Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 3, December 2009
___________________________________________________________________
Sawhney, Simona. The Modernity of Sanskrit. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 213 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-4996-9 (paperback)
Reviewed by
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Sanskrit is a dead language. So, for all practical purposes, the literature composed in this language holds an archaeological fascination and appeals only to those who are interested in literary fossils. However, Simona Sawhney’s rather paradoxically titled “The Modernity of Sanskrit” seeks to precisely undermine the above mentioned notions and shows how Sanskrit is not only not dead, but alive and flourishing in the various languages and literatures of India, and is very contemporary.
Sawhney’s book is an attempt to answer the question: “How may we read Sanskrit texts today?” She turns our attention to the deceptive simplicity of this quest and points out the pitfalls on the way as she traces her path through two approaches – by examining the identity of the reader and evaluating the position of Sanskrit in India today.
The position of Sanskrit in India is further problematized by its espousal by the right-wing Hindu revivalists who link it to what they perceive as India’s pristine cultural heritage. It is also true that the Indian tradition was conflated with the Sanskritic tradition thanks to the orientalizing mission of the colonizers so much so that tradition today is completely identified with Sanskrit. The contemporary reader is bewildered as to how to read these texts – beginning from the question whether we can read them adequately as their provenance is a language and culture that is alien to us. Sanskrit has been so enmeshed in ritualistic practices that disentangling its secular aspect has become a thorny issue. Sawhney traces the dual progress of Sanskrit as a language – of its religious affiliations and as a refined product of ubiquitous linguistic practices. The tension associated with the language is the tension between ancient orthodoxy and progressive modernity, an aspect often highlighted by ‘modern’ westernized thinkers like Raja Rammohun Roy of the Indian national movement. This feeling persists even today as Sanskrit is associated with rigid conservatism, a stone in the midst of the flowing stream of contemporary life.
Sawhney disproves this assumption by outlining the reciprocal relationship shared by the Sanskrit classics and contemporary Indian literary and non-literary works. The writers discussed are from northern India – noted Hindi writers like Mohan Rakesh, Dharamvir Bharati, and Jaishankar Prasad besides M. K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. She has successfully articulated her point that Sanskrit is a living presence in these writers, influencing and influenced by each respective writer. Perhaps the unique focal point of this work is this emphasis on the act of literary reading that, according to Sawhney “…remains attentive to what, in a text, constitutively exceeds or even unravels the production of knowledge” (19). She emphasizes that the classics need not be approached on tiptoe with hushed reverence, but have to be treated like living entities that need to be argued with or even quarreled with. She reminds us that there is no single closed interpretation for these works and that they too are open-ended like other literary texts.
This book is like a whiff of fresh air to those who are familiar with writings on Sanskrit classics and aesthetics, primarily for its lucid treatment of the subject. It is not rigidly conservative or defensive – the two most common traps that Sanskrit aficionados are prone to – and is an insightful blend of contemporary approaches with those of the ancient theoreticians. By doing so, Simona Sawhney has demonstrated what her book is attempting to do, which is to make the ancient contemporary. Her knowledge of Hindi literature adds to the value of the book. It is definitely an asset to the field of Sanskrit studies.