Language, culture, and society can be studied from various points of view. Classical Indology and Indian anthropology have different points of departure, but deal sometimes with the same material; the difference in background has generally prevented close collaboration. Classical Indologists tend to look upon Indian anthropologists as mainly interested in almost inaccessible hill tribes, in village superstition, and sometimes in contemporary affairs; moreover a synchronistic bias in methodology has often limited the potential richness of their studies. Anthropologists who study India, on the other hand, are often inclined to view classical Indologists as busy with case endings and etymological derivations, or as discussing obscure and long-forgotten doctrines. Yet neither field has been able to dispense with concepts traditionally handled by the other; for instance, anthropologists talk about language, and classical Indologists about culture. A recent example is the concept of Sanskritization, introduced by anthropologists with obvious reference to Sanskrit, the language to which the main attention of classical Indologists has always been directed. As a student of Sanskrit and classical Indology, I offer some reflections on Sanskritization with the hope that I am not altogether blind to the problems occupying anthropologists.

As Bharatanatyam dancers across the world talk about what they do through listservs, websites, and performance publicity—in academia's world dance courses and amidst international cultural diplomats—I keep re-encountering the Orientalist representation of a “pan Indian transhistorical” devadāsī. Her history is a linear deterioration of aesthetic quality and personal agency, from temple to courts and from courts to streets and to (deserved) abandonment from where the dancer and the dance must be rescued (see Hanna 1993; Banerji 1983).

The lifestyle of the sadir dancers of the early twentieth century was extensively researched by Amrit Srinivasan (1979–81) and documented in her ethnographic dissertation at Cambridge University 1984 and in subsequent articles.2 The devadāsī was selected for her talent. She was highly trained in dance, texts, and music, and she performed temple rituals. Her freedom from household responsibilities (grhastya) was made possible by the largesse of a patron, and bhakti theology legitimized “both the housewife and god's wife as parallel life-possibilities” both for women and for those men who could afford to support both kinds of liaisons. Temples frequently reimbursed devadāsī-s with bourses and land donations.

Dancers today persist in maintaining that dancers had no “technique” since they danced only for God, that they knew nothing of music or theory, performed in a vulgar manner, and that contemporary dancers are much more beautiful, intelligent, and better trained.

Professor Edgerton has offered us in his recent work on Buddhist Sanskrit (a monument to almost twenty years' labour) a material of delightful richness. It required both courage to undertake such a work and great persistence to carry it through. No doubt each reader will at first look eagerly to see how the cruces which have long baffled him have been resolved here; then to see how much new matter is offered in the elucidation of texts where he has himself after long searching been able to gather up some small amount of the widely scattered evidence. He may even venture to estimate how much of the harvest has been garnered and how much still remains to be brought in.

An etymology long current among Indo-Europeanists runs as follows: Gk. “ the dark underworld ” ( “ dark, gloomy ”, “ black, dark ”), Goth, riqis “ darkness ” (riqizyan “ to become dark ”, riqizeins “dark”) Arm. erek “evening”, Skt. rajas “darkness, dimness; dark space, space; dark mist, mist, cloud, atmosphere; dust, dirt; pollen; arable land (as black); the darkening quality, passion, emotion; the second of the three gunas whose nature is active, urgent, and variable ”. As far as the first three languages are concerned the equation is simple and straightforward; but the Sanskrit word creates difficulty on account of the extreme variety of meanings which it is said to possess, and the semantic problems which this involves.

Collins’ book presents a comprehensive, if necessarily concise, approach to the issue of the relations between Sanskrit—very broadly conceived, including various South Asian languages and writing systems—and Malay, equally broadly conceived, as his work contains forays into other Austronesian languages such as Tagalog, Batak, Rejang, and so on. Collins is not a Sanskrit specialist. Besides, in such a comprehensive and succinct work, covering so many fields, it is inevitable that the author will occasionally fall short here and there, although this in no way detracts from the value of his book. In particular, there is a complex interlocution that the author weaves throughout his text with his intended audience (see below for details). Collins has in fact made a name for himself in Malay linguistics, and perhaps his best known work (extant both in English and Indonesian translation) is Malay,World Language: A Short History. In the book reviewed here, Collins largely taps into over a quarter of a century of his own research and publications in English, Malay, and Indonesian, as well as a plethora of centuries-old colonial works related to Nusantara, originally published in Spanish, Dutch, English, French, and German (he can apparently read in all these languages, bar perhaps Spanish). It is a very informative and delightful work, and it should be translated into English and made more widely known.

. . . the people of India love and venerate Sanskrit with a feeling which is next only to that of patriotism towards Mother India.

Report of the Sanskrit Commission, 1956–57

This essay raises the language question in its relationship to the wider problematic of the nationalization of pasts by focusing on the curious and puzzling status accorded to Sanskrit in the nationalization of the Indian past in this century. I use the words ‘curious’ and ‘puzzling’ deliberately, for the Sanskrit issue unsettles many well-entrenched assumptions about language and nationalism that circulate in scholarly circles and popular imagination. Just as crucially, Sanskrit's (mis)adventures in the past century or so, draw our attention to the troubling linguistic turns taken by the nationalization process in India with its disquieting complicity with colonial categories and certitudes. The concerns of this paper have thus been shaped by three related issues pertaining to language, nationalism, and modernity.

This Ṛg-vedic word, for which Grassmann's Wörterbuch proffers the meanings—

1. “noble,” “of high origin (Abkunft)”;

2. (of goods, possessions) “fine”, “excellent”

recurs in the Sāma-veda and in the Kāṣhaka-saṃhitā and Maitrāyaṅī- s. of the Black Yajur-veda, but only in two passages taken verbatim from the Rv., viz. Vi.42.4 = Sv. II.6.3.2.4, and V, 1, 5 = Ks. XVI, 3, XIX, 4, Ms. II.7.3. In the other Vedic texts, in the Nirukta, in Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyi and its commentaries, in the Gaṇa-pāṭha, the Uṇādi lists and in the whole subsequent independent literature it seems to be uninstanced. The Ṛg-veda commentaries, which could not fail to interpret it, propound meanings for the most part different from those adopted by Grassmann.

In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People's Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India's past. Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the dominant culture language of precolonial southern Asia outside the Persianate order. Hindutva propagandists have sought to show, for example, that Sanskrit was indigenous to India, and they purport to decipher Indus Valley seals to prove its presence two millennia before it actually came into existence. In a farcical repetition of Romantic myths of primevality, Sanskrit is considered—according to the characteristic hyperbole of the VHP—the source and sole preserver of world culture. The state's anxiety both about Sanskrit's role in shaping the historical identity of the Hindu nation and about its contemporary vitality has manifested itself in substantial new funding for Sanskrit education, and in the declaration of 1999–2000 as the “Year of Sanskrit,” with plans for conversation camps, debate and essay competitions, drama festivals, and the like.The VHP assessment is cited in Bhattacharji 1990; see also Goldman 1996 and Ramaswamy 1999. A recent review of Hindutva fantasy (and fraud) about indigenous Sanskrit is found in Witzel and Farmer 2000. The “Year of Sanskrit” runs for “Yugābda 5101,” the year of the Kaliyuga dating system now apparently in use by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (“Times of India,” Bombay ed., December 10, 1999).

Sanskrit śauṭīra-, given the meaning “haughty, arrogant, proud”, occurs mainly, according to the Petersburg dictionary, in the language of the epic poems. From it is derived a neuter abstract noun śauṭīrya- “manliness, pride” current in the same texts. Beside śauṭīra- there also occurs an alternative form of the word, śauṇḍīra- (whence also śauṇḍīrya- nt.), and the relation between these two forms in the epic poems is that they regularly occur as variant readings in the same passages. Apart from the epic poems, and the Harivaṃśa, which counts as a supplement to the Mahābhārata, the dictionary only cites śauṇḍīrya- (in this form) once from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, and three times from the drama Mṛcchakaṭika. In the latter text the form śauṇḍīrya-, as opposed to śauṭīrya-, seems well established, since in only one passage (Ed. Stenzler, 120, 21) is śauṭīrya- quoted as a variant reading.

The meanings of the root /gar- (1) are according to the concise statement of Neisser, ‘Stimme erheben, besingen; ehren, ruhmen, loben; beifällig, ehrend aufnehmenä. This accurately represents the facts, but it gives rise to an obvious question inasmuch as the last meaning, which involves no raising of the voice or utterance, is on consideration noticeably different from the first. Neisser's statement, which represents the consensus of opinion, assumes that the primary meaning of this root is ‘speak aloud, sing, proclaim, etc.’, and that the other set of meanings ‘welcome, approve, show appreciation, etc.’, represents a secondary meaning development, presumably through the intermediate stage ‘express approval’, etc.