The Modernization of Sanskrit Education

Occasional Paper No. 160

The Modernization of Sanskrit Education

1997. “The Modernization of Sanskrit Education in Banaras” in W. Radice, ed.,
Swami Vivekanand and the Modernization of Hinduism. Delhi: Oxford University Press

Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

Beezone note: The following are excerpts from the original paper. For the full paper see below.

There are many ways to understand the role of Sanskrit education in the 19th century’ and the changes it underwent from the middle of that century onwards. The discussion in this paper should be taken as one preferred approach towards it Sanskrit teaching here is taken as a system that ascribed a natural role of special, superior sanctity to the teacher, with a host of rituals, symbols, and ideas to support this sacredness. A separation of the system as ’’political” and “cultural” is not desirable, because the values it propagated were effective in maintaining a hierarchy precisely because they were shared common-sensically across certain classes In taking over and adapting this system, the colonial government dispensed with these practices and replaced many of the crucial meanings with its own. Sanskrit education ‘ended’ as a system because of larger social and economic changes, of course, as a general precondition, but more precisely because the very naturalness that had come to characterise it was not defended by its practitioners who perhaps believed that something ‘natural’ would naturally last forever.

This approach highlights some methodological points which makes the case of Sanskrit education of wider interest First, precolonial belief systems, regarding social hierarchies for instance, were no more natural than colonial ones. The intervention and domination by the state certainly extended the range of control into new, let us say, capillaries of control But the state, precolonial, colonial, or postcolonial, has no monopoly on the exercise of power. The state’s discourse, once it became the normative one, must not be analytically privileged by us above that of marginalised and dominated discourses. But apart from representing the latter as asserting their own ideologies in protest or self-definition, we must read these resistant or subversive ideologies also as power-constructions For every “cultural system”, no matter how superseded or defeated in history, is also a system of classification, of categorisation, of power

Second, an analysis of process or change must problematise the question of dominating-dominated, normative-subversive, and control-protest more than has been done. The temporal dimension of Sanskrit education shows us that the very same procedure of Sanskrit guru-shishya teaching which was dominating and normative and exclusive at one time (approximately until the 1850s-60s), came to be dominated, subversive, and excluded at a later time (1860s-70s onwards) There is no way to fit these dichotomous relations of control to the process of control once and for all. At the same time, the possible variations in an understanding of ‘resistance’ should be emphasised. Given a colonial,normative model of what correct education consists of, would resistance he in (i) rejecting it and sticking to an old. condemned model? (li) rejecting it but discovering one’s own route from a variety of pragmatic and idealistic considerations? (iii) accepting it as a matter of convenience, but reinterpreting it silently to bring an alteration in its meanings closer to one’s preferred values?

Third, no matter who the subjects of our story, or the objects of our analysis, a similar basic respect has to be paid to them in the writing of our narratives That is, whether undervalued lower caste females or overvalued Brahman males, whether the illiterate and despised, or the divinely learned and insightful, our subjects still remain a group of people heterogeneous, able to exercise agency and autonomy, rational by their own lights, reflexive, and probaby grossly under-articulated in the historical materials accessible to us. We come to the ironic but logical position of striving to recover the voices of those who had in high-principled thoroughness been very effective in silencing the voices of others The feminist scholar in us wornes about these last, but the very approach of feminist scholarship leads us to this complicated ideological pursuit.

There was no Sanskrit or Hindustani term equivalent to “school”. The closest equivalent is shiksha-diksha, or the giving and receipt of teaching.¹³ A school equalled a single teacher, and a school was the place where the teacher sat, typically his home. A school was not understood as a building, a specialised space apart from the physical presence of the teacher.

A second point concerns the meanings of time, including the layout of the day, the week, the month and the life of the student.

The hours of study were from 6 or 7 a m. to 11 in the morning, and then again in the late afternoon from 3 to 4 p.m. Morning study always began after only milk and fruit; the study of Vedas or any other uchch granth (high or special works) was forbidden after eating cereal. There were eight monthly holidays : two at Ashtami (the 8th and 23rd of every month), two at Parwa (the 1st and 16th of every month), and two at Chaturdashi (the 14th and 29th of every month), plus one each at Amavasya and Purnamashi (the 15th and 30th of every month). Holidays were further specialised, such as for those who could read, for those who studied grammar (Panim’s death anniversary—trayodashi, or the 13th day), those who studied literature (ekadashi, or the 11th day) etc. The course of study lasted for approximately 10 years and could begin at any age from 8 to 18. Thus young boys, older boys, and young men could be studying together.

The understanding of the student’s age and capacity and of the teacher’s centrality led naturally to a series of principles regarding the student’s craft. Since there were many students of varying abilities together and at various stages of progress, the first and longest process in the school day consisted of revision with a senior student, or path lagana. i.e., recitation of verses. No progress could be made until everything previously taught had been memorised and could be recited to perfection The guru, in his turn, looked after each student while the others recited and perfected.

James Ballantyne, the principal of the Government Sanskrit College from 1846 to 1861, translated many Sanskrit works into English with commentaries on their implications for the Western student, and the process of their study in general. Some of his essays, published in The Pandit, give an excellent insight into those features of Sanskrit education which struck an outsider as remarkable—the very features that elicit no comment from the pandits themselves who took them for granted. He describes the initial stage of learning as follows:

“The pupil [having mastered the alphabet] proceeds to commit to memory some twenty pages of the grammar-written in Sanskrit—without understanding one word of it. As he is about nine year old, an age at which the memory is strong and the reflective faculties comparatively inactive, this toil of sheer learning by rote—which, to a mature mind, would be a drudgery simply insupportable—appears neither to fatigue nor to distress him. He commits to memory every thing as he goes along; and in anticipation of this, whatever occurs in the course of the grammar pre-supposes the most complete recollection of all that went before. Any previous matter is therefore referred to, when reference is not tacit, with such shorthand brevity of allusion as is of no earthly use to any one whose recollection is much less perfect than that pre-supposed.

This principle—of the pre-supposition of perfect recollection of all that went before—runs through the whole grammatical literature of the Sanskrit….”¹⁴

As to the actual content of the curriculum, there is clear notation in government records, and more than that, we have examples of several institutions and teachers in Banaras who can give us details either as remembered or even as currently practised. As such, there is no distinct line to be drawn between the ’’old” and the ”new”, between the 19th and 20th centuries.

Subjects between which choices could be made were Grammar (Nyaya), Literature (Sahitva). Logic (Nyaya), Astrology (Jyotish), Philosophy (Darshan) with emphasis on any of the schools, and the Vedas, with choice of any branch. The choice had been made for the most part when the student came to the teacher because each teacher, therefore each ’’institution”, specialised in one or two of these fields, or specifically in the Vedas (or one of them) or Vedanta. Naturally, each field had its own “syllabus”, rules, texts, and standards, and community of scholars. It was not unusual for a specialist in one to begin taking interest in a different area while he was teaching his own, and take up the study of his new interest with a specialist of that area An example is Pandit Ramyash Tripathi, grammarian, who taught, among other places, at Marwari Sanskrit College and Goinka Sanskrit College between 1918 and 1941. While teaching Grammar he studied Nyaya for 11 years with Vamacharan Bhattacharya; then Shankar Vedanta for 8 years with Lakshman Shastri, and Mimansa for 6 years with Chinn Swami.¹⁵

The tailored individual course work plus self-established mutual relations between teacher and student, as well as the ideas of service that went with education, ensured that the level of responsibility in education was high. But “discipline” was clearly a matter of interpretation. To a progressive such as Bharatehdu Harishchandra, himself unrelated to the Sanskritic system and anxious for his countrymen to adopt the British one, the process of study seemed to go like this.

‘There is not any great discipline in vogue… The teacher devotes certain hours to teaching fas opposed to having fixed hours and demanding punctuality]….no curriculum is fixed and each boy reads his own books and has his own lesson. Even the boys reading the same book have different lessons. The teacher will not retard the progress of a sharp boy in order to push on with him an indolent one. Each student goes to the tutor for a short time to receive his lesson Advanced students help those who are backward. The schools sadly lack the discipline in vogue in government schools.”¹⁶

But according to another observer, this one a specialist, the Deputy Inspector of Schools of Allahabad District: “the discipline, so far as reverence and obedience is concerned, is far superior to that in our government schools, though lax in other respects.”¹⁷

Underlying these presuppositions about space, time, and curricula ran some basic principles of hierarchy. Age hierarchy has already been indicated, as has been the superiority of fine matter (fruits and milk) over gross (cereals), and of the individual over the group. Caste hierarchy required no mentioning; it was coincidental with occupational specialisation for the most part. Students of Sanskrit were almost exclusively Brahman, with the occasional Baniya or Kayastha venturing in. Teachers were typically Brahman, again with Kayasthas and more rarely, Baniyas as exceptions, but the subdivisions within the large varna category of “Brahman” were secondary in importance to the status of learning reached by the scholar.

Gender hierarchy was not up for questioning or challenge. The patron of learning was a goddess, Saraswati, one of the forms- of the Goddess of many names and forms in the Hindu iconical system, with many characteristics of other goddesses and some peculiarly her own. She is described as ’’glowing with the cool beauty of the snow, pearls, camphor and the moon, the bestower of welfare, decorated with golden garlands of champak flowers, with attractive limbs rising from full-bodied breasts” (him, muktahar, kapoor tatha chandrama ki abha ke saman shubhra kantiwah. kalvan pradan karnewali, suvarnasadnsha pit chamoak pushpon ki mala se vibhushit. uthe huve supushta kuchkumbhon se manohar aneawali.,.) —a figure of noticeable feminine charms and comparable to the Shakta goddesses in that she ”is known through Brahma vidya by yogis who can then destroy all bonds and reach the first place….” ⁵

No females were taught the Vedas or any other branch of the shastras. No girls went to pandits to study, and if any of them did acquire Sanskrit it was within the family, as daughter or sister or, more rarely, wife, of a pandit.¹⁹However, apart from the essential patronage for learning from Saraswati, there is an underlying androgynity to the man gods such as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, and a corresponding lack of rigid and separating ‘masculinity’ in the language and metaphor of Sanskrit. This contrasts, for instance, with the use of ‘male’ as a celebratory adjective in English, as when Muir praised English itself “as opening up to you [his Sanskrit students] the sources of the purest, the most masculine, and most salutary truth “²⁰ Learning was perhaps female in the Hindu/Sanskrit system, as it was masculine in the Christian/English. The pandits, all householders, were ranked lower than sanyasis or ascetics because of their embroilment in the world of kama and karma, but ranked higher in their learning. Yogeshwar Shastri (b. 1828) “did not look down upon sadhus and saints no matter how ill-educated they were.”²¹ Brahmacharya, or celibacy, supposedly a central value in Hinduism, is not mentioned in connection with the pandits, presumably because of their householder status.

There was no celebration, however, of this householder status. It was perhaps a duty as a stage in life, perhaps a necessary evil. The pandits were “other-worldly”, as will be expanded below, and part of this distancing from the gross and material world was a disinterest in wife and family. No wives are ever mentioned in connection with the pandits’ lives or achievements. Among many other pandits, Jaydev Misra (b 1844), Shivkumar Shastri (b. 1857), and Yogeshwar Shastri (b.1828) are described as having no time for domestic duties or a normal life. “Studying and teaching, recitation and prayers…there was no other activity in his life.” is a fair description of a good Sanskrit pandit’s routine.^-2

To grasp the nuances of these concepts, and funher understand the notion of learning, of the text and the word, the teacher and the student, and the very experiences of actual pandits.

The lore about Pandits

Ramyash Tripathi (b. 1884) grew up in a village near Varanasi, and according to the wishes of his father studied Astrology and rituals locally. “But after he studied the M”hurt Chintamani, the Saraswati residing within him specially encouraged him to study Grammar and other texts As a result he left home one night and reached Kashi In a few days, with the grace of Mother-of-the-world Annapurna, a rais of Kashi, Jagatganj resident Sri Babu Kavindra Narayan Singh gave him a place to stay in his Shiva temple, and gave him every kind of help towards his studies “^–’

We see exemplified here two typical features of Sanskrit education No matter where a person starts, directed by a parent and so on, the ultimate choice of specialty is made by him under an internal directive.²⁴ Second, patronage finds the individual who is senous and dedicated in the way described above, that is, in no predictable way The ambitious student must be prepared to face hardship in the form of poverty, simplicity, scarcity, and physical discomfort of any nature As for an ascetic, the rigours of these may be directly related to his stuggles at his studies Even his guru may act as an obstacle, as in the case of Dronacharya who demanded the right thumb of his star archery pupil as dakshina. knowing fully well that an archer without a right thumb is incapacitated. All kinds of tests are considered typical of the stumbling road one must travel in order to woo Saraswati Hence the vision of learning as tapas, meditation, yoga, or concentration

Anecdotes like the following tell us of many other significant characteristics of the education When Sudhakar Dwivedi (b 1860) was ready to begin his Astrology lessons in the Sanskrit College, he went and sat down near Pandit Devknshna Mishra by mistake rather than Pandit Bapudev Shastri as was his father’s instruction and his own intention. Upon his mistake being discovered, his father upbraided him and insisted he go to Bapudev Shastri now But Sudhakar Dwivedi said, “1 have opened my book in front of a guru, and that guru only will be my guru from now on.”²⁵

When Pandit Nityanand Pant (b 1867) finished his Vedanta and Dharmashastra studies, he wanted to take sanyas and went to his guru Pandit Gangadhar Shastri for advice. Shastnji told him, “Everyone in Kashi is a guru, no one wants to be a follower. There is no need for such a learned man as you to take sanyas. But if you must, you have to first present before me two such students whom you have enriched with your teaching of the shastras and made them truly learned The tireless labour that has gone into my making you such a scholar can only be repaid by such a gurudakshina” On hearing this. Pantji gave up his resolve of sanyas for the time and devoted himself to producing many excellent students. Two of them received the title of “Mahamahopadhyaya” like himself. Then in the last days of his life he finally fulfilled his great desire to take sanyas/⁶

The importance of the guru is highlighted by both the stories, as someone that you do not abandon once you have taken him as guru, as well as someone whose permission you seek for every important move in your life. But equally clear is the great importance of the student. He is indispensable to the success of the guru He voluntarily chooses the guru, but after that the guru is as bound to him as the student is to the guru. The very measure of the teacher’s success is the number and still more, the quality of his students. If he does not reproduce his learning, he is nothing, he is known by the students he produces.

All this is, of course, worldly activity, and the world of these transactions is contrasted to that of sanyas, or renunciation. A scholar and/or teacher of Sanskrit was not a renouncer, and there is little doubt that the sanyasi’s position was higher than that of the pandit’s. The purpose of the renouncer was to free himself from all bonds as far as possible and prepare himself for moksha. The purpose of the scholar was to serve the cause of his students, of Sanskrit, and of learning in general And a pandit could have other interests as well. The biographies of these wise men are replete with references to their love of life Rajaram Shastri’s (b e 1830) for wrestling,²⁷ Yogeshwar Shastri’s (b.1828), Shivkumar Shastri’s (b.1857), Gangadhar Shastri Telang’s (b. 1853), and Batunknath Sharma’s (b 1895) for music and poetry;²⁸ Ramanath Vyas’ (b e 1860) for art;²⁹and Taracharan Bhattacharya’s (b 1884) for theatre,³⁰among other passions.

The disembodied notion of Sanskrit

The pursuit of knowledge may have revolved around the body of the guru, but the nature of knowledge itself was disembodied and anti-material. The central notion embedded in the ideal of the scholar was that of other-worldliness, based on the premise that involvement in worldly affairs distracts from the pursuit of knowledge. This inverse relationship between knowledge and every day concerns was made into a central philosophic principle whereby the pandit was certainly rewarded for his learning and given recognition, both material and social, but all of this he accepted with relative indifference Ramvash Tripathi (b. 1884) and Hariharkripalu Dwivedi (b c 1870) were typical of most pandits in that they spent none of their earnings on themselves, but on expenditure like the building of a village school or a temple.³¹ Among the questions we may ask are how did the Sanskrit scholar support himself, if so indifferent⁹ And, why should learning and material success be so antithetical to each other?

Regarding the first, Sanskrit scholars in fact worked. Either they were directly supported as teachers by the aristocracy, or they were less directly supported by students through irregular but predictable gifts at certain times of the year, and dakshina at the end of the course of study The best scholars were supported directly and liberally by wealthy patrons simply as scholars, as show pieces in their courts and mansions. They had to work even at his, however, through expositions, composition, and shastrarth. Hariharkripalu Dwivedi won the shastratha at the crowning of the Riwa Maharaj Venkatesh Narayan Singh, and then at a Brahman boy’s upnayana ceremony The latter changed his life, he was offered teaching positions and patronage?²Scholars kept their ears open for news of shastrarthas, and actively sought them out.

For the full paper go to:

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_fac_pub/21/