17-19 November, 1994 Leiden, the Netherlands IIAS seminar IDEOLOGY AND STATUS OF SANSKRIT IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA On 17-19 November 1994 the IIAS hosted a seminar on the ideology and status of Sanskrit in South and Southeast Asia. Twenty-two scholars and researchers from USA, Canada, India, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Belgium,and the Netherlands addressed questions concerning the spread of Sanskrit in South Asia and beyond, and its role in political, religious and literary contexts. The seminar focused especially on the status attributed to Sanskrit vis--vis other languages, dialects and varieties, and on ideologies reflecting and justifying this status. The speakers had been invited to apply and evaluate modern social, socio-linguistic, anthropological theories (or to contribute to their development) in the context of 'Sanskrit in South and Southeast Asia' and to identify strong and weak points of different methodological approaches. In addition, they had been invited to identify immediate research needs and fruitful directions for research on the ideology and status of Sanskrit in South Asia and neighbouring areas. The theme of the seminar reflects recent developments and discussions in social and sociolinguistic theory which are based mainly on data provided by areas other than 'Sanskrit in South and Southeast Asia'. The papers, which were presented in response to an invitation from the seminar, comprised data-oriented papers dealing with a specific period and area, or with specific literary traditions, and papers addressing more directly larger issues connected with the ideology and status of Sanskrit. On the basis of the papers, reworked in the light of the discussions at the seminar, a publication 'Ideology and status of Sanskrit: Perspectives on the social history of the Sanskrit language' is now in preparation. The programme with the abstracts of most of the papers is still available at the IIAS-office. In this report I will give a short review of the forum discussion at the end on research needs and fruitful directions of research. By Jan Houben In conjunction with this forum discussion, some of the speakers, viz. Prof. B.J. Terwiel (Hamburg), Prof. S. Pollock (Chicago), Prof. M.M. Deshpande (Ann Arbor, USA), Prof. H.H. Hock (Urbana-Champaign, USA), and Prof. A. Wezler (Hamburg), had been invited beforehand to prepare and present a short statement of their views. Prof. Terwiel isolated two sorts of approaches which were also reflected in the papers at the seminar. One approach is that adopted mainly by American-trained researchers and is characterized by a willingness to tackle the larger issues more directly. The other approach is followed mainly by European trained scholars, who start, generally speaking, from detailed, textcritical studies and address thematic issues more tentatively and incidentally. His suggestion for the European-trained scholars, to whom he reckons himself, is to be a little more daring in dealing with the larger issues. Referring to the subject of the seminar, Prof. Terwiel emphasized that the enormous span of time and its geographical extent make the use of Sanskrit a difficult phenomenon to study in its entirety. Many relevant areas and periods (e.g. in the history of Java) had not yet been covered by the papers of the seminar. Prof. Pollock believes the most promising field of future research is the world of Sanskrit after about 300-400 CE. It is here that South Asian Studies can make an enormous contribution to international scholarship on language, literature, social formations, and political identity, because of the wealth of data available for that period. In comparison to this, the European world from about 300-400 CE is largely a waste land. The South Asian data are of great importance if one tries to make sense of some crucial themes in human society and human culture. Prof. Pollock and some of his colleagues in Chicago are particularly interested in questions of cultural practice and social practice, in what people did and what people thought. Prof. Pollock's own work concentrates on the world of literary and cultural change in about the year 1000 at the courts of Bhojarja, in what is now Madhyapradesh, and in Kalyana its neighbour to the south. Prof. Pollock is also involved in a group that is attempting to look at literary practices and historical literary cultures in South Asia from about the 1st century CE up to the present. Here, an important reason for the prestige of Sanskrit, as well as languages such as Persian and English in later periods, is the transnational or transregional character of the language. All these languages are able to address translocal and transethnic communities. The interactions of these cosmopolitan languages and literatures and social formations with local languages and cultures deserve special attention. Moreover, there is, according to Prof. Pollock, another critical dimension to this scholarship: in the exploration of the pre-capitalist past we have a very interesting way of thinking about what has been lost in the present with the rise of capitalism and the formation of monolingual nations. As Prof. Deshpande pointed out at the beginning of his statement, his angle of looking at the issues of the seminar is somewhat different from that of Prof. Pollock, as he is standing more at the intersection of linguistics and Sanskrit studies. He is interested in the kind of studies he has conducted so far: distinguishing attitudes and historical changes and facts and the relations between them, and studying some of the transitions that have occurred in Indian linguistic history in this light. Issues which deserve special attention according to Prof. Deshpande are: - the shift of Prakrit to Sanskrit in inscriptions; - the shift from Sanskrit to vernaculars in a later period; - the shift of the Jaina and Buddhist traditions from their vernaculars to Sanskrit. Jainism especially has been left out of consideration too much until now. Another issue with wide implications for linguistics derives from a sociolinguistic approach to Indian linguistic history: a language does not exist in some solid monolithic form, but it is a scalar phenomenon. It can be said that the variety of languages is lined up along a scale, and then not only different communities use these varieties but that the same person can shift back and forth. To illustrate such a scale, Prof. Deshpande first referred to the kind of Sanskrit reflected in the Uktivyaktiprakaraa (an early text teaching colloquial Sanskrit), which has a close connection with the vernacular: this can be placed on one point of the scale. Next, there is the variety of Sanskrit as propounded in the Girvnapadama~jar^ and the kind of texts Prof. Wezler talked about in his paper: this is represented by another point on the same scale. Next, a sort of pre-Pinian or Klidsa-like Sanskrit is another point on that scale. Certain people are capable of using only certain points. But then there are others who can slide depending on the context and occasion. Another discussion at the seminar which was very important in Prof. Deshpande's view concerned the notion of diglossia. Not only do linguists offer so many different definitions of diglossia, but whichever definition we choose, if we say here is a Sanskrit-and-some-other-language diglossia, we still have to look at each situation very carefully and see what the limitation of Sanskrit or that other language is in the given environment. So, in the environment of the Indian grammarian Bharthari, Sanskrit probably means something completely different to Sanskrit in Vietnam or Sanskrit in Cambodia. If both the varieties do exist in a certain format, each individual situation has its own very distinct parameters and besides using the word diglossia or another term we need to pinpoint those specific parameters. Another set of problems concerns the use of terms such as Sanskritization and vernacularization. Again, these are tricky terms, according to Prof. Deshpande. There may in fact be a continuum of parallel, simultaneous processes, and often, the processes of something like Sanskritization or vernacularization of Sanskrit being simultaneous, they create a product which stands somewhere in the middle, and one is often faced with the dilemma of whether to call it vernacularized Sanskrit or a Sanskritized vernacular. Whichever way it is described, one has to look at it very carefully and see how it came about. The same thing applies in the context of language shifting, code switching, or variety switching. Prof. Deshpande concluded with the remark that he had the feeling that this conference would be making a good beginning in sharpening our analytical tools with regard to these problems. Prof. Hock started by pointing out that in order to deal with the issues raised by the seminar one has to adopt a dvaita (dualistic') approach: In Indian philosophy largely Advaita ('monism') is the preferred mode, but I think when we want to deal with issues like status and ideology we have to take a very strong Dvaita ('dualistic') view. We have to look at 'the other side' too, and to see what it is that Sanskrit interacts with. And I think that this is where having been at this meeting has been very helpful for me. The two approaches referred to by Prof. Terwiel, the broad approach attempting to tackle general issues directly, and the approach starting from detailed textcritical studies, complement each other in a way Prof. Hock believes. And the broad approach has great advantages: it sets agendas for research. Addressing the issue of research needs, Prof. Hock can see X number of projects for individual dissertations or papers or whatever else, for instance with regard to the question of: can we say more about the Prakrits that Sanskrit is related to; can we say more about the developments in these Prakrits? Referring to a very nice paper at the seminar (viz. the one presented by Dr Tieken) addressing issues in the developments in dramatic Prakrits, Prof. Hock pointed out that many more studies along those lines are needed, many more tools regarding the interaction between Sanskrit and early Indo-Aryan languages have to be developed. Little work has actually been done in this area, especially beyond the areas traditionally covered of phonology and morphology. Syntax is really very much neglected. Such tools would likewise help Prof. Hock in his research regarding the issues addressed in his paper: the continuity and lack thereof in developments involving convergence. Much too little is known about many of the intermediate stages. Similarly, Prof. Hock argues we can encourage colleagues in neighbouring disciplines to furnish more work which can help us in defining Sanskrit vis--vis these other linguistic entities with which Sanskrit interacts, for instance Dravidian. Dr Menon's paper was very instructive in showing there is this interaction between Sanskrit and Dravidian on a mini scale. Prof. Wezler considered the seminar successful in the sense that it had contributed to a better understanding of the problems concerning the ideology and status of Sanskrit. What we need now, according to Prof. Wezler, is a discussion in follow-up seminars, workshops, and conferences, to be able to deal more comprehensively and more critically with the problems which have been explicitly addressed by some of the participants at the seminar, or which are involved in the material discussed: Of course, we may pursue our normal line and do our individual research; but I think it would be a better alternative to continue this discussion. Some issues addressed in the seminar and deserving further elaboration were mentioned by Prof. Wezler. For instance, the issue addressed by Dr Menon and Prof. Pollock, the use and mixture of particular languages in Indian inscriptions, in both South and Southeast Asia, mainland and (pen-)insular would be enough for a whole seminar. Or the issue of linguistic norms in India, and their relation to social norms, could be elaborated in a separate seminar. This relation was already apparent in early times. Just as Pata~jali referring to 'correct' words speaks of the 'well-educated' (ias) in the area called ryvarta (North and Central India), the Dharma stra literature refers to the same area and the same group of people with regard to the dharma (religiously and morally correct behaviour). Another important issue to which Prof. Wezler drew attention had come up in a remark on one of the papers: the relation between power and grammar, and the question of to what extent the power a certain ruler claims to have amounts to his having real control over an area. The problem is closely related to the question of the relation between the Katriyas (the ruling class) and the Brahmins (the priestly class). The relation between them is complex. It cannot be viewed merely under the category of a division of labour: liturgical work done by Brahmin priests and administration done by the Katriyas. It was also a relation not without tension, most probably throughout Indian history. This could be the subject of another seminar. Another instance: Prof. Aklujkar distinguished between a narrower and a wider sense of vc 'speech' in Vedic Sanskrit. Prof. Wezler would like to know what are the occurrences in which vc is used in the wider sense, in where it is certain that it means language or speech as such. Then another point: Sanskrit cannot be made the subject of a sociolinguistic study without distinguishing it from the other languages, no matter whether they are Prakrits or Apabhraas, or whether these Apabhraas are considered to form a continuum with Sanskrit or whether they are non-Aryan languages. Taking this interaction, or convergence, whatever the right term may be into consideration, will be of great importance. Another point concerns the very strange and peculiar modern ideas with regard to Sanskrit. It was touched upon in the paper by Mr. van der Burgt. And finally, we do not know enough about the history of Sanskrit as such. After all, Louis Renou's highly informative Histoire de la langue Sanskrit, is only a beginning. In short, according to Prof. Wezler we have started the discussion and we have to continue it. Unfortunately lack of time made it impossible to go much deeper into the important points raised by the panellists. It is to be hoped, as Prof. Wezler and many other speakers and participants do, that the discussions at the seminar will continue and give direction to some further research into sociolinguistic and literary problems concerning Sanskrit in relation to other South and Southeast Asian languages, which will no doubt prove to be of considerable interest not only to Sanskritists and Indologists, but to scholars working in various related and neighbouring fields as well.