Abstract This paper addresses the near impossibility of writing the socialhistory of knowledge production in India. It also considers the question of thehistoricity of Sanskrit traditions. It concludes with pointing at a major lacunain the SKS project, namely the examination or ritual and religious knowledge.

Keywords History Æ Historicity Æ Religion

When I received my doctorate at Utrecht University the document waswritten in Latin. In the Dutch gymnasium (the high-school that preparespupils for the university) one still has to learn Greek and Latin. Although theLatin mass is no longer common in secularized Holland, the Catholic Churchstill occasionally uses Latin as a means of global religious communication.These are some of the patterns of continuity with the classical languages thatare established in both a civilizational and religious sense (or rather a mixtureof both) in parts of Europe. More generally though, as a medium of academiccommunication, for instance, these classical languages are considered to bedead. One may argue that ‘‘dead’’ is not an appropriate metaphor for lan-guages (Pollock 2001, p. 393) but clearly what is intended by this metaphor isthat these languages are only used in a very limited and circumscribed way inritual communication or as an element in a politics of distinction (Bourdieu1984) and that there is a sense in which they have become static rather thandynamic. The place of Sanskrit in India today seems quite comparable to thatof Latin and Greek in Europe. There are such things as Sanskrit Day and evena Sanskrit year, and in general these are rhetorical gestures towards the

P. van der Veer (&)University College, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80145,3508 TC, Utrecht, The Netherlandse-mail: p.t.vanderveer@ucu.uu.nl

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J Indian Philos (2008) 36:633–641DOI 10.1007/s10781-008-9038-8

Does Sanskrit Knowledge Exist?

Peter van der Veer

Published online: 9 May 2008� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

cultural definition of the nation and national history. Since that definition ishighly contested in a multicultural society like India, the promotion ofSanskrit and Sanskrit civilization is always more contested than that of Latinand Greek in Europe. This makes a project like the Sanskrit KnowledgeSystems part of political debate today, and this is enhanced by its focus onSanskrit rather than on Knowledge.

The central problematic of the Sanskrit Knowledge Systems project (SKS)appears not to take Sanskrit only as a medium of communicating knowledge,but at least in places as a form of thought or a form of knowledge or a culturalform that shapes knowledge (see: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/Sanskrit/proposal/html). This is something that needs clarification and discussion. On the onehand, one may see here a shift from a history of ideas to a linguistic history ofdiscourse and concepts. This is very much in tune with the direction taken byEuropean students of intellectual history. On the other hand, however, thereseems to be the assumption that there is a special connection between theSanskrit language and what is called Sanskrit knowledge or Sanskrit dis-ciplines. Comparing this to European intellectual history it is striking that onewould not speak of Latin knowledge systems in medieval Europe even if theywere partly, or even largely in Latin. It seems to me that the question oftranslation from Sanskrit into vernacular languages is crucial in the trans-mission of knowledge if one agrees that there is such a thing as the decline anddeath of Sanskrit. That certain disciplines, such as hermeneutics, logic, andgrammar, use Sanskrit as their medium does not imply that the knowledgegathered in them cannot be conveyed in other languages. If these disciplinesare to be further developed they actually have to be conveyed in the verna-cular. Obviously, one can write the history of vernacularization in which theseparation of a classical language from regional and, ultimately, nationallanguages widens and this, of course, has been done in Europe. Pollock (2007)argues that the vernacularization of the language of science has not happenedin India. Writing on Sanskrit poetry Pollock informs us ‘‘how very littleinformation we have, even for a period as relatively late as the end of theseventeenth century, about the real interactions between cosmopolitan andvernacular courtly poets’’ (Pollock 2001, p. 408). Elsewhere in the same articlehe argues that

the process of vernacularization in India, in so many ways comparableto the European case, was nowhere a consequence of growing Sanskritignorance; the intellectuals, who promoted the transformation,certainly in its most consequential phases, were themselves learned inSanskrit. The demographics and sociology of the new literacy thatpromoted vernacularization in Europe (a new middle class ignorant ofLatin and demanding a demotic literature) have no parallel in India,where those who could read vernacular poetry could always readSanskrit (pp. 415–416).

It seems to me that the history of vernacularization in India is not yet writtenand that that history is crucial for the understanding of the declining

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importance of Sanskrit as a medium of learned communication, but it strikesme that it is not central in the project under discussion.

Sanskrit does not disappear entirely, but remains in the later nineteenthcentury an important standard of purity for those who write in the vernacular(Darnton 2001, pp. 142–143). From what I know about the history of theRamayana tradition and the relation between the Sanskrit poem and thevernacular versions (for the Hindi version see Bulcke 1962) it seems that sucha literary history could be written and that it would also pay attention to therelation between a sanskritic vernacular and a non- (or less) sanskritic one,but I would admit that it would be hard to write about its demographics andsociology. Such a question has to be, at least partly, answered by providing asocial history of education. This touches on two fundamental problems: thewriting of history and the historicity of Indian traditions.

The discipline of history has itself a complex modern history that needs thekind of careful examination for the Indian case that it has received, forinstance in the English case (Pocock 1987). Whatever that history may be inthe period under discussion in India, it is in the nineteenth century that both inEurope and in India writing history is transformed into a professional genrethat is related to the rise of the nation-state. In short, the histories written areby and large national histories because the resources of the nation-state areput at the disposal of the writers of such histories.

The historical study of the development of Indian thought can be con-sidered as a major element in Indian historiography, and it is obvious thatmuch of the basic contextual knowledge that is required to answer even theprimary questions of the social history of knowledge production and con-sumption is not available. It is not that such questions are in principleunanswerable, but, possibly for lack of funding, they seem to be notresearched in a systematic way in India. This makes one wonder about thecontemporary context of the project under discussion. It seems to me that onecannot avoid reflecting on the fact that the project is largely one of foreignscholars, funded by American largesse. One can, obviously, respond thatscholarship is cosmopolitan, but one also needs to think about the relation ofsuch a cosmopolitan project to national historiography. This is not only aquestion about the relation between a project on Sanskrit knowledge andwhat I have called elsewhere religious nationalism (van der Veer 1994), butalso about the place of such a project within the entire endeavor of makingsense of the history of India in India. To what extent are Sanskrit texts indeeddead in the sense that in India their study and interpretation is only marginalto the project of modern Indian historiography?

The other issue I want to mention here is that of the historicity of Indiantraditions. It has been a long-standing Orientalist opinion that Indian cultureis inimical to history. Louis Dumont has expressed this most cogently when heopposed the Indian classical concept of yuga, the four ages of the world to themodern concept of history with its focus on individual people and individualevents as well as causal explanations. In the Indian concept, Dumont argues,there is a conscious devaluation of time, just as in the concept of dharma there

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is a devaluation of the individual. Moreover, while there are only fewchronicles that deal with mundane affairs there are many religious treatisesthat deal with what transcends the world. The challenge put forward byDumont is that one should take seriously the religious valuation of time andhistory in Indian civilization in our writing of the history of India. In his viewone should try to avoid imposing a modern historicity on texts that rebelagainst it (Dumont 1975, p. 38). The problem with Dumont’s view is that ittakes an interpretation of some Sanskrit treatises as the basis of the essentialvalues of Indian civilization (van der Veer 1993).

One would have to do a history of ideological formations in India to be ableto contextualize and interpret these seemingly timeless principles of time-lessness. One would need to know what these concepts are, but also what theydo at a given moment in time. According to the SKS project, the work ofAppayya Dıks: ita on alan: karasastra is informed by a ‘‘new historicity that aimstoward a renewal of the past’’ (Pollock 2003, p. 433). Not much is said aboutthe old historicity and the new historicity seems to belong to the very defi-nition of tradition, something that is also expressed by calling Appayya an‘‘innovative traditionalist.’’

Talal Asad (1986) has given the following definition of tradition: ‘‘A tra-dition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitionersregarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that preciselybecause it is established, has a history. These discourses relate conceptually toa past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of itspoint and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how thepoint of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term. Or why itshould be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to otherpractices, institutions, and social conditions).’’ Central to a tradition istherefore the debate about authenticity and transgression. Traditions projectthemselves as timeless, transcending history and their discursive authority liesprecisely in that claim. This explains what Pollock himself has called ‘‘thegeneral absence of historical referentiality in traditional Sanskritic culture’’(Pollock 1989, p. 607). The crucial issue in the SKS project is how an authorrelates himself to the authority of the tradition. In the grammatical tradition,as Houben (2003, p. 464) argues, this is the acknowledgement of the authorityof the munitraya, the three wise men of the tradition: Pan: ini, Katyayana andPatanjali. Indeed, this is what one would expect, namely that one would placeoneself in the tradition and then go on to distinguish one’s position from thatof contemporary authors whose claims to be in accordance with the traditionwould be disputed. What one cannot expect is a historical description ofintellectuals like Appayya or Bhat:t:oji that is even vaguely reminiscent of ourpossibilities of historical description of thinkers like Spinoza and his circles(Israel 2001) or Descartes (www.cartesius.net). The question of the historicityof Sanskrit traditions is valid. It is a question also raised in Michel deCerteau’s (1988) reflections on the writing of history, in which he argues thathistory writing is fundamental to modernity in that it is an act of separatingpresent and past as well as discourse and social body. As such the SKS project

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is inevitably part of modernity in its attempt to distinguish modernity fromits antecedents. While British arguments about modernity identified itsantecedents as ancient, medieval, and preindustrial, in the colony theantecedents are identified as pre-colonial. One of the questions that have tobe raised is that of the nature of colonial modernity and the place of historyin it.

The question of historicity is central to the huge project in eight volumes onthe history of German concepts (Begrifffsgeschichte) that was initiated in the1970s by Werner Conze, Otto Brunner and Reinhart Koselleck, and finishedin the 1990s. This project examines a particular period (1750–1850) in whichthe advent of modernity transformed German political and social vocabul-aries. In its focus on a major transformation, it has something in common withthe SKS project, but it examines concepts rather than texts as integratedwholes. I think that there is a lot to be gained from a systematic discussion ofthe German project for a proper understanding of the SKS project. Theassumption in the German project is that historical discontinuity can beprecisely located through conceptual analysis. The history of ideas is thusreplaced by a linguistic history of concepts. Secondly, Koselleck holds theview that concepts not only vary according to their semantic field but alsoaccording to the temporal associations built into them. With the advent ofmodernity there is a different temporalization, a new intensity brought intothe older concepts, like the concept ‘‘Volk’’ or ‘‘Staat.’’ That new tempor-alization, that new sense of time and history is a dominant aspect of moder-nity. It is this new sense of time and history that Dumont refers to in hiscautionary note on the ideology of the text.

The other work that the SKS project must be compared to is the work doneby Skinner and Pocock on English political discourse. They do not focus onconcepts, but on discourse. A discourse is, in Pocock’s words, ‘‘a complexstructure comprising a vocabulary; a grammar; a rhetoric, and a set of usages,assumptions, and implications existing together in time and employable by asemi-specific community of language-users for purposes political, interested inand extending sometimes as far as the articulation of a world-view or ideol-ogy’’ (Pocock 1996, p. 47). Central to the history of discourse is the idea thatthere is a multiplicity of discourses simultaneously and that these discourseshave their usage and effects that can be studied to get a better knowledge of aparticular Lebensform, to use Wittgenstein’s term, in history.

It is clear that for the kind of projects that have been developed to study thehistory of English and German discourse and concepts, one needs a wide arrayof sources and a high level of understanding of the context in which thesediscourses and concepts are formed and transformed. The German projecthas, for instance, determined that Kant was the first to use the term Fortschritt(progress) and what a powerful concept this has become! This is innovation,but transformation is just as important. Aristotle’s political philosophy hasremained important till the present day and one has to delineate the ways inwhich his concepts are transformed in later usages. Can we determine suchconcepts in the SKS? Do we have the sources to do so?

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A crucial difference between SKS and the German and English projects,referred to above, is the role of colonialism. The German and English projectsdeal with the coming of modernity, while SKS deals with the coming ofcolonialism. The suggestion made in the introductory remarks to the SKS isthat there is a causal relation between the coming of colonialism and thedisappearance of Sanskrit systematic thought. This suggests a rupture that isfar more radical than the transformations of discourse and concepts thataccompany the coming of modernity in Europe. I have to emphasize that thisis mainly a suggestion in these introductory remarks and is open to furtherrefinement and even refutation as the project develops.

A major debate in the writing of the history of British India is about howimportant colonial rule has been for the transformation of Indian society. Onthe one hand, there is a historical school of thought that portrays colonial rulenot as an imposition but as an Indian project or as a form of dialogue betweenthe Indians and the British (Bayly 1988, 1998). A Marxist permutation of thisview with more emphasis on historical logic than on agency is that of DavidWashbrook (1988) who argues that ‘‘colonialism was the logical outcome ofSouth Asia’s own history of capitalist development.’’ On the other hand, onehas a school of thought where the emphasis is on colonial knowledge andpower, on colonialism as a cultural project of control, or, as Bernard Cohn hasput it, ‘‘the conquest of India was the conquest of knowledge’’ (Cohn 1996,p. 16). The argument is that there is something which can be called colonialrule and that technologies of knowledge or, as David Ludden (1993), hascalled it ‘‘orientalist empiricism,’’ were crucial in the formation of the culturalcategories through which Indian realities were understood both by the nativesand by the British. Bernard Cohn (1987) has famously shown the importanceof the census operations on understandings of caste, tribe, and religiouscommunity in the development of a politics of numbers. Arjun Appadurai(1981) has demonstrated the ways in which the colonial administration oftemples was central to colonial governmentality. Nicholas Dirks (1993) hasargued that under colonialism an understanding of caste was developed whichenabled the British to dismantle a previous power structure, to make it into‘‘a hollow crown.’’

Some of the differences in these positions can be traced to the use of thetropes of internality and externality as signifying a structure of mutualexclusivity. The colonial state is portrayed as an external global powerformation, originating outside of India, while Indian subjects are seen ashaving native agency, internal to India. Another way of looking at this is thatthe imperial encounters between India and Britain produced an imperialmodernity both in India and in Britain, in which these tropes of internality andexternality should not be taken as foundational grounds of scholarly discus-sion, but as the shifting grounds of imperial discourse itself (Suleri 1992;Viswanathan 1989, 1998; van der Veer 2001).

The SKS project also is vested in the trope of internal versus external: ‘‘theconfrontation was one-sided: as modernizing Europe attacked vociferously,Sanskrit India retreated in silence.’’ This might be an adequate description of

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Macaulay’s Minute on Education and the deafening silence from Sanskritpandits to it, but one does need to recall that Macaulay argued the Anglicistcase for the superiority of teaching English against an established Orientalistschool that was very much impressed by Sanskrit and Sanskrit learning. Theimpact of the ‘‘discovery’’ of Sanskrit on European philology and historywriting is well known and one wonders whether the interaction is not moreinteresting than that between the loud and the silent. The jacket illustration ofThomas Trautmann’s book, Aryans and British India, shows a scene fromHindu scripture carved on the pedestal of a statue of Sir William Jones byJohn Bacon Senior. This statue of Jones, erected in his memory by the EastIndia Company, can be found in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Hindu scene,featuring the tortoise avatar of Vishnu, was depicted to show the truth of thebiblical story of Noah. This illustrates Trautmann’s contention that in the lateeighteenth century there was a moment of great British interest in Hinduismand Sanskrit, a veritable ‘‘Indo-mania’’ that was only later in the nineteenthcentury replaced by the negative attitude that is witnessed by Macaulay’sMinute. If that is true then the decline of Sanskrit as a learned languagecannot be explained by the spread of European power in the mid-eighteenthcentury, as the introductory remarks to the SKS project suggest.

Since the sources of the SKS project are mainly the Sanskrit materialsthemselves, the primary task may be to analyze the nature of the Sanskritarchives. Since much of what we know about the period preceding the colonialperiod depends on the colonial archive, it is quite crucial to understand therelation between the colonial and the Sanskrit archives. The history of thosearchives may also give us some clue as to the question of historicity. The SKSproject states clearly that the pre-colonial Indian polity did not produce cul-tural archives. This is certainly not true for the Mughal polity and thus seemsan observation about the Hindu polity. One wonders therefore what the placeof Sanskrit knowledge was in Hindu governmentality. Archives are importantsites of governmentality and thus show what kind of knowledge is seen asimportant for state and society. It is quite likely that the composition of thesearchives shifted considerably with the growing importance of colonial powerand this may give us a clue as to the decline of Sanskrit. Understanding thisshift not only requires an analysis of patronage in both Hindu and Muslimcourts in Mughal India, but also of the transformation of ‘‘white Mughals’’into colonial rulers. The decline of Sanskrit is not merely a question of thesuperior knowledge conveyed in Western languages, but of the kind ofknowledge that was relevant for colonial rule. In the end it seems inevitable toconnect the nature of knowledge to the nature of power.

This brings us, finally, to something the SKS project meticulously avoidsaddressing, the place of religious and ritual knowledge. One does feel greatsympathy for the desire to separate SKS from what Pollock tellingly deems‘‘religious obscurantism’’ (2002; p. 438), but one needs to remind oneself thatthis very separation is an aspect of modernity. Indeed, the grammarian-philosopher, Bhat:t:oji Dıks: ita, whose work is discussed in this volume by bothHouben and Bronkhorst, is a Brahman and his daily practice must have been

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in accordance with his interpretation of Vedic ritual. Not to take this ritualcontext into account as well as the forms of patronage that it requires, thesectarian struggles that it is part of and the role in governmentality that itplays would be seriously missing out on the Lebensform of which theintellectual traditions are a part. It would be similar to writing the intellectualhistory of early modern Europe without any reference to the religious wars.Religion in early modern Europe is not a separate category (Asad 1993) andthe term itself is hardly translatable in Sanskrit. One should therefore not askfor more attention to ‘‘religion’’ in the SKS-project, but for more attention tothe particular Lebensform of the Brahman castes that are the carriers of SKS.

Acknowledgements I want to thank Jan Houben and Sheldon Pollock for their invitation toparticipate in a workshop at the Sorbonne on the SKS project as well as Jan Houben, IsabelleOnians, and Sheldon Pollock for their comments on the draft version.

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