This January, roughly 2,300 years after the composition of Pāṇini’s definitive Sanskrit grammar, scholars congregated in New Delhi to present papers on the massive and enduring cultural system represented by the language. The World Sanskrit Conference, a triennial event that brings together two worlds: one in which Sanskrit serves as the language of imagining truth, beauty and power, and one in which Sanskrit is an object of study and fascination. It confirms that these two worlds are less discontinuous, historically and geographically, than they might seem.



This was clear, first of all, from the kind of participation. International academic conferences often produce experiences of difference in approaches to knowledge: people are trained to ask different questions in different ways, and in different languages. But the boundary between “traditional” and “modern” modes of scholarship–which is only one way of experiencing this difference, and not an unproblematic one–was porous. Panels included papers in English and Sanskrit. Indians presented on Chomsky and computational linguistics; Germans discussed papers in Sanskrit; Americans recited Sanskrit verses fluently and musically. There was dissatisfaction, both with the perceived limitations of “traditional” Sanskrit education and with the perceived hegemony of a “Western” perspective, but over six days of scholarly discussion, these issues appeared to owe more to historical contingencies (including the vastly different institutional structures of Sanskrit studies across the world) than inherent blindnesses.



Secondly, while the conference represented many visions of Sanskrit, it was inaugurated by one in particular: Sanskrit as a repository of instrumentally useful knowledge. The contrast with Sanskrit as the exclusive code of Brahmin ritual, or as the artificial dialect of Indian belles lettres, is pointed and, it seems, intentional. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, emphasized Sanskrit’s resources for “liberalism” and “toleration.” Other speakers, and a series of panels, attempted to mine Sanskrit sources for scientific and technical knowledge. These visions are not entirely groundless (Sanskrit did sustain a noncoercive, multiethnic, and nonsectarian cultural order for a millennium, and Sanskrit authors made decisive advances in linguistics, mathematics, and astronomy), but their way of keeping Sanskrit “alive” in the twenty-first century involves strapping it to a complex of unquestioned cultural values. Fortunately, most scholars at the conference believed that Sanskrit represents something besides a prospective validation of liberalism and scientism—something that requires painstaking research and hermeneutic sensitivity to elicit, something we may unexpectedly learn from.

The range and quality of papers at a massive international conference (more than 500 presentations) is obviously a very limited metric for gauging the state of the art, but it confirms the impression that Shaivism, the range of religious and philosophical traditions that figure Shiva as the primary deity, and Tantrism, an overlapping complex of esoteric practices, are Indology’s current growth sector. Computational approaches to Sanskrit have also made impressive recent progress. There appeared to be a scarcity of papers on philosophical and literary topics, at least in comparison to the importance of these two forms of discourse in the Sanskrit tradition itself.