskrit and the classical culture based on it have radically silenced and screened out of history entire groups and communities of disadvantaged persons. They therefore seek to construct new perspectives that accords priority to what has hitherto been "marginal, invisible, and unheard" people and their (non-Sanskrit) languages.

This construction of Sanskritic (equated by them as Brahmanical) domination is coupled with a hermeneutic for understanding the continuity of specific past forms of violent sediments in contemporary India. In fact, the subaltern “others” are often held together as a category by a single principle, namely, having a common enemy who is deemed to be the cause of all their problems. This common enemy is Sanskriti. Such a task, they feel, entails solidarity with its contemporary victims: subalterns, women, religious and cultural minorities. Here is one such example:

For example, Prof. Vijay Prashad is among those who have championed a massive Western funded program to create solidarity between Indian Dalits and African-Americans under the umbrella of a newly engineered identity known as Afro-Dalits. The thesis they proclaim says that Dalits are “the blacks of India” and non-Dalits, i.e. upper castes, are “the whites of India.” Using this framing, the history of American slavery gets transferred over to reinterpret Indian history, and to locate the cause of all Dalit socioeconomic problems on Indian civilization. Many Christian evangelists have jumped on this bandwagon as a great way to earn the trust of India's downtrodden, by projecting their fellow Indian countrymen and countrywomen as the culprits. The project includes reinventing the history of various Indian jatis to make them feel un-Indian and eventually anti-Indian. Once a certain threshold is reached, i.e. once the ground has been prepared, a given local activist “cell” can get appropriated by other more blatantly political forces. Many foreign funded activities are going on that create a separatist identity especially among the youth of these jatis. The intellectual cover for this anti-India work is under slick terms like “empowerment”, “leadership training” and, of course, “human rights”.

One may say that certain portions of the Indian left have been appropriated by the very same “imperialistic” forces which in their day jobs they attack. In fact, it is precisely such leftists who make excellent candidates to be recruited as they seem more authentic in their stands on India. This has created a career market for young Indians seeking to step into the shoes of such sepoys in order to enjoy the good life promised and delivered by the well funded foreign nexuses of South Asian Studies and related institutions of Church, government related think tanks and even the supposedly liberal media.

There is a major untold story in the way many Indian intellectuals play both sides, some more intentionally than others: On the one hand, they project images of being patriotic Indians winning recognition abroad and are being idolized back in India. On the other hand, they are deeply committed in often deliberately ambiguous work which can be made to appear in multiple ways, but which ultimately feed various separatist forces. Meanwhile, ambiguity serves as great cover because many Indians tend to be naïve about geopolitical implications of such work, are trusting of the good intentions of others or feel uncomfortable confronting problems they cannot deal with.

It is against this backdrop that much of the anti-Hindutva scholarship and lobbying works. Of course, most Hindus I know are against any form of religious bigotry, especially violence, for respect for every person's own sva-dharma (personal dharma) is a core Hindu value, and being Christian, Muslim, etc. falls under sva-dharma. But what most broadminded Hindus fail to realize is that underneath this attack on Hindutva there lies a broader attack on Indian Sanskriti, and this, in turn, feeds the pipeline of separatist tendencies. Naturally, many foreign nexuses have invested in such human and institutional assets while maintaining a “human rights” demeanour as part of their strategy of managed ambiguity.

Sheldon Pollock, one of the foremost Sanskritists of today, appears to agree with Edward Said in the need to reclaim "traditions, histories, and cultures from imperialism" (Said 1989: 219). He nevertheless insists that we must not forget that most of the traditions and cultures in question [India is obviously included in this] have been empires of oppression in their own right - against women and also against other domestic communities (Pollock 1993: 116). The Western Sanskritist, he says, feels this most acutely, given that Sanskrit was the principal discursive instrument of domination in premodern India. Thus Pollock deftly turns Said's attack on imperialism into nonsense by insisting that the subjugated Indians are themselves imperialists, as much as the conquering Europeans. In Pollock's view, the trend continues today, and Sanskrit is being continuously reappropriated by many of the most reactionary and communalist sectors of the population (Pollock 1993: 116). Needless to say, this line of imagining invites many Indian mimics who make their careers as India-bashers in order to prove their usefulness to the Western institutions they serve.

Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (1997) have no hesitation in declaring that the main purpose of the learned traditions preserved in Sanskrit is to underpin a static social and religious structure, while they spare similar criticism against the elitist Arabic and Persian based cultures. Additionally, they continue to make use of the loaded term "Brahmanical" in the formulating the following expressions: "Brahmanical orthodoxy," "Brahmanical social orthodoxy," neo-Brahmanical orthodoxy," "the high Brahmanical tradition," or "Brahmanical ruling ideology." Yet they fail to define and establish their premises of tyranny vested in whatever they mean by "Brahmanical," nor do they use similar rhetoric against “Mullah orthodoxy”, “Imam ruling ideology” and so forth when discussing Islam.

One of the pillars on which Sanskrit Phobia is sustained is the linearization of Indian civilization into arbitrary historical stages just to map India on to European historical stages. Kapoor criticizes this:

Contemporary Indologists and South Asianists (a term used by the US State Department to refer to scholars it depends upon for research on South Asia) emphasize a class conflict between Sanskrit and Prakrit. The use of the Marathi language by Jnanesvara, who was the son of an excommunicated Brahmin, according to Jayant Lele, initiated a revolt by the subaltern and the oppressed against the Brahmanical hegemony and the force of reaction symbolized by Sanskrit, a dead, fossilized language that had lost the ability to generate live, new meanings. Being monopolized by the ruling classes, Sanskrit held no meaning for Jnanesvara's community of the oppressed. Marathi, on the other hand, was the language of the living tradition of that community (Lele 1981: 109).

According to Lele, Sanskrit traditionally has been limited to the Brahmins and other higher castes. It was manipulated by the wily Brahmin leadership on behalf of landed or dominant castes to serve their own agenda and vested interests. The thesis may be stated as follows: Elitist Brahminism = (1) hegemonic Sanskrit + (2) homogenizing Hindutva + (3) subjection of the masses to forced Sanskritisation.

Varkaris (devotees of Vitthala) offered an all-encompassing blue print for transcending the context-bound interpretations of tradition while containing its essential ones. As per Lele, their use of Marathi language, a living language, in itself was a critique of domination and of Sanskrit, a language of oppression (Lele 1995: 70). By remaining fully involved in social life Varkaris subverted a significant hegemonic appropriative strategy. They explicitly denied the priestly role of a mediator relying on self-experience gained through the daily involvement in normal social life. They united spirituality with daily life experience and thereby opened up the possibilities for reflection on life that has inherent in it a transformative potential (Lele 1995: 71).

According to Lele, the Varkari critique involved rejection of external (Brahmanical) authority, magic and miracles, severe criticism of mindless rituals, secrecy, exclusivism and esoteric practices, insistence on full involvement in productive life, emphasis on the unity of the male-female principle in identifying both god and guru as mauli (mother manifestation), equal and authoritative status of the female poet-saints and a conscious and yet fully living use of the language and idiom of the oppressed classes indicate an attempt to widen discourse and to involve those who experienced the falsehood of a hierarchical social order in their daily life (Lele 1995: 72).

Lele's logic appears to be that simply by using Marathi, the Varkaris were “obviously” engaged in a “critique”; hence, their practices and themes must necessarily be a criticism of Sanskriti which was threatening to their individual and social identity. There are several flaws in such logic: (1) Many of these themes are not discontinuities but part and parcel of traditional Hinduism - uniting spirituality with daily life experience is, for instance, one of the main themes of the Bhagavad Gita, and worship of God as mother (and women poet-sages) is present in the Veda. (2) Initiation into profound and esoteric disciplines and the occurrences of miracles in the lives of the saints are all part of the Varkari tradition, as much as of “Brahminical” or traditional Hinduism. (3) Tremendous social, cultural and political disruptions in the form of Islamic invasions and iconoclasm may have also been a little threatening to individual and social identity of the Marathi-speakers. Indeed, it can be argued that the Varkari tradition blossomed at a time when traditional Hinduism was under tremendous stress from Islamic invasions and acted to shore up core local symbols, beliefs and ritual practices - such as pilgrimage - exactly as a culture symbiotic with Sanskritic learning would.

Apart from works such as the above that dubiously pit Sanskrit in a historical fight with the vernaculars, Sanskrit phobia is also being spread by a second line of attack, which uses contemporary Indian politics as the starting point. A research project (in partial fulfilment of a Ph D degree) submitted in 1994 to the Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago would serve as an illustration of that trend. The proposal by Adi Hastings (a cultural anthropology student at the University of Chicago) was provisionally entitled," The 'Revival' Of Spoken Sanskrit In Modern India: An Ethnographic And Linguistic Study." (This project has since been completed.)

Hastings described in detail his goal to examine recent attempts in India to promote and broaden the use of spoken "simple" Sanskrit. While the classical Sanskrit language has been supported by authorities as a medium of scholarly and literary discourse, it recently has been promoted by political groups as a future lingua franca and emblem of a specifically Hindu nation. Hastings's project sought to problematize the privately-funded movements to promote conversational “simple Sanskrit” as the emblem of a specifically Hindu nation.

He proposed the following working hypothesis: the movements under investigation have fashioned Sanskrit, India's classical literary language, into a sign which both represents and points to membership in an imagined Hindu national community. In promoting explicitly conversational Sanskrit, these organizations are trying to recapture elements of a perceived Hindu heritage, and in doing so to reinstate or revive what they see as the most important element or unifying thread of ancient Indian civilization.

Thus, Sanskrit, once symbolically identified as the exclusive property of certain restricted communities (entailing access to and mastery over certain forms of privileged knowledge), is now used to invoke a generalized and popular level Hindu cultural heritage. In this context, argued Hastings, Sanskrit would no longer function as a classical language (if indeed it ever was; cf. Kelly 1996), but would become a superordinated language of politico-religious unification.

Refuting the Sanskrit Phobics:

A dominant assumption common among Sanskrit phobic scholars, both Western and their Indian accomplices, is Gramsci's theory that the "vernaculars are written down when the people regain importance" (1991: 168). This is, unfortunately, untrue for both Europe itself and India. The history of the relationship between Sanskrit and the non-Hindu, non-elite populace suggests many positive interrelationships which Sanskrit phobics simply ignore. For example:

• Lele shares in the widely held belief that the emergence of regional languages in India was due to bhaktas who mostly came from the marginalized castes. But this is simply untrue. In Karnataka, for example, old Kannada literature was courtly, was suffused with Sanskrit, and was unintelligible to those ignorant of Sanskrit. Similarly many Tamil kings, poets and scholars of all castes, Jains and Hindus, appear to have been fluent in Sanskrit as well as Tamil, and this does not seem to have inhibited the development of Tamil in the least, but benefited both.
• In the north, some of the earliest regional-language texts were composed by courtly (elitist) Muslims (e.g. verses of Mas'ud Sa'd Salman, ca. 1100, of the Yamini Kingdom of Lahore). The relationships between language, literature, and social power cannot be analyzed by any simple formula transferred from Europe, as Lele does in order to interpret Indian contemporary politics using Sanskrit as the whipping boy (Pollock 1996: 244-245).
• Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, writing in the first decade of the nineteenth century about Bengal, observed, "The first rudiments of education are usually given...under the tuition of teachers called Gurus, who may be of any caste or religion."
• According to William Adam, there were more than 100,000 vernacular indigenous schools for the "indigent" classes in Bengal and Bihar in 1835. This averaged a school for every sixty-three children of school-going age (cited in Acharya 1996: 105, 99). In fact, colonial scholars sent to study India's education system remarked that native education was often more widespread than in England and that it included lower caste students.
• While the genealogical account found in many inscriptions is in Sanskrit, the “business” portion (i.e. details of the land grant etc) are in the regional language. This is an interesting indicator of bilingualism.

The importance of Sanskrit given in Jainism and Buddhism – which have always been against caste hierarchies – undermines the claim that Sanskrit was a Hindu/Brahmin hegemonic instrument. For example:

• Paul Dundas observes that Jains of Western India produced, from about thirteenth century onwards, an extensive literature of the types of narratives, chronicles, and biographies in a style that has been called "Jain Sanskrit" (Dundas 1996: 137). As the lingua franca of shastra, and general literary culture, Jains could enthusiastically utilize Sanskrit without any danger of compromising their sectarian identity and socio-religious values.
• In the days of Buddhists studies in China, when Indian Sanskrit scholars were translating Buddhist texts into Chinese with the help of boards of local scholars, there existed a school of Sanskrit studies in China. Clearly, this was not intended for the purposes of any Brahmin hegemony in China.
• Jan Houben draws our attention to the fact that testimonies of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims show that Sanskrit was widely used, not only in a great number of texts but apparently also in discussions. However, he laments that the background and precise circumstances of the shift of the Buddhist and Jain to Sanskrit and its importance for the development of Sanskrit as a "lingua franca" at least in the sphere of intellectual and religious discussion have not yet received sufficient attention (Houben 1996: 176).

At the meetings of the Constituent Assembly (1946-1949) members who were not Sanskritists, nor Brahmins, nor Hindus, moved an amendment to make Sanskrit the national language of India. Sponsors included Dr Ambedkar and Professor Naziruddin Ahmad. Standing up in the Constituent Assembly, Professor Ahmad declared:

This stance certainly unsettles the presumption that Sanskrit is a language of the wily Brahmins and other ruling elites who have been using it for centuries to dominate the masses.

Pollock feels the need to rethink received accounts that imagine a "resurgence of Brahmanism" leading to a "re-assertion of Sanskrit" as the language of literature and administration after the Maurya period (Norman 1988, 17-18; Kulke & Rothermund 1990, 85). Pollock instead suggests the possibility that a new cultural formation, a Sanskrit cosmopolis, was created and which continued until 1300 (Pollock 1996, 207).

Pollock persuasively argues that the prominence of Prakrit in inscriptional discourse does not represent ignorance or rejection of Sanskrit. Such a claim is based on the assumption that there was some type of invariable co-relation between Prakrit and Buddhism/Jainism and Sanskrit and Brahmanism. The available epigraphic evidence suggests, as Pollock affirms, that trans-regional use of Sanskrit for public political texts was instituted in South India by no specific event of political or religious revolution. A uniform idiom and aesthetics of politics, homogenous in diction, form, and theme characterizes all of India (Pollock 1996, 216-217). When vernacular languages were becoming popular among the masses, Sanskrit became the language of communication among them.

Sanskrit was appreciated by some of the Muslim rulers of India who patronized it, and, in some cases (as in Bengal and Gujarat), had their epigraphic records inscribed in Sanskrit. It was the scientific and secular aspect of Sanskrit that made the Arabs welcome Indian scholars to Baghdad to discourse on sciences and to translate books in these subjects into Arabic.

A large mass of literature in Sanskrit was not produced by any particular community. Several instances can be quoted of non-Brahmin and non-Hindu authors who have made significant contribution to Sanskrit literature. In Karnataka, 300 Sanskrit schools are nowadays being run by non-Brahmins.

Kapil Kapoor explains the non sectarian importance of Sanskrit as a major container of Indian civilization and national identity:

The table below summaries the main Sanskrit Phobic arguments and rejoinders to them:

Sanskrit studies have been pursued (whether within or outside India) in isolation from the true spirit of Sanskrit and Indians. Arvind Sharma has a provocative question: "What would have Sanskrit studies abroad looked like if they had originated in India and gone abroad, instead of originating abroad and then being adopted by the Indians?"

The House Indians:

To interpret the contemporary Indian intellectual fashion of selling out to the West, let us examine the framework established by Malcolm X in his analysis of a segment of African-Americans whom he labeled, “house Negro.” Malcolm X said:

In an analogous fashion, and entirely independently of Malcolm X, Kapil Kapoor analyzes the Anglicized and now Americanized Indian intellectuals' internalization of Western categories to form what they call Indian literary criticism. He writes:

As in the case of house Negroes, these house Indians enjoy great privilege from Western institutions either directly or indirectly. Kapoor continues his description of these self-hating Indians:

I regularly come across such house Indians in the US academic study of India. When the masters say, “jump,” the house Indian asks, “how high sir?”

Contrary to the wishful thinking of postmodernist literary theories and trends in pop culture, the competition among major civilizations is intensifying. Sanskrit phobia must be examined in the broader context of geopolitics today and not in the narrower context of local Indian sociopolitics only. Each of the main three contenders in the clash of civilizations – USA, China and Islam – deploys its own culture as a form of social and political capital, and each has a unique language in which its civilization is rooted.

There are pragmatic reasons behind the intensifying clash of civilizations, and ideology may often be a weapon rather than the underlying cause: Only one billion out of the six billion people in the world today live at Western levels of consumption, but by mid century most of the ten billion people (projected population level by mid century) will mimic Western consumerist lifestyles, and this will further pressure the environment, resources, capital and labor markets.

This global competition is deploying collective assets, such as identities, cultural capital and soft power. France, USA, UK, China, Arabia, Japan, etc. each wear their respective civilizations with great pride, and use it as a vehicle in international diplomacy, foreign soft power and cultural capital.

Every ancient civilization has had its social abuses, but the proud cultures named above do not throw out the baby with the bathwater, i.e. they each insist on reforming their tradition internally rather than demonizing it in world forums to gain legitimacy in foreign eyes or abandoning it in the name of “progress.”

The West (especially America), China and Pan-Islam are, therefore, each asserting themselves in this inter-civilizational competition for intellectual market share, projecting with pride their respective rich heritages which include languages. For instance, the rapid globalization of English language culture has privileged Western paradigms that are implicitly embedded in its literature and thought:

• Despite the numerical expansion of English speaking people in non-Western countries, the certification and legitimization of English and of its modern thought are controlled by standards established by Western institutions.
• These control mechanisms are diverse: prestigious awards, elitist institutional affiliations, jobs, financial grants, foreign travel, access to media channels, etc.
• The intellectual capital includes Eurocentric historiography, literature, philosophy, sociology, human rights theories, art history, and school curricula.
• The institutional backbone of the West that propagates this superiority includes government agencies, multinational religious institutions, academic establishments and private funding agencies.
• In this new inter-civilizational competition, everyone is equally invited to play; however, the rules, referees and rewards are often controlled by a few.
• In some instances, the dominant culture also selects and props up proxies to represent the third world in a fashion acceptable to the dominant religious and secular ideologies of the West.

The above figure shows how Sanskrit Phobia and the denigration of the Indic Civilization are often interrelated, how these might feed the subversion of sovereignty of Asian nation-states through the various levels of foreign intervention made possible by this.

If one were to apply this to a hypothetical scenario of Western intervention in China, the components might be as follows (not necessarily in this sequence):

• Attack on China's human rights
• Demands for internal reforms
• Critiques of Mandarin as hegemonic
• Denigration of Chine