Indian literary genius survived British imperialism in forgotten villages, research reveals

(Press-News.org) ‘Pundits’ kept Sanskrit scholarship alive in remote settlements as British control swept across India, a major new research project will show. The largely forgotten literary figures and their works – ranging from erotic plays to legal treatises – are neglected treasures of Indian intellectual achievement, argue Cambridge researchers.

 

English speakers are familiar with the word ‘pundit’ but few know that it comes from the Sanskrit word paṇḍita, meaning ‘learned’. Now a Cambridge University-led project is going in search of the pundits, Brahmin scholars, who kept writing poems, plays, philosophy, theology, legal texts and other forms of literature in Sanskrit as Britain tightened its grip on India.

It has long been assumed that the expansion of British power in India from the seventeenth century steadily suffocated Sanskrit scholarship. But the experts behind an ambitious new project argue that the two centuries leading up to the establishment of the British Raj in 1858 were, in fact, a golden age of Sanskrit intellectual thought, literature, and arts. They point to the scholarly activities of hundreds of pundits dispersed across the Indian countryside in Brahmin settlements (agrahāra) and monasteries (maṭha). Having been awarded a major 5-year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), they are leading the first extensive survey of these sites in the Kaveri Delta in southern India, where they were most concentrated.

“There were literary geniuses among these men, historically significant figures, but many people in India don't know them,” says the project’s lead, Dr Jonathan Duquette, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Selwyn College. “Some of these pundits had a huge impact on Sanskrit scholarship. A very small minority still revere them but they and their works have mostly been forgotten.”

“We will study texts that have never been translated or printed and it is quite likely we’ll come across texts that have never been studied in Western scholarship or even catalogued. And we should be able to clear up who wrote what, when and where.”

British colonial power transformed traditional education and knowledge systems in India. After 1799, when the East India Company took control of the court of Thanjavur – the heart of Sanskrit patronage - English-speaking schools began to spread in the region. Sanskrit had always been studied by an elite minority - Brahmins attended traditional schools to learn the Vedas and study Sanskrit philosophy and literature - but gradually, after 1799, fewer Brahmin families aimed for their sons to become priests and instead sent them to the new, Western-influenced, schools.

“This could have suffocated Sanskrit scholarship very quickly but it survived partly because of these rural settlements,” Duquette says. “Their remote location may have helped but more importantly the scholars held their land grants in perpetuity and I think this is one of the factors that protected them from some of the changes taking place in bigger towns.”

“In the Kaveri Delta, I don't think there was a systematic attempt by the British to undermine Sanskrit scholarship. But the British presence changed political structures and economic conditions, and eventually that substantially weakened the patronage practices which sustained Sanskrit scholarship.”

The pundits’ village-like settlements, though an old feature of the Tamil region dating back to the Chola period, appeared with renewed intensity from the end of the fourteenth century. In the Kaveri Delta alone, dozens have been established over the next 500 years. Dr Duquette and his team are focusing on the period 1650-1800, when Sanskrit scholars benefitted from the munificent patronage of the Maratha Bhonsle dynasty.

These powerful and highly cultured rulers granted land to Brahmin scholars in perpetuity and exempt from taxation, allowing them extraordinary security and freedom to focus on their thinking and writing. At the end of their lives, these great men passed on the land to their descendants and students to advance their intellectual, literary, and artistic achievements. The villages usually featured temples to Vishnu, Shiva, and other deities, and in some cases a ‘Sabha’, where the Brahmins would assemble for administrative purposes and for their intellectual activities.

The pundits repaid their generous patrons by praising them in poems and plays. Shahaji Bhonsle, the Maratha ruler who donated villages in the late 17th century, inspired biographies, chronicles of his family history and was depicted as a generous patron, poet-scholar, and an expert lover in some erotic plays.

The researchers are particularly interested in the village of Tiruvisainallur, founded around 1693 on land donated by Shahaji Bhonsle to a group of 45 distinguished scholars. Among them was Ramabhadra Dikshita, who wrote the Jānakīpariṇaya, a Sanskrit play still read and studied until a few decades ago. Also active at this time was Sridhara Venkatesa ‘Ayyaval’, a highly revered poet-saint and crucial early figure in the development of nāmasiddhānta, an influential tradition in which the name of a god is chanted to achieve ‘ultimate bliss’. In the late 19th century, the village was also home to Ramasubba Shastri (1840 - 1922), one of the most original and controversial Sanskrit scholars of his day.

“Ramasubba Shastri followed intellectual traditions from the classical and medieval periods but was very bold and was constantly arguing with pundits from neighbouring settlements,” Duquette says. One of these rivals was Tyagaraja Dikshita (1815 – 1904), a descendant of the great 16th-century scholar Appayya Dikshita.

Duquette and his team expect to identify twenty or more settlements of particular intellectual significance in the Kaveri Delta. They will study land donations, geographical directories, and manuscripts to discover how pundits were connected to one another, to local temples, monasteries and to the court. They will also visit multiple settlements to better understand their geography and structure, and to meet descendants.

“These settlements have been in decline since the early 20th century,” Duquette says. “Most Brahmins have moved away, and many buildings have been sold but some descendants remain. We want to understand the importance of these sites and lives, and make this common knowledge.”

"There is an assumption that Sanskrit was confined to aristocratic circles, courts and cosmopolitan centres,” Duquette says. “But our project will show that it had a vibrant life in the countryside and interacted with Tamil scholarship in the region.”

The project begins at a time when Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies hopes to secure philanthropic funding for posts in Sanskrit and the pre-modern Indo-Persian world. Sanskrit research and teaching has a long and prestigious history in Cambridge dating back to 1867 and the University Library holds an internationally important collection of Sanskrit manuscripts.

The ‘Beyond the Court’ project is led by Dr Jonathan Duquette from the University of Cambridge. The project’s co-investigators are Professor Vincenzo Vergiani, also from Cambridge; Dr Margherita Trento from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Dr Talia Ariav from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Dr Vinoth Murali from the French Institute of Pondicherry. External advisors to the project are K. Srinivasan and Dr Hugo David.


Media contacts

Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: tom.williams@admin.cam.ac.uk / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 44

Jonathan Duquette, University of Cambridge: jd861@cam.ac.uk

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