— Chapter 1 —
IT IS REALLY quite remarkable how in less than a century, India has ceded ground — perhaps permanently — to the West in a discipline that had once been coveted worldwide and had drawn the best and brightest minds: Sanskrit.
Today, what is generally known as Sanskrit studies (Indology, to use a dated but broad term), resembles the scorching Thar desert, which was formed after the perennial Saraswati dried up; the few scattered oases are the only saving grace.
What compounds this erosion is the fact that it was entirely self-inflicted. Indeed, Mahāmahopādhyāya P.V. Kane had foreseen this precise situation in his ominous speech delivered exactly eighty years ago.
Notwithstanding the slew of feel-good messaging and exaggerated claims of an alleged grand revival of Sanskrit after 2014, the verifiable reality is that Sanskrit is perched on the edge of irreversible loss in the sacred land of its realisation—indeed, Sanskrit is not merely a language but a realisation. As Shatavadhani Dr. Ganesh memorably put it, Sanskrit is an expression of Bhauma.
Today, there is a generation of fairly learned Sanskrit scholars whose highest ambition is to garner—for example—a lecturership or to occupy a chair in some American university. This psyche operates on a plane that is lower than avarice, approval-seeking or inferiority complex—it is the willing embrace of the obliteration of one’s own identity.
The first Sanskrit department in the United States was established in 1841 at Yale University. It was headed not by an Indian but an American named Edward Elbridge Salisbury. The verdict on America’s qualitative and positive contribution to Sanskrit after 185 years is clear: nil. Quite the contrary, it has birthed a generation of abhinava racists and political ideologues like Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, et al., who operate from a combination of bigotry, malice or both.
The consequences have been predictable: a mass of distortions have been mainstreamed and factual rebuttals to them have been mere murmurs in the wilderness.
This is glaringly obvious in the steady stream of English translations of the Sanskrit literary corpus. Roughly over the last three decades, it has become almost impossible to find reliable, honest and pure English translations of even major works like Raghuvamsha, Uttara Ramacharita, Kadambari, etc. High-quality and faithful translations done by Sanskrit scholars of the modern Indian Renaissance continue to languish in obscurity.
Wikipedia epitomises this rot like nothing else does. Its “articles” on almost any Sanskrit work, poets, dramatists, authors, scholars and commentators profusely cite Western Sanskrit academicians most of whom cannot speak and write in Sanskrit. If any Indian scholar is cited, he or she has usually been preapproved by his Western counterpart or is a Leftist in the mould of say, D.D. Kosambi or Rahula Sankrityayana. The other theme of such articles is a marked political overtone.
This nadir is the direct result of entrusting our family jewels to a Mleccha for safekeeping. The phenomenon of mistranslations, mischievous translations, ill-informed translations or context-free translations has a prolonged history, which in turn has several beginnings. The foundation stone of all these beginnings is Christian theology followed much later by colonialism, a sanitary term for loot, plunder, exploitation and genocide.
One such notable beginning originated in the Netherlands. It gave Europe its maiden translation of Bhartrhari’s Shataka-Dvaya, done by a Christian pastor and missionary.
— Chapter 2 —
IN 1630, the Calvinist chaplain and missionary Abraham Rogerius sailed from Amsterdam and landed on the shores of Pazhaverkadu — Pulicat — on September 17, 1632. His employer, the Dutch VOC (East India Company) had sent him to replace Molinaeus, the Minister preaching and carrying on missionary work at Pulicat.
During his ten-year stint in Pulicat, Rogerius travelled quite extensively along the Cholamandalam coast and into the heart of the Malayala Desha. Typical of a hardened missionary, Rogerius not only engaged in conversion activity but rigourously studied Sanatana philosophy and performed a thorough recce of the Tamil Hindu society.
In Pulicat, Rogerius got acquainted with a Sri Vaishnava Brahmana named Padmanabha, “from whose mouth I have all the mysteries of heathendom.” The outcome was a modestly-sized book titled De Open-Deure Tot Het Verbogen Heydendom or The Open Door to Hidden Heathendom. The pompous title of the work unambiguously announces its intent, and Rogerius, in his appeal to the “well-disposed reader,” declares it in so many words,
The Open Door to Hidden Heathendom became an immediate success when it was first published in 1651—two years after Rogerius died. The story of the evolution of this work and its long-term historical consequences will be narrated in a separate essay later.
Among the “divers secrets of Heathendom” that Padmanabha “revealed” to Rogerius was the śataka-traya of the “renowned Heathen,” Bhartrhari. A polyglot, Padmanabha translated the Niti and Vairāgya śatakas into Portuguese. Rogerius then rendered a paraphrase of selected verses from both the śatakas in Dutch. Padmanabha had omitted the śṛṅgāra śataka because of its erotic content.The śataka-dvaya is the first appendix of Rogerius’ work; its English title reads, On the occasion of Padmanabha’s translation of Bhartrhari’s centuriae.
This is the brief history of how Bhartrhari made his seminal voyage to Europe. The following is a sample of Rogerius’ paraphrased Dutch translation of the sublime nāndī-padya of Vairāgya śataka:
Every European scholar since the publication of Rogerius’ work has unanimously opined that “a very important feature of Rogerius’ Open-Deure is that one finds in it, as an appendix, the translation of a fairly extensive Sanskrit work: the very first to reach Westerners, namely two of the three Centuriae (śatakas) of Bhartṛhari.”
In an astonishingly swift period, Rogerius’ book was translated into other European languages: German in 1663 and French in 1670. The impulse behind the translations was the same: to aid missionary activity in India. The title of the French translation is stark for its unconcealed bigotry: The Theatre of Idolatry, or the Open Door to Arrive at the Knowledge of Hidden Paganism.
In 1833-34, Peter Von Bohlen published the first Latin translation of the śataka-traya as a standalone work: Bhartriharis sententiae et carmen quod Chauri nomine circumfertur eroticum; he followed it up with a 1835 German translation: Die Sprüche des Bhartriharis.
The reason for the long gap between Rogerius and Bohlen is evident: Europe had been busy launching serial mercantile and piratical expeditions into India and by the end of the seventeenth century, they had begun to reap fecund rewards. A fraction of these rewards was diverted to fund more extensive researches into Heathen India.
A major aftergrowth of these rapacious colonial projects was the evolution of Sanskrit studies of which Germany was the undisputed headquarters. By the second half of the nineteenth century, considerable scholarship had grown around Bhartrhari alone in Europe. For the first time, Bhartrhari was being studied as a subject than a poet or philosopher; he had become the typical object of Oriental exotica.
Two independent translations of his śatakas were published in rapid succession: the first was by the French Indologist Paul Regnaud titled Les Stances: Erotiques, Morales et Religieuses De Bhartrhari, in 1875. The second was by C.H. Tawney, a prolific English translator of Sanskrit works. His Two Centuries of Bhartrhari was published in 1877.
Among others, these two translations offer an instructive case study into—and indeed, symbolise several common themes of how Western scholars approached, understood and analysed Sanskrit literature, both sacred and creative.
Their premise was initially rooted in Christian theology: Rogerius studied Bhartrhari as an ancillary to missionary intelligence-gathering activity. In Regnaud and Tawney’s translations, the missionary impulse is largely absent because it had been replaced by the triumphant coloniser’s contempt and disdain for an inferior race.
— Chapter 3 —
STRIPPED OF THE veneer of academic window-dressing, it was a triumph of avarice armed with super military technology against a hopelessly divided enemy, who wasn’t weak but stupid and petty-minded. It was also a victory of deceit and backstabbing.
Because every plunderer needs a veil to cloak his pesky conscience, colonial Europe concocted a variety of balms to justify the heartless rape of two-thirds of Mother Earth. The White Man’s Burden, civilising the natives and variants thereof became the dominant themes of European public discourse from the nineteenth century onwards. What is now universally denounced as racism was the hallmark of cultured society just a century ago.
However, of all victims of colonialism, India alone posed a unique and persistent irritant. The British had perfidiously usurped a civilisation that was at its lowest ebb. England attributed this “victory” to its inherent superiority; by implication, it meant that the Hindus were an inferior race.
But it was the discovery of the perfect beauty of Sanskrit that shattered Britain’s fondest notions of supremacy. It gave the British not just an inferiority complex but a cathedral, to borrow Otto Katz’s delicious phrase. To express the searing depth of their shock in layman’s terms, it took the form of a chary question: how dare something as profound and perfect as Sanskrit exist in this backward land of half-naked savages bereft of culture and manners?
Indeed, every European chronicle about India written since Marco Polo up to Robert Clive’s victory at Palashi had only reaffirmed the same biases about the Hindu race. They were a people without religion and a Book; they had no written laws; they were the very spawn of the Devil because they relished in vulgar idolatry; their Brammines were the agents of Satan...
Sanskrit was the sublime pin that blasted centuries of such hostile myth-making. Indeed, there is a PhD thesis waiting to be written on how the British fear of Sanskrit shaped much of their political, social and educational policies.
Fear of Sanskrit arguably played a significant part in the invention of the Aryan Invasion myth. In general, anything that violated colonial prejudice was neatly cast into two categories. First, that it was irrational and superstitious. To this category belong our evocative expressions of saṁskāras, devotional practices, temple traditions and Vigrahas. Second, that it was an import from a foreign genius if it was superior because by definition, Hindus were a lowly race. Sanskrit belongs to this category.
This dismal psyche is rooted not in the detached pursuit of knowledge and truth but in the insecurity of a victorious despot who thinks that culture and knowledge flow from the barrel of a gun. When this mindset is deployed to the study of Sanskrit—and Indology, broadly speaking—the consequences are obvious and far-reaching. Like Muslims, the British had managed to conquer the geography and people of Bharatavarsha but not their philosophy and spiritual culture. Even on mundane planes—for example, our pūjā-paddhati—both Islam and Christianity have miserably failed to make a dent even after a millennium of relentless assault. Not one among our ṣaḍ-darśanas has been tainted by Abrahamic ideas. The reason for this failure is clear: the post Christian West, for all its philosophical pretensions, still cannot handle real abstraction; it most pronounced evidence is its unwavering inability to grasp Vedanta.
A representative slice of this inability is the Western scholarship and translations of Bhartrhari. We are reminded of V.S. Sukhtankhar’s memorable verdict on the West’s scholarship and understanding of the Mahabharata:
— Chapter 4 —
THE BHARATIYA TRADITION accords a rather unique place of reverence to Bhartrhari. Aestheticians and literary connoisseurs extol his poetic prowess, beauty and nuance. Philosophers praise him as a true Vedantin. Linguists and grammarians have written extensively about the intricacies of his path-breaking Vākyapadīya. Millions of “common” people venerate him as a Ṛṣi, Sādhu, Tapasvī and Siddhapuruṣa. He endures throughout Uttarāpatha as one of the most revered virāgīs, a distinction unparalleled in the spiritual history of Bharatavarsha. He was not a traditional Swami; he was affiliated to no maṭha or pantha nor founded one; he composed no Stotra or Sahasranāma or Kirtana. Yet, he has captivated both popular and sacred imagination for at least fourteen centuries. An incredible corpus of legend and folklore has grown around him. Uttarāpatha abounds in Bhartrhari-Gufas; locals at each such site insist that this was the original cave where he performed Tapas.
Bhartrhari is also one of the most translated poets rubbing shoulders with the Adi Kavi, Bhagavan Veda Vyasa and Kavikulaguru Kalidasa. His Nīti and Vairāgya śatakas have been translated into all Bhāratīyā-bhāṣās and have received the same level of acclaim. Even to this day, people of all ages quote from his popular verses as one-liners in casual conversation without knowing the full verse or the name of its author. Several folks regard his Vairāgya śataka almost as a Pārayaṇa-grantha.
D.V. Gundappa memorably calls Bhartrhari as an “alembic poet” while M. Hiriyanna regards him as a profound predecessor of Adi Sankara. Pandit K.T. Telang, the earliest Indian translator of Bhartrhari into English, provides a comprehensive and critical introduction to the poet-philosopher and his work. He has essentially achieved an elegant Samanvaya—synthesis—which blends Bhartrhari’s poetic artistry, philosophy and Vedantic experience. The other distinction of Telang is the manner in which he has clinically dismantled Western readings of Bhartrhari.
— Chapter 5 —
THE CONTRAST cannot be more chasmic. It is unbelievable how in spite of a millennium’s worth of oral, written and popular tradition, Western scholars chose to resort to untamed speculations about Bhartrhari and spun theories based on them. Even if we disregard Rogerius’ bigoted slur that Bhartrhari was a “renowned Heathen,” the charge of speculation is still valid.
A notable early speculator was Christian Lassen (1800-76), a Norwegian-German Indologist who confidently declared that a person named Bhartrhari never existed! He later corrected this error but did far worse by tying himself up in unresolvable knots by making wild guesses about Bhartrhari’s dates. To the contemporary reader, it sounds hilarious but this sort of fact-free acrobatics about an alien culture and people was valued as serious scholarship.
It is also noteworthy that such theorising took place at a time when Karl Marx was, in parallel, developing his own theoretical brew that purported to explain everything under the sun.
The aforementioned Paul Regnaud who published his standalone translation of Bhartrhari’s śataka-traya in 1875, is notable for his naked racist contempt for Sanskrit literature as a whole. In his preface, he makes no attempt to hide his condescension.
Regnaud conveniently forgets the fact that his own countrymen had worked as daily-wage labourers under Mir Jumla, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan just 150 years prior, and were wholly dependent on Dubashes to ply their trade in Puducherry.
Indeed, his preface reads like a masterclass in white-skin prejudice. It is also mired in a familiar colonial resin: of evaluating the worth of Sanskrit literature against their Greek and Roman counterparts holding the latter as the de facto standard.
In Regnaud’s view, Sanskrit poets are inferior because they give lesser importance to rhetoric than poetic. Prima facie, this is a double violation and can thus be dismissed outright. First, the Greek discipline of political rhetoric never existed in Bharatavarsha at any point—it didn’t exist in Regnaud’s own time. Thus, he clearly commits the classic triple fallacies of arguing from absence, ignorance and sets up a strawman. Second, Indian Aesthetics is an independent discipline with its own grammar, lexicon, vocabulary and rules. Accordingly, a literary work must be judged solely by literary criteria and not by pramāṇas imported from extraneous subjects—in Regnaud’s case, it is rhetoric.
When we next examine C.H. Tawney’s Two Centuries of Bhartrhari, we don’t find explicit racism but its more sinister sibling: normalised racism. Racism was the Natural Order because England, not France, was the Master Race ruling India.
Tawney strictly adheres to the same Regnaudian resin of evaluating Sanskrit literature using Western standards. His parallels are both forced and outlandish.
In Tawney’s world, Chanakya is the Indian version of the Biblical counsellor Achitophel who betrays his own master, King David. Indian Rishis, Parivrājakas and Sadhus are equated with Greek cynics! Tawney’s “logic” for drawing this parallel is truly bizarre:
This kind of false equivalence—though honest—also leads Tawney to yet another “logical” conclusion: that Bhartrhari was a Western saint in an Indian garb. More pointedly, Bhartrhari was the Indian Diogenes!
This train of Tawneyian “logic” proceeds apace and applies equally to Bhartrhari’s śatakas. In his mind, the Niti and Vairāgya śatakas have value because Bhartrhari was the Indian Diogenes.
Tawney’s assessment of the Niti śataka includes but is not limited to such claims:
Such misreadings are at the root of the popular notion that all Hindu kings were selfish tyrants. A similar but more egregious misinterpretation is how Tawney understands Vairāgya as “literally, disgust with the world.” He bases this interpretation on “the legend of Bhartrhari’s disgust with the world [because] of his faithless wife.” That is, on the celebrated verse, Yām cintayāmi satataṁ mayi sā viraktā…
However, Tawney clearly overlooks an equally celebrated verse in the Vairāgya śataka: Mātarmedini Tāta māruta, which in my opinion epitomises two things at the same time: one, it is the grandest homage paid not just to the mortal world but to Creation itself; two, it is the profoundest declaration of the ultimate goal of Vairāgya emanating from the soul of one who has attained it: jīvanmukti. In this verse, Bhartrhari speaks as a Siddha, who is also a poet.
It is precisely because Tawney confounds and limits the meaning of the word Vairāgya as “disgust with the world,” that he casts Bhartrhari as an Indian Diogenes. The accurate translation of Vairāgya is “the state of being non-attached.”
On the whole, Tawney seems to harbour genuine appreciation for both Bhartrhari and his śatakas but the appreciation stems not from heartfelt feeling but superciliousness.
The quality of his translation is similar to that of Regnaud and his other Western brethren: generally accurate but arid, dull, listless and unfeeling. It is a reflection of the pscyhe that rendered it. A glaring omission is the Nāndī-padya of the Vairāgya śataka, a sublime Shiva-Stuti. On the contrary, Tawney has retained the Nāndī-padya of the Niti śataka, which is a Stuti of Para-Brahman.
— Chapter 6 —
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL background of Regnaud and Tawney also sheds essential light not just upon their translations but more importantly, upon their understanding of Bhartrhari.
Paul Regnaud was a linguist and Indologist forged in the patented colonial foundry. He “studied” India and Sanskrit like an Egytologist excavates mummies and subjects them to dissection.
An unrepentant armchair scholar, Regnaud never stepped outside France like Karl Marx who infamously declared the Jagannatha Ratha Yatra as a haven of vice, sin and prostitution without visiting India.
Regnaud learned Sanskrit not from an Indian Acharya or Pandita but from fellow Frenchmen. Armed with these credentials, he netted a Sanskrit Chair created specially for himself at the University of Lyon. He was also an avowed socialist.
C.H. Tawney hailed from a wholly different pedigree. His ancestors and relatives served variously as Mayors, academicians and business magnates. His father was elevated as the Vicar of Willoughby, Warwickshire.
Tawney received the typical nineteenth-century classical education at Trinity College, Cambridge and imbibed all the biases that such an education instills. He moved to India in 1864-65, seven or eight years after the first war of Indian independence and became the Principal of Presidency College, Calcutta. Among other things, he opposed the appointment of Jagadish Chandra Bose as Physics professor. A strict Victorian, he faithfully served the British Raj and had no moral ambiguity about its very existence. His son, R.H. Tawney was a committed Anglican and declared himself as a Christian socialist.
To borrow an old adage, what you bring to your work is more revealing than your skill and expertise in accomplishing it. We have seen at length what Bhartrhari’s Western translators brought to the table. The verdict is incontrovertible: in general, it is misleading at best and dangerous at worst to rely on Western translations of Sanskrit works.
Bhartrhari is too precious to be left at the mercy of Mlecchas.
durjanaḥ parihartavyo vidyayālaṅkṛto'pi san |
maṇinā bhūṣitaḥ sarpaḥ kimasau na bhayaṅkaraḥ ||
⁂
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