"The Story of my Sanskrit"

[Phaniapard]

Namaste. I am attaching an article "The story of my Sanskrit" by Ms.Ananya Vajpeyi appearing in "The Hindu" today. To my mind, this is a well known stereotypical portrait of sanskrit to which  Ms.Vajpeyi is trying to give additional currency. Thanks.

[Jsr Prasad]

Namaste.

1. In the name of 'The Story of My Sanskrit', it seemed that the author, Ms. Ananya Vajpeyi of this article tried to attack Mr. Dina Nath Batra, the coordinator of NGEC and eminent Sanskrit scholar and her Guru, Prof. Kapil Kapoor. There is no need to tell that the author is an 'admirer' of 'celebrated indologist' Prof. Wendy Doniger. After reading this, anybody can construe the real intention of the author of this article.

2. She has clearly stated the ideological difference with her Guru, by stating that "He (Prof. Kapoor) and I lost touch, partly because I went away overseas and partly because our political disagreements that were becoming increasingly apparent." When she (author) is able to appreciate Prof. Kapoor's passion towards Sanskrit that made him a 'memorable teacher', I really wonder why it felt difficulty to formulate, express and analyse concepts in Sanskrit of such a caliber trained under his tutelage. She did not mention what sort of Sanskrit commentaries she went through while working for her doctoral thesis.

3. I do not understand whether she met 'pandita maanyas' at the places she mentioned during her exploration on interpreting caste system. My heart goes out to her, on her apparent experience of hardships while achieving her mission. The comment of a panditammanya - '... only perverted women became scholars', does not mean entire pantheon of scholars think in similar lines in India. Perversion is a disturbed state of the psyche. A person cannot be a 'perverted' and at the same time a 'scholar'; otherwise, which is known as 'split personality.' In fact, women are revered a lot in our great land as one can recall the words of sage Manu - यत्रैतास्तु न पूज्यन्ते सर्वास्तत्रा'फलाः क्रियाः ।

4. Prof. Kapoor's endorsement of Hindutva spokesperson's statement on airplanes, cars, stem cell research in ancient India, has nothing to do with any 'caste system' that she was trying to understand. Though, I am not sure of airplanes and cars, but I am sure, somebody would soon decode something on stem cell research from Ayurvedic samhitas.

5. The author referred to her PhD guide, Prof. Pollock ( a Govt. of India - President Awardee) and his scholarship. No doubt, his dedication and contributions to Sanskrit are commendable, but his much debated article 'The Death of Sanskrit' (2001) is still raging controversy. I firmly believe, equal caliber of scholarship still exists in India. Only that, one should identify and approach right kind of scholars.

Finally, the last paragraph in the article brings in a lot of ambiguity. She basically missed the anubandha catushtaya of her narration.

With regards,

Dr. Prasad

On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 8:18 AM, Phaniapard <phani...@gmail.com> wrote:

Namaste. I am attaching an article "The story of my Sanskrit" by Ms.Ananya Vajpeyi appearing in "The Hindu" today. To my mind, this is a well known stereotypical portrait of sanskrit to which  Ms.Vajpeyi is trying to give additional currency. Thanks.

--
निराशीर्निर्ममो भूत्वा युध्यस्व विगतज्वरः।। (भ.गी.)
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Dr. Jsra Prasad,
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[Nagaraj Paturi]

One of the online responses to 'The story of my Sanskrit':

 

"I am Indian. I am in Europe for the last 10 years. It's interesting that children in Europe can learn Latin and Greek freely in schools, refer to the Greek/Roman heritage – accepted as the civilizational ethos of Europe - freely in humanities & social sciences, without it being debated by "secular-humanists". Is it our fault that India's antiquity/civilizational ethos is "Hindu/Vedic?" Or is there a better term? So-called "secular-humanist" parties oppose the teaching of Sanskrit in schools because of an imagined "religious" connection. Surely, “secular-humanists” ought to know that “Hindu” philosophy includes different schools of thought and knowledge traditions and that Sanskrit has the largest known atheistic literature corpus. And why force this Western construct of "secular-humanism" on us when there are equivalents in Indian knowledge traditions too? How "secular-humanist" is it to deny epistemological freedom to certain societies and guarantee the same to others?"

Prof.Nagaraj Paturi

Hyderabad-500044