by B Mahadevan
[B Mahadevan is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. This write-up is an edited transcript of the lecture delivered by Professor Mahadevan at the Indian Institute of World Culture, Bangalore during August 10, 2003 at the invitation of Sri Thirunarayana Trust Bangalore.
This is the first draft of the write-up and is likely to undergo further refinements and corrections. Comments and suggestions are welcome.]
Introduction
I have chosen to talk about the relevance of Sanskrit in today's society. In fact I have been thinking about this often, for the last 10 years. To tell you the truth, until I was doing my PhD, I was learning, writing examinations and talking about Sanskrit using several other languages such as Tamil, English and Hindi. That is what most of us do when it comes to Sanskrit. Yet we pass judgments about Sanskrit, we discuss about how important Sanskrit is, we discuss as to what is good in Sanskrit and what is not good in Sanskrit – everything in some other language, usually in one's own 'Matrubhasha' and predominantly in English. I was also doing that.
Only when I was doing my PhD I happened to acquire some knowledge in Sanskrit, and ever since then, after I finished my PhD, the first question that naturally came to my mind was – 'why do we need Sanskrit?' I personally liked it; I personally enjoyed whatever little I have understood. I am not a Sanskrit scholar – let me clarify. But whatever little I have understood and have gone through in the last 10-12 years – there was one question that was ringing in my mind all the time, 'Do we need Sanskrit? And, if we need Sanskrit, what do we need it for?'
So it is only natural that I broached the subject with anybody who was willing to talk about it. What I am presenting today is, in some sense, an accumulation of my thoughts arising out of these discussions. I have discussed these issues with my students; I have discussed these in my house;
I have discussed these with my colleagues in the Indian Institute of Management; I have discussed these with professionals belonging to different areas like management consultants, software and so on. In some sense what I am going to present today represents a certain evolution of my thought in this subject. I would think that it continuously evolves in my mind. I personally don't think that I have reached any substantive conclusion or opinion on this particular issue, but what I would like to share with you is what appears to be a reasonable way of putting the pros and cons of the subject in the society and it being so, what does it mean, and what do we do? So that is going to be the broad context in which I intend to spend the next 45 - 50 minutes, or one hour, depending on the interest.
[For full article, please visit http://www.iimb.ernet.in/~mahadev/samskrit_why.pdf]
1 comment:
"why do we need sanskrit today?"
india being a predominantly hindu society, whose scriptures are all in sanskrit, and every hindu, who is a believer, would say some sanskrit shloka/ would listen to some chantings in sanskrit at temples or on religious occasions, would be too glad to understand the meaning of these sanskrit shlokas and mantras. the prayers would become more meaningful if the person understood what the significance of these chantings are. and there has always been some kind of opposition to accept a particular language as the language of the nation. hindi is our national language but many may not readily accept it as such. in such a scenario, why not teach sanskrit and speak sanskrit and make it the national language that can bind all of us together? that way we would all take much more pride in our scriptures and the wealth of knowledge that it contains as explained in many of the blog posts here.
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