to a marginalization of this knowledge and the degradation of the bearers of it to native informants. The Pandits had to deliver the raw material so to speak, the end products were to be finally manufactured by the superior techniques developed in Europe. In other words, their knowledge became valuable only once it had gone through the filter of European knowledge … The loss of authority … was not due to the intrinsic worth of either system, it was occasioned by the weightage awarded to Western scholarship by the political power it commanded.4
Great works in the sciences and arts continued to be written well into the nineteenth century, but the Indian intellectual tradition was almost wholly removed from the educational system.5 After Independence, the new Indian state’s official policy of “technology-centric modernization” resulted in the entire native scholastic heritage being described “as ‘traditional’ in opposition to ‘modern’ and, therefore, understood as retrogressive and an obstruction in the path of progress and development which had been given a totally materialistic definition.”6 In my early childhood, I heard Sanskrit only in temples or at weddings; in both cases, Pandits chanted verses that the majority of us — children and adults — couldn’t understand. In sixth grade, I began to learn Sanskrit as a compulsory subject at school, and a vast, stifling boredom engulfed me immediately. It wasn’t just the endless rote learning of verb conjugations and vocabulary lists; Sanskrit came to us surrounded by a thick cloud of piety and supposed cultural virtue. Immediately after Independence, a passionate national debate took place over the institution of a national language for the Indian nation state. English was of course a foreign tongue, but southern speakers of Tamil and Malayalam objected to Hindi as the national language because it would put them at a disadvantage in the competition for jobs and advancement. In this context, the eternal language of the cosmopolis was presented as a good choice by some because it now was equally alien to everyone, because it was nobody’s “mother tongue”: “I offer you a language which is the grandest and the greatest,” said Naziruddin Ahmad during a debate in the Constituent Assembly, “and it is impartially difficult, equally difficult for all to learn.”7
Others insisted that Sanskrit was a source of moral virtue, that its verses
breathe a high moral tone and display a precious note of what might be called High and Serious Enlightenment. Persons who are attuned to this spirit through an acquaintance from early childhood with verses of this type … have a balanced and cultured outlook upon life … The message of Sanskrit read or chanted is that of sursum corda, “lift up your hearts.”8
Eventually, Hindi was installed as the national language, but Sanskrit was accorded official status by the Constitution and taught in school. Our Sanskrit lessons were replete with High and Serious Enlightenment; the characters in our readers were pompous prigs of every age and gender who went on and on about Right Action and Proper Behavior. The vast irony was that every Indian child of my generation and after has voraciously consumed the brightly colored pages of the Amar Chitra Katha comic books, which re-create “Immortal Picture Stories” from India’s vast storehouse of narrative. In these comics, much is taken from Sanskrit literature, and in them, muscled epic heroes behave badly, lop off limbs and heads, tangle with monsters, and go on quests; queens launch intricate intrigues; beautiful women and men fall in love and have sex; goddesses bless and create havoc; great sages spy on voluptuous apsaras and inadvertently “spill their seed” and thereby cause dynastic upheavals and great wars. In short, the beloved Amar Chitra Katha comics contain all the gore and romance dear to a twelve-year-old’s heart, but we could read them only in Hindi or Tamil or English, never in Sanskrit.
And of course nobody ever told us about Tantric Sanskrit, or Buddhist Sanskrit, or Jain Sanskrit. By the beginning of the second millennium CE, Sanskrit had “long ceased to be a Brahmanical preserve,” but it was always presented to us as the great language of the Vedas.9 Sanskrit — as it was taught in the classroom — smelled to me of hypocrisy, of religious obscurantism, of the khaki-knickered obsessions of the Hindu far-Right, and worst, of an oppression that went back thousands of years. As far as I knew, in all its centuries, Sanskrit had been a language available only to the “twice-born” of the caste system, and was therefore an inescapable aspect of orthodoxy. At twelve, I had disappointed my grandparents by refusing to undergo the ritual of upanayana, the ceremonial investiture of the sacred string which would signal my second birth into official Brahmin manhood. This was not out of some thought-out ethical position, but from an instinctive repulsion at the sheer, blatant unfairness of a ceremony and a system predicated on the randomness of birth. Now Sanskrit was being forced on me, with all its attendant casteism, its outdated and hidebound and chant-y ponderousness. As soon as I was offered a choice — a chance to learn another contemporary language to fulfil requirements — I fled from Sanskrit and never looked back, until I had to ask, for the premodern poet in my novel: What makes a poem beautiful?
The poet Kshemendra — Abhinavagupta’s student — left this advice:
A poet should learn with his eyes
the forms of leaves
he should know how to make
people laugh when they are together
he should get to see
what they are really like
he should know about oceans and mountains
in themselves
and the sun and the moon and the stars
his mind should enter into the seasons
he should go
among many people
in many places
and learn their languages10
I have a sabbatical coming up. My plan is: (1) write fiction; (2) learn a functional programming language; and (3) learn Sanskrit.
In Red Earth and Pouring Rain one of the characters builds a gigantic knot. “I made the knot,” he says.
I made it of twine, string, leather thongs, strands of fibrous materials from plants, pieces of cloth, the guts of animals, lengths of steel and copper, fine meshes of gold, silver beaten thin into filament, cords from distant cities, women’s hair, goats’ beards; I used butter and oil; I slid things around each other and entangled them, I pressed them together until they knew each other so intimately that they forgot they were ever separate, and I tightened them against each other until they squealed and groaned in agony; and finally, when I had finished, I sat cross-legged next to the knot, sprinkled water in a circle around me and whispered the spells that make things enigmatic, the chants of profundity and intricacy.
When I wrote that book, when I write now, I want a certain density that encourages savoring. I want to slide warp over woof, I want to make knots. I want entanglement, unexpected connections, reverberations, the weight of pouring rain on red earth. Mud is where life begins.
Like palm-leaf manuscripts, the worlds the writer creates will finally be destroyed, become illegible. At least until they are re-excavated and become alive again within the consciousness of a future reader. I don’t worry too much about whose work will “last,” and if mine won’t. I do think endlessly about the shapes of stories, about the tones and tastes that will overlay each other within the contours. I don’t much like perfect symmetry, which always seems inert to me. The form of art rises from impurity, from dangerous chaos. When I can find perfection and then discover the perfect way to mar that perfection, I am happy. As a creator, I want to bend and twist the grammar of my world-making, I want crookedness and deformation, I want to introduce errors that explode into the pleasure of surprise. In art, a regularity of form is essential, but determinism is boring. When I am the spectator, the caressing of my expectations, and then their defeat, feels like the vibration of freedom, the pulse of life itself.