Morning at my uncle's house in Delhi is special. I admire his approach to life. The day must start with a cup of good tea. The tea is precision made with attention and care as though creating an engineering design. The water, the leaves, the temperature and the time are all measured through various devices. The brew is then filtered into a thermos flask. The flask is set on the dining table. The host and the guest assume their seats. The tea is poured in to cups set on geometrically placed place mats. Some snacks would then appear in closed containers. The process is quiet, meditative and dignified. There is an element of concentration and hospitality. It is like British royalty doing an Indian yajna! in 1992, I had taken a tour of India with some students and friends from MIT. Everyday morning I used to get up and walk to the nearby tea stall in whichever city we might have landed. Tea stalls were busy in the morning. Various kinds of people would show up. Most knew each other but they operated in quiet. They used tea as an aid in thinking. All in such establishments made their living day by day. Each day was a new day, the previous day did not carry on. There is an individuality and independence in drinking a cup of tea with mindfulness.
My aunt slept late and got up late. Most women do not participate in the morning tea ritual. Lately women are as much in work force as men are. They have to create strategies for the day than being careful about health and hormones. We do see women in the mornings in western coffeehouses. Women do have more delicate taste. They possibly would think of a drink as food rather than a ritual. My aunt has her own style. My mother had. My wife makes her own spicy tea!
Uncle and I discussed newspaper stories. There was a new right-wing government that had taken over the administration in India. The old party of the freedom veterans had been fossilized through ineptitude and corruption. The new people appeared to have too many slogans. India's political and economic process is difficult. Administration gets difficult through democratic procedures. Democracy has worked in India in local homogeneous units. Application of democratic methods in the larger domain containing all is tough. It is noble. India is a political experiment. Indians do like free speech and free vote. There is a free press. There had been efforts to dim India, it is lighting back!
In Indian set up, it is easy to form a political party and sway public opinion. The issues are many and the economy is fluid. India is still recovering from the colonial stress and has not been able to provide basic essentials to all her people. There is massive flow of population to the cities which are not designed for the new entry. There is violence, misconduct and social disorder. Many political parties operate on protest. One such party had captured the majority in the Assembly in Delhi city area. The members in this new party were young, but appeared as corrupt as the seasoned ones. Politics by definition could be a profession designed to breed corruption.
A person from the Indian national TV Doordarsan had been in touch while I was in Orissa. They wanted to take an interview on my views on Sanskrit language and its restitution. I had given them time at 9:30. They did show up. There was a young Sanskrit speaking journalist and a cameraman. They had some heavy gadgets to set up. Under instructions, I sat on the sofa. The young interviewer sat on a chair in front of me with his prepared questions. I asked him if I could review the questions. He was kind to share. I requested him to reorder them slightly such that my response could appear continuous.
The origin of Sanskrit language is not known though we may state that it roots through the oral literature of India. Human settlement in Indian subcontinent is at least forty thousand year old and archaeological evidence of society and village is available for ten thousand years. I am of the opinion that speech is a natural expression of human cognitive thinking. The words are not "found" but are "created". Sanskrit is a good repository to experiment on word creation. The question is how are the words are created. I think it has to be discovered in human neurology than artificial imitation. "Communication" is needed for the spread of the language, but a language must be "expressed" first before being communicated. "Communication" is governed by the audience, but "expression" is an individual human attribute. Every expression is a new manifestation.
Through Q&A we went through some of the new observations that were made in our papers presented in Bangkok. I tried to stress that the language has a deeper semantic component. Sanskrit language seemed to retain this semantic component in word creation. The semantic content helped create the mood that gets reflected in the voice. While a communication needs words, it is rendered through voice. This leads to the development of prosody which is the key in Sanskrit compositions. We do not know the neurological origin of prosody. The old Indian scholars have helped create maps of various possible avenues of manifestation giving us ample examples to study.
We discussed the formation of Sanskrit grammar and the proliferation of Sanskrit writing the first millennium AD. With the facility of creating new words from the semantic "roots", Sanskrit developed families of words which operate more like tree branches than individual specimens. However the organization of the branches has not been studied. While I think they are not arbitrary, I have not put sufficient work to prove the thesis. Some linguists create various phonetic rules and wander around to check where a root was possibly first used. I have not been a fan of of such correlation studies.
There were questions about Sanskrit research in India. I did talk about my observations on the jingoistic noise than analytic discoveries. Patronized through the Islamic and the colonial rulers, Indian scholars have gone into the descriptive mode than the discovery mode. People can cite pages of books without bothering why they are relevant to the students. Such rote reproduction lacks an application value. The student must know why the information is important.
Not much new material gets generated leading some to observe as though the language is dead. It is very much alive, but it has taken a religious conservative garb. It gets squeezed in monasteries and temples. Jobs are not created. Teaching jobs are few and the classes are designed to create new teachers. There is saturation. The new Government must release it and move it forward towards creativity.
The discussion did proceed to English translations from Sanskrit done by many western scholars for the last two hundred years. I expressed my reservation about the quality of the work produced. Also I showed my doubts on the motivation. Much of the work was propelled for religious conversion of the Indian public and one clearly sees the bias in creating a translation. The "superiority" concept is purely colonial and has to be fully rejected. With the use of English in India, the new youth are exposed to this literature by default. The western scholars might not have thought that such disservice might result through their hard work. India has to create many bilingual scholars to proceed towards new translation projects. It may take another century for the revival of Sanskrit. We wrapped up the interview about noon time. They said they would edit and get back. I joined my uncle and aunt for lunch. Then I took a short rest. I had to get ready to go to Special Center for Sanskrit Studies at the local Jawaharlal Nehru University where a seminar was organized.
