Licked by mother tongue

Licked by the mother tongue: Imagining everyday Sanskrit at home and in the world

Adi Hastings

2008, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic Anthropology, Sanskrit language and literature, Nationalism

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which Sanskrit revivalists in contemporary India imagine social contexts for the production and reproduction of Sanskrit speech. In contrast to the received view of Sanskrit as being a ritual language par excellence, opposed at every step to the domestic sphere and everyday life, Sanskrit revivalists treat Sanskrit as a “mother tongue,” figuring the home as the primary site for the creation of an “everyday Sanskrit” world and the mother as the primary agent of this process of Sanskritizing the domestic sphere. “Domesticating Sanskrit,” the process of bringing the elevated ritual language down into everyday life, at the very same time “Sanskritizes the domestic,” that is, ritually transforms or elevates the home into a “Sanskrit home.” Moving outward from the Sanskritized domestic sphere, activists also imagine other contexts in which one could use Sanskrit, which nonetheless conforms to a notion of a Sanskrit interiority or domesticity. [India, Sanskrit, language revival, mother tongue, middle class, ritual]

Every few months in India, and this is especially true nowadays around the first week of August—which was officially declared “Sanskrit Week” by the Indian Government in 2001—there is a newspaper or magazine story about some household which has decided to speak nothing but Sanskrit at home. These stories usually frame the event as a curiosity, as an index of one family’s peculiar, if nothing else, impassioned devotion to a language which no one really speaks anymore and has not, in fact, for centuries in any extensive capacity. What makes speaking Sanskrit at home “newsworthy” stems largely from the many associations Sanskrit carries: as the elite “classical” language of South Asia, the language of ancient literary and ritual practice, and subjected to such focused and deliberate cultivation so as to make it virtually artificial.[1]

This “domestic sanskrit” is only one of many reframings of Sanskrit. As I argue in the larger work of which this is a portion, different engagements with Sanskrit, and particularly within the horizon framed by the European “discovery” of Sanskrit, have led to the development of different Sanskrit objects—the philologist’s Sanskrit, the nationalist’s Sanskrit, the pandit’s Sanskrit, etc.—which are nonetheless all contained within the referent “Sanskrit” as used to denote a language, in the sense of an abstract system of lexico-grammatical structure—Saussurian langue. However, if we are to follow the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin and take a truly dialogic approach to language—and I believe we ought to—then none of these Sanskrits are entirely separate from the others. Each is a palimpsest of prior and subsequent uses, utterances, and contexts, each word and phrase redolent of a host of other associations—each reveals a “sideward glance” at the other “Sanskrits.”+++(5)+++

Traditionally regarded as the language of the gods, dēvabhāṣā , Sanskrit stood for centuries in the South Asian subcontinent, and beyond, into Central and Southeast Asia, as the model language for knowledge production, literary composition, and ritual performance. Even when those functions were later replaced by local vernaculars (see especially [Pollock 2006] ), Sanskrit continued to exert enormous power as the ideal model. The elaborate Indian traditions of grammatical analysis and ritual hermeneutics emerge out of a concern ultimately with the preservation, transmission, and correct use of Sanskrit, since the very efficacy of world-making ritual action relies upon the proper pronunciation and employment of the language. Thus, even in its heyday, Sanskrit is a code restricted to certain highly regimented contexts—hardly prosaic conversation. So what happens when one decides to take a language defined largely by its non-domestic and ritual character and make it the language of domestic, everyday conversation? One of the points I want to make in this paper is how, despite this seeming reversal of valencies, the framing of Sanskrit as a domestic, everyday language relies on precisely the kinds of ritual associations and transformative powers Sanskrit has long carried. As we will see, domesticating Sanskrit, in fact, is based on a series of performative, ritual acts of re-baptizing the everyday with Sanskrit.

Many households which have undertaken such an effort are involved with one of the primary organizations behind the so-called Sanskrit revival movement, Samskrita Bharati.[2] Samskrita Bharati was founded in 1981, originally as the Sanskrit wing of the Hindu Seva Pratishthanam, a volunteer organization based in Bangalore and affiliated with the Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (“National Organization of Volunteers,” RSS). Samskrita Bharati’s charismatic leader, Ca. Mu. Krishna Shastry (Cā. Mū. kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī) has spent the last two and a half decades traveling around India and the world preaching the cause of spoken Sanskrit as a vehicle for national unity and integration. He claims that Sanskrit once was the language of “all Indians” irrespective of caste, class, regional origin, or religion, and it should be so again. A common spoken language with a vast literary heritage should ameliorate all the problems which beset modern India.

In what follows, I examine Samskrita Bharati’s efforts to imagine contexts for the social reproduction of everyday Sanskrit practice. As I stated above, the basic goal on their part is to create a nation of Sanskrit speakers, (re-)creating a national unity for India through common linguistic practice. Despite the ecumenical rhetoric about Sanskrit being “all Indians’” primordial linguistic heritage, it is a vision of a national past and future closely tied to that espoused by other Hindu nationalist organizations. As I argue throughout, since “everyday Sanskrit” is largely a creation of Samskrita Bharati and associated revivalist groups, there is a marked absence of any actual contexts in which one_would_ speak Sanskrit. Therefore, a great deal of energy is focused on creating or imagining contexts where one could speak it. The majority of my discussion, then, focuses on models for how to implement everyday Sanskrit conversations, rather than on observations of actual practice (or lack thereof).[3] I should also note here that labeling this Sanskrit as “everyday” follows the practice of Samskrita Bharati and is not my own terminology. While clearly bearing some relationship to the notion of “everyday life” in modern Western thought (and as analyzed by Simmel, Lefebvre, de Certeau, and others),[4] it is here used primarily by Sanskrit revivalists to mark explicitly the opposition to customary associations of Sanskrit with decidedly non-everyday activities like ritual performance.

In the first part of this paper, I examine the framing of the household as the central node from which Sanskrit practice emanates. Along with centralizing the household in their attempt to produce organic contexts for the production of a Sanskritized domesticity, Samskrita Bharati focus on the mother as the primary agent of this process, investing the term “mother tongue” with a deep significance. However, as I have noted already, I show how the endeavor to transform Sanskrit from a language associated with (masculine) priestly authority and ritual practice into one of (feminine) domesticity depends on the very authority and practices from which they are trying to divorce it. In the second part, I look at a small phrasebook published by Samskrita Bharati, the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī (“A Thousand Practical Sanskrit [Sentences]”), which contains a number of sample utterances in Sanskrit, organized topically around various everyday contexts. As I show, reading this phrasebook as presenting a particular point of view reveals an iconic model for Samskrita Bharati’s imagination of what constitutes both the domestic basis for a Sanskritized world, as well as ideal speakers.

There’s No Place Like Home

A couple of months into my work in India, I had the opportunity to attend what promised to be a momentous event, organized in conjunction with Samskrita Bharati. For two days in late December, several hundred men and women—Sanskrit revivalists from all over southern India—gathered in Shimoga, Karnataka, for the “South Indian Sanskrit House Festival” (dakṣiṇabhāratīyaṁ saṁskr̥ta-gr̥ha-sammēlanam ). In a bilingual Sanskrit-Kannada pamphlet announcing the festival, there were several stated objectives for the event:

• the maintenance of the “mother-tongue-ness”[mātr̥bhāṣātva ] of Sanskrit by means of Sanskrit households
• the preservation of the best [parts] of Sanskritic life through Sanskrit
• increasing efforts toward producing a new vitality among Sanskrit families
• the promotion of a Sanskrit mother-tongue tradition
• the overall furthering of the [Sanskrit] conversation movement [saṁskr̥ta-sammēlna-samitiḥ 2000] :2]

The festival served as yet another marker in a definitive shift in strategy by the Sanskrit revivalists that had been ongoing for the past several years. Initially, their program was comprised of two primary components: the kind of Sanskrit promoted and the manner in which it was taught. Samskrita Bharati promotes what it calls “simple Sanskrit,” which is a kind of regularized, lexically reduced form of the language (see [Hastings 2003b] for details). Many constructions and means of periphrasis are introduced to parallel those in modern Indian languages, so that, much like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life, students of simple Sanskrit discover that they have been speaking Sanskrit all their lives. The primary forum for introducing simple Sanskrit is the conversation camp, a ten-day, Berlitz-style immersion program designed to get people speaking Sanskrit as quickly as possible.

While the Sanskrit conversation camps have garnered a great degree of public visibility for the Sanskrit revival movement, they have not generated as large and dedicated a following as Samskrita Bharati would hope. The organization has a host of follow-up activities for graduates of the introductory ten-day camps, but there is a substantial attrition rate after initial exposure in the camps. This problem arises largely out of the very nature of the camps and the Sanskrit taught in them: since every effort is made to create a bridge to Sanskrit by pointing out parallels and correlations between Sanskrit grammar and vocabulary, and that of either Hindi or the regional language, participants come away with the impression, as I already noted, that they have always been speaking something like Sanskrit. Thus, all one needs to do is to “Sanskritize” their speech in particular, marked ways.[5] Many feel after going through the conversation camps that they have sufficient knowledge of Sanskrit and discontinue their studies. This is despite the fact that Samskrita Bharati exerts large amounts of effort to encourage follow-up study. These efforts include advanced conversation and special topics courses, courses for children, various other outreach projects, and a number of workbooks, collections of stories, and other publications.[6]

It is with this in mind, then, that one of the main thrusts of the spoken Sanskrit movement currently is the encouragement of “Sanskrit households” (saṁskr̥tāni gr̥hāṇi ). While these have been a feature of the movement since its inception, efforts have only turned seriously toward this endeavor in the last ten years or so. That is, the household was always implicitly part of the intended domain of the language as an everyday language; only recently has it been singled out as an instrumental or pivotal site.[7] A popular saying in the movement—and one proclaimed at every opportunity at the Sanskrit House Festival in 2000—is “gr̥hē gr̥hē , grāme grāme, nagare nagare” (“in each house, in each village, in each town”). For Samskrita Bharati, Sanskrit households form the atomic basis for an ever-widening organic structure of contexts for Sanskrit speech: “If in one house there is constant use of Sanskrit, then the splendor (prabhāvaḥ ) of that exists in all the houses around that house, and likewise in a hundred more houses of friends and relations” (kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 1999] :32). They become the nodal points in a process of eventually making the Sanskrit language the “people’s language” (jana-bhāṣā )—from houses, to villages, to towns—and eventually to the entire nation and beyond. (The proclamation could just as easily have continued up the ladder, “janapade janapade, pradeśe pradeśe” (“in each district, in each region”) etc., etc.) Sanskrit households become a socially locatable and significant site for the production and reproduction of “Sanskrit speakers,” a deictic origo or ritual center from which the movement is to spread outward, but which are nevertheless to remain the central anchor for reference. As I will discuss shortly, it is through the domestication of Sanskrit in making it the language of the home that the ground is prepared for the Sanskritization of the world, ritually re-baptizing that world with Sanskrit.

The emphasis placed on the Sanskrit household follows largely from Samskrita Bharati’s approach to language pedagogy, which is founded on the principle of immersion through conversation. “sarvamūlam bhāṣaṇam ” (“speech is the root of all”) declares one overview of the movement by its founder (Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 2000] :15), and it was a sentiment I heard voiced repeatedly: “If Sanskrit is going to be revived, it needs to be spoken.” The idea follows that listening and speaking skills must precede reading and writing; these stages are visualized as a series of consecutive steps toward mastery of the language (as diagrammatically represented by a staircase, e.g., in Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 2000] :6). Now this may seem to be a fairly commonplace assertion, and certainly would make sense for a movement which is putatively engaged in a language revival effort. This model is, after all, an idealized version of the process people normally follow in first-language acquisition. But what we need to understand is what this pedagogical philosophy is raised in objection to. Samskrita Bharati attributes (with some justification) many of the problematic aspects of contemporary Sanskrit education to its instruction via the “Grammar Translation Method” (as in Classical language education)—by which they mean teaching the language through the medium of another—as opposed to the kind of program they advocate. In an English language pamphlet published by the organization, in a section on “Questions and Answers” about Sanskrit, they write:

For more than hundred years [sic] the Grammar Translation Method has been adopted from Primary to University levels. This is not the Indian method. It is a foreign one. Samskrit was being taught through Hindi or English or some other regional language. This is one of the reasons why Samskrit reached such a sad situation. Therefore from the Primary stage itself Samskrit should be taught only through the Samskrit medium. [saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 1998b] :27–28]

Note the emphasis on the utter foreignness of Grammar Translation Method to the task at hand. Of course, one doubts if the so-called “Indian method” of teaching Sanskrit would satisfy the revivalists’ purposes, since perduring pandit traditions of Brahmanical Sanskrit instruction teach the language not through conversational immersion, but through rote memorization of texts. Rather, the method they wish to promote in place of this is one which they stipulate must have existed when the language was “formerly the language of everyday dealings”—and therefore must be the (true) “Indian method”: “Samskrit can be studied by repeatedly hearing and speaking, by aural means. Without reading any book, without reading grammatical rules, by oral practice alone one can learn Samskrit. So one must talk in Samskrit” ([saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 1998b] :3). The distinction Samskrita Bharati wishes to draw is summed up nicely with an aphorism repeatedly invoked in their literature and by the members: “Speak in Samskrit, not about Samskrit.” However, as we will see, the process of creating Sanskrit speech contexts proceeds precisely through _ritual _baptismal acts of translation.

The logic of the model of language instruction and acquisition employed by Samskrita Bharati demands that one hear and speak Sanskrit as much as possible, as often as possible. Part of the reason for focusing on the creation of Sanskrit homes is to establish contexts where that kind of immersive contact with the language can happen. Judging from the entire day’s worth of testimonials at the Sanskrit House Festival by people who had declared their home a Sanskrit-speaking home, this has been a moderately successful strategy. Those of us in the audience heard time and again how speaking Sanskrit in the home gave the family members increased fluency in spoken Sanskrit and a renewed sense of purpose and devotion to the cause of the Sanskrit revival movement. As we will see, domesticating Sanskrit—transforming a ritual language into a language of everyday conversation—proceeds largely through a process of Sanskritizing the domestic, using Sanskrit’s ritual powers to sanctify the home.

The Sanskrit Household

The home is a particularly ideologically saturated site in India, as elsewhere, and has historically been constructed as a space for the production of national subjects and culture.[8] [Partha Chatterjee (1993] ) has shown us the far-reaching repercussions of how in nationalist discourse in colonial India distinctions made and found between private and public, the inner and the outer, the home and the world, the spiritual and material, are recursively inscribed upon one another as a set of non-commensurable, mutually-entailing oppositions—a set of oppositions which find their ultimate expression in the opposition between the Orient and the Occident. Although the indexical ground has shifted somewhat, these oppositions perdure as significant conceptual and social categories in independent India.[9] According to Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī, it is in the inner realm, the “private” spaces of the home that Sanskrit will thrive. In this view, the home is the affective domain, where emotions can be let loose.[10] It provides the most fertile environment for learning a language since it enables a context for unmediated and unselfconscious expression, a place where you can be your “true [linguistic] self.” Underwriting this assertion is a theory of language acquisition and linguistic practice where the powers of verbal expression proceed from the capacity for “general communication” (simple reference and predication), through the capacity for expressing thought or reasoning (logical argumentation), culminating in the capacity for the outward manifestation of emotions (Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 1999] :33).

The home is also crucially marked as a feminine domain, the realm of the wife, the mother.[11] Here, Samskrita Bharati adopts a particularly loaded interpretation of the term “mother tongue” (mātr̥bhāṣā ) by placing primary responsibility for “Sanskritizing” the house with the mother of a family. The term “mother tongue” is a European importation, current in India as a salient category only since the mid–19th century ([Mitchell 2005] ; [Ramaswamy 1997] :16). In this context it has a double sense. On the one hand, “mother tongue” is used in the sense enshrined in instruments of state governmentality (such as—most importantly—the census) as the language spoken in the home (whether by the mother or not). Actually, as defined and used in the decennial Indian Census, the term has had an illuminating semantic career. In 1881 and 1891, it was “the language ordinarily spoken in the household at each persons’ parents.” In 1901 it was the language each person “ordinarily used.” In 1911 and 1921 it was the language each person “ordinarily used in his own home.” In the three censuses from 1931 to 1951 it was the language “first spoken from the cradle.” In 1961 it was the language “spoken in childhood by the person’s mother to the person or mainly spoken in the household.” From 1971 through 1991, it was defined as the language spoken in childhood by the person’s mother to the person; if the mother died in infancy, then the language spoken in the person’s home in childhood was recorded. However, Census officials note ([Census of India 2002] ) that in collecting returns for the most recent censuses, language data was collected alternately under the rubrics “mother tongue,”“language ordinarily used,” and “parent tongue,” all of which produced “relatively consistent results.” What is important here is not that the term has been inconsistently applied from decade to decade, or that collection of language data has proceeded under several different labels, but rather that the term “mother tongue” has gone from meaning the language a person “ordinarily used” or used with their parents, to referring to the language actually “spoken by one’s mother.” It has gone from a metaphorical usage of the term to a much more literal and gendered application. It should probably not be surprising, therefore, that Samskrita Bharati also employs the term with such a literal rendering.

On the other hand, particularly in speaking of Sanskrit, the term can have another sense, taking on a much broader meaning when linked to the familial metaphors employed in talking about historical linguistic relationships. “Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages” is a statement one encounters again and again in conversations about Sanskrit in India. While not technically precise as a description of linguistic genealogy in South Asia, it is nevertheless an accurate reflection of the functional relationship Sanskrit has to many modern Indian languages (as a source for lexical and generic innovation and renvoi), as well as—and this is perhaps more important—construals of that relationship. What statements like this represent are a transference of the metaphor inherent in the Stammbaum or “family tree” model of schematizing historical linguistic relationships to Sanskrit, positing an essentialized identity for it as a “mother tongue.”[12] When we combine this with the not-unrelated interpretation of “mother tongue” as the language spoken by a mother, we end up with a parallel analogy: as a mother teaches her children a language (and Sanskrit, at that), so does “mother” Sanskrit impart itself to its “daughter” languages. We could say, then, that the usage of “mother tongue” with respect to Sanskrit is highly overdetermined, and Samskrita Bharati’s usage of the term “mother tongue” with reference to Sanskrit deliberately exploits this.

Of course, as I mentioned above, this usage of “mother tongue” is not merely an invocation of the figure of the mother. In a parallel fashion to the usage of the term in the Indian Census, the term links Sanskrit language usage not just to a maternal image or metaphor, but materially and practically to the role of the mother herself in propagating Sanskrit. In a prolegomenon for Sanskrit households printed originally in Samskrita Bharati’s monthly journal, saṁbhāṣaṇa-sandēśaḥ , Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī writes, “To the extent that women (mahilāḥ )—defined as the mistresses of the house (gr̥hiṇyaḥ )—do not speak Sanskrit, (to that extent) Sanskrit cannot become the people’s language (jana-bhāṣā )” (Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 1999] :33). Women are the ultimate arbiters of Sanskrit competence. For whenever a mother knows Sanskrit, “then [her] family will be a Sanskrit family, and it will be a haven for Sanskrit activity” (Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 1999] :34). A profile of Sanskrit households in an issue of saṁbhāṣaṇa-sandēśaḥ opens by linking Sanskrit mother tongue-ness and mothers: “What is a mother tongue but the mother’s language, the language acquired in the vicinity of the mother? If Sanskrit is to be a mother tongue then the greatest effort should be made in this matter by mothers.” ([saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 1998a] :7). This profile goes on to introduce the accounts of a number of women who are described as “some mothers who have been speaking Sanskrit to their children.”

Here, in the image of the household of the Sanskrit-speaking family, we see the union of women and Sanskrit, figures who at least since the earliest Orientalist writings in the late 18th century have been united as the twin conservators of Hindu tradition ([Sangari 1999] ): Sanskrit as the verbal, textual clothing of dharmic law and religion; women as the custodians and symbols of that tradition, opposed, of course, to the traditionally masculine world of pandits and priests.[13] In nationalist mythologies in India, feminine and maternal figures play prominent roles in the iconography of the nation, although it is always as mothers and wives to male patriots. Women, as the symbolic representatives of the inner, domestic realm become figured as the space upon which tradition and culture rest; by a kind of building-block, or recursive, imagination, they become metonyms for the nation. Efforts for cultural improvement or conservation of tradition then end up focusing energies on women and the domestic sphere. Take for example, [Amanda Weidman’s (2003, 2006] ) work on the “classicalization” of South Indian (or Carnatic) music in Tamil Nadu, where she shows how women were sited as a locus for cultural improvement through schooling in Carnatic music, with the idea that domestic accomplishments in the home would radiate outward to the society at large.

In the same essay on the Sanskrit household, Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī offers a variety of scenarios about how one can go about inculcating Sanskrit usage at home. Almost all the means to Sanskritize the house involve the coincident interconnection—the reflexive calibration—of speech and action.[14] By reflexive calibration, I mean that the speech, uttered at the same time as the action, characterizes or names the event, for example, “This is a stick up” announces a bank robbery (a “stick up”) by naming it. Sometimes, of course, the speech can be the action itself, as in explicit primary performatives, “I hereby pronounce you man and wife.” In any case, the desired effect we have to imagine is that while doing things around the house, one is at the same time producing a continuous narrative of what one is doing. “Whatever is to be done in the home should be done while uttering the expression connected to that (tatsambandhi),”Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī writes. “Thus when a mother says, ‘I am setting down the pot,’ she should be setting down the pot” (Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 1999] :36).[15] What is striking here is the parallelism to orthodox Brahmanical ritual practice (and ritual practice more generally), which similarly dictates a certain reflexive calibration between speech, action, and material objects, in order to produce and enact connections which serve to mediate the mundane and divine realms and make ritual meaningful. In this tradition of ritual performance, _bandhu_s (bonds) are believed to govern the interconnection of the various domains (worldly, godly, ritual) which enable action in the ritual sphere to be a means of establishing and maintaining mundane–divine relations. Objects, actions, and phrases in the ritual are declared as consubstantial representations of divine beings and qualities, and their manipulation enables mediation of the two worlds.[16] With the Sanskrit household, the calibration of speech and action in effect creates an everyday Sanskrit by lifting ordinary reference and predication to ritual effect.

The narration of activities in Sanskrit creates a translational equivalence which allows the subsumption of those activities into a Sanskritized domestic realm: as this activity was formerly done in my “Kannada world,” by describing it in Sanskrit I claim it for my “Sanskrit world.” This is achieved by what [Tambiah (1985] ) would call a “persuasive analogy,” which carries a certain illocutionary force through the effective establishment of correspondences and relations of equivalence. In setting up and enacting relations of equivalence, these acts have a high degree of (poetic) metricality and enable the ordination of a new, Sanskritized domestic space. Thus, by performatively narrating a Sanskrit everyday life, one is able to _ritually _create it, phrase by phrase, action by action, suffusing the household space and the objects in it with the emanation of Sanskrit.

Of course, it is not just actions which are brought into translational equivalence, but objects as well. In addition to calibrating speech and action for the Sanskritization of the home, Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī (1999] :35) recommends “writing a Sanskrit name and placing it on everything in the house.”[17] Here we see explicitly the creation of these sorts of translational equivalencies which have the performative effect of ritually transferring objects from a mundane domestic space to a “Sanskrit” one. Several Sanskrit houses I visited engaged in this practice, with a number of labels with Sanskrit words on notecards affixed to various household objects and implements. By giving the objects their Sanskrit name, and labeling them as such, they are brought into the Sanskit world. At the Sanskrit House Festival, there was a pavilion set up next to the recital hall where the event was taking place. The tent was filled with various modern everyday objects, displayed with attached labels indicating the appropriate Sanskrit word. Strolling through, one learns, for example, that a “purse” is a dhana-syūtam (dhana- “money” + syūtam “bag”), a “toothbrush” is a danta-kūrcam (danta- “tooth” + kūrcam “brush”), and “glasses” are called “upanetram” (upa- “toward” + netram“eye”). The overwhelming sense of the place was that here were objects from daily life, arranged and rebaptized for a Sanskritized world. An important objective with the spoken Sanskrit movement has always been to demonstrate the everyday utility and suitability for Sanskrit, and that necessitates the labeling of everyday objects with Sanskrit names.

According to Samskrita Bharati, there are a little more than thirty “Sanskrit households” in the city of Bangalore. Several of these are the families of the full-time workers at akṣaram , Samskrita Bharati’s compound on the outskirts of the city, and it is my sense that for the most part Sanskrit is spoken as much as possible in these. However, in the remaining households designated as Sanskrit homes, actual Sanskrit use ranges from relatively to rarely, if at all. As I discovered, the designation of a household as a Sanskrit household is more of an optative expression of how things should or ought to be, rather than being indicative of a state of affairs. Granted, the adults and often the children in these homes all had some experience with Sanskrit, often through Samskrita Bharati’s conversation camps, and of course there was a positive predisposition toward its use in everyday contexts. But as should be no surprise at this point, it is the designation—the naming—of a house as a Sanskrit house which is itself intended to bring it into being, as a ritually effective performative statement: “This house is a Sanskrit house.” Indeed, just as in ritual practice, the fact that one can Sanskritize a house without actually using Sanskrit all the time shows that even “everyday Sanskrit” still has a kind of ritual performativity such that actual, non-ritual, mundane practice does not matter.

Making Sanskrit the language of the home anchors it in a private domesticity from which it can venture forth into new domains of use. But by this very fact, the designation of a Sanskrit house is a public, outward-looking act—one that tranforms the private Sanskritness of the household into a public Sanskritness. Sanskrit households mark themselves in relation to all the other homes in the neighborhood, and do so literally: family members are advised to put up placards outside their residence advertising their home as one in which Sanskrit is spoken (Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 1999] :37). Just as labeling objects inside the the home with Sanskrit names enables the creation of a Sanskrit domestic world through translational equivalence, the naming and labeling of the house itself serves to encompass all the labels held within, as a meta-label of sorts. “This house and everything in it is a Sanskrit house.”

In publicly distinguishing themselves from their neighbors, Sanskrit households produce the possibility of further development—further converts to the cause. The mother in one household I visited held weekly evening Sanskrit camps for the neighborhood children. She claimed, with some obvious pride, that several parents had subsequently approached her inquiring about how they could start using Sanskrit in their home. By these means, Samskrita Bharati believes Sanskrit will spread out from the original domestic centers into new social realms and locales. Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī writes, “For creating a new tradition of Sanskrit today, there is a need for every district in the whole country to have two or three model Sanskrit houses and to establish the customariness [of that]” (Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī 1999] :39).

In domesticating Sanskrit by making it the language of the house, Samskrita Bharati attempts to entirely decouple it from its prior context as an esoteric scholastic language and yoke it to new everyday contexts, producing a Sanskritized everyday life. While one can—and certainly from Samskrita Bharati’s perspective ought to—speak and act in Sanskrit, it is not necessarily these facts which make the household a Sanskrit household. Rather, it is the baptismal act of labeling the house a Sanskrit house—an act which lays down the prototype (like all good ritual utterances) for the effective Sanskritization of the home.

Sanskritizing the World

The domestication of Sanskrit, while framed as an end in and of itself, is really only one step in the direction toward the (eventual) Sanskritization of the world which an organization like Samskrita Bharati is working to achieve.[18] The existence of Sanskrit households (or Sanskrit villages) lays the groundwork for Sanskrit to spill forth into the streets by establishing habituated uses and users who will carry Sanskrit out into the world. In the various primers and phrasebooks published by Samskrita Bharati, the dialogues and other phrasal models of Sanskrit usage often depict events taking place outside the home: in stores, in offices, in train stations. They provide an illustration of how and where the Sanskrit revivalists imagine Sanskrit could be used. That is, the schematization of various other domains of use outside the home provides a sort of verbal model of a Sanskritized world. As I will discuss, reading these as verbal models of a Sanskrit world invites other questions about what kind of world this is, and who is doing the speaking.

For the purposes of my analysis here, I would like to focus on one phrase book in particular, the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī (“A Thousand Practical Sanskrit [Sentences]”) ([saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] ). Originally published as a Sanskrit-Kannada bilingual phrasebook, it was subsequently translated into Hindi, English, and several other Indian languages.[19] In a preface by the publishers, we are given the rationale for the publication of the book:

There are quite a few who know a bit of Samskrita and would very much desire to speak and converse in this great language. But they lack expression. Right words and right construction of sentences fail them and often they have to indulge in verbal acrobatics. The answer to this predicament can only be to have on hand sets of suitable readymade sentences. That would at one stroke give confidence and knowledge to match one’s expressions with one’s ideas and emotions. [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :iii]

Note especially the last sentence, where the idea is that language is merely a tool for verbally clothing internal states, matching thoughts to their linguistic expression. This is fundamental to the presuppositions underlying tools like the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī, and ties it together with the kinds of activities I discussed earlier. Just as with going around the house, narrating actions in Sanskrit and labeling objects in Sanskrit, (and through that performative activity making them part of a Sanskrit domestic life), the phrasebook offers Sanskrit translational equivalents to enable a similar Sanskritization of various other interactional contexts.

As the title suggests, the booklet contains around 1,000 sentences dealing with all sorts of subjects, arranged topically.[20] We are told in the preface that “the sentences presented here have been selected on the criterion of their utility and applicability in day-to-day life” (saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :iii). Bookended by a section on “Etiquettes (śiṣṭācāraḥ )” at the beginning and one on “Dissatisfaction (asantōṣaḥ)” at the end, the topical arrangement of the phrasebook is a haphazard assortment of potential addressees (“Friends,”“Teachers,”“Guest,” etc.), subjects (“Food,”“Health,”“Weather,” etc.), and situations (“Journey,”“On Arrival,”“Commerce,” etc.). Each of the 25 sections has a number of potentially relevant sentences (from as few as ten to more than a hundred), arranged on a single page with Sanskrit in one column and English in a parallel, facing column.

At first glance, these are obviously not “dialogues,” like one finds in many language textbooks, but rather a succession of single sentences, with little contextual information provided other than that given by the topical heading. The format is therefore much more similar to travel phrasebooks, which supply a stock of phrases one may need (to speak or understand) when traveling abroad, grouped by topic. In travel phrasebooks, however, the speaking subject is clearly understood to be the traveler (or sometimes their interlocutors), whereas in this Sanskrit phrasebook, it is not always clear who the speakers, or the addressees, are. Upon closer examination, however, we can see that there are certain “dialogue-like” characteristics to some sets of sentences. Some sequences flow from a (putatively) necessary logical succession, or comprise a series of potentially pair-part interactional interchanges. The arrangement suggests that it may be interesting to read these as a dialogue or disjunctive narrative of certain encounters.

As I stated above, the sentences in each section deal with a number of circumstances one might encounter in the context determined by the heading. For example, the following sentences are excerpted from the section with the heading, “Train (relayānam).”[21]

• 20. yātrāpatraṁ kutra kretavyam? Where should I buy a ticket?
• 21. yātrāpatrasya krayaṇa-sthānaṁ tatra asti paśyatu. See, the ticket selling counter is there.
• 22. tatra bahu dīrghā anupaṅktiḥ asti. A very long queue is there.
• 23. ārakṣaṇasya prārthanāpatraṁ kutra labhyate? Where is the reservation form available?
• . . .
• 32. jī. ṭī yānasya ghaṇṭātrayasya vilambaḥ. G. T. Express is late by three hours.
• . . .
• 48. etad vyajanaṁ na calati. This fan doesn’t work.
• 49. vātāyanam ughāṭayati kim? [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :11–13] Will you open the window?

Anyone that has traveled by train in India will recognize that these are indeed sentences one might easily need to use when doing so: purchasing tickets may involve standing in long lines and filling out the necessary forms; trains can easily run hours late; and amenities like fans don’t work more often than they do. So we should assume that these sentences really were created for their “utility” and “applicability in day-to-day life,” as the preface states.[22] But what makes these sentences interesting is precisely their almost complete lack of utility and applicability in day-to-day life, where Sanskrit is not, in fact, the language of the Indian rail system. They have only potential applicability, and a tenuous potentiality at that.

With its motley collection of topical categories, the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī seemingly attempts to cover as many potential contexts as possible, providing a repertoire of brief, decontextualized sentences. In doing so, it creates a diagrammatic icon—a schematic replica—of the everday world it seeks to invoke.[23] That is, by imagining these contexts as ones where a person could speak Sanskrit, it creates a possible—that is, “imagined”—Sanskrit life in these domains. In creating a diagrammatic icon of a Sanskrit everyday world, a verbal model subcategorized by a variety of potential contexts or topics, this Sanskrit phrasebook is different from the sort of travel phrasebooks that its form immediately calls to mind. Whereas in Destination French for example, the world depicted through the organization of topics is a world where one would go and need to speak French. Such a world in fact already exists in some form or another, and the travel phrasebook presupposes its existence. It presumes an identity for the user of the book (a non-native speaker and tourist). What is the world that the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī depicts? What is the presumed identity of the user or speaker?

What is really interesting about this collection of Sanskrit phrases are the answers it provides to these questions. The phrasebook creates a diagrammatic icon of a Sanskrit-speaking world, and it also provides an implied subject position or perspective of the “Sanskrit speaker” finding their way through that world, thus answering questions like where you would speak Sanskrit, with whom, and what you would talk about. Although in common understanding dictionaries and language-teaching materials are often believed to be value-neutral instruments of the standard language, we should already know this is rarely the case. What happens if we read the sentences in this phrasebook narratively, or as conveying a particular point of view, a particular perspective on this imagined Sanskrit world?[24] Here, I want to examine more closely some selections from the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī with these questions in mind.[25] As I will show, the image of the ideal Sanskrit speaker imagined through this text is one which conforms largely both to long-standing images of the Indian “middle class,” and more importantly to new notions of middle-classness emerging in India following economic liberalization in the 1990s.

Women

Since we have already seen the extent to which women figure prominently (as mothers) in the rhetoric and symbolism of the Sanskrit revival movement, the section titled “Women (mahilāḥ )” may be a good place to start the discussion. I reproduce here two portions from that section:

• 1. gr̥hakāryaṁ samāptaṁ kim? Have you finished your household chores?
• 2. ām, samāptaprāyam. Yes, almost finished.
• 3. gatāni dvitrāṇi dināni kutra āsīt bhavatī? Where were you for the last two or three days?
• 4. ahaṁ mātr̥gr̥haṁ gatavatī. I had gone to my mother’s place.
• 5. ēṣu dinēṣu śyāmalayā militavatī kim? Did you meet Shyamala recently?
• 6. mama prātaḥ] ārabhya bahu kāryāṇi. I’ve had a lot of work since morning.
• 7. karmakarī adya punaḥ na āgatavatī. Again today the maidservant didn’t come.
• . . .
• 11. agrima-māse vastraprakṣālanayantraṁ krēṣyāmaḥ. Next month we will buy a washing machine.
• 12. samīpe ēkaḥ nūtanaḥ sarvavastu-āpaṇaḥ udghāṭitaḥ asti. A new departmental store has opened nearby.
• 13. ramāyāḥ putryāḥ vivāhaḥ niścitaḥ iti śrutavatī. I heard that Rama’s daughter’s marriage is fixed.
• 14. adya ārabhya tasmin āpaṇē kācapātrāṇāṁ nyūnamūlyena vikrayaṇam asti. From today there is a sale of glass wares in that shop.
• 15. kiñcit śarkaraṁ dadāti kim? Would you lend me some sugar?
• 16. etasya pākakr̥tiṁ māṁ vadati kim? Would you tell me its recipe?
• 17. āgacchatu, dēvālayaṁ gacchāmaḥ [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :22–23] Come, let’s go to the temple.

The first question we ought to ask is whether there is any interactional or logical structure governing these sequences. It appears that there is, at least in certain places. The first set of four sentences (1–4), for example, appear to be two paired interchanges of question and answer. That is, the second part of each pair seems to be an answer by an interactant in reply to the question posed by some other interactant in the first part. On the other hand, the following sentence (5) does not seem to follow from the second pair (or the first). And while sentences (6) and (7) could possibly be related to each other, the latter being an explanation for the former (“I had a lot of work this morning because the maid did not show up”), there is nothing to indicate that this is necessarily the case. None of the sentences in the second excerpted portion (11–17) exhibit an obvious pair-part structure or any other clear cohesive elements. Rather, they appear to be a series of non sequitirs—decontextualized one-liners with no clearly identifiable speaker or addressee (the pairs of exchanges in the first part have at least a presumed conversational dyad). Whereas the structure of the pairs in the first part might be characterized abstractly by A and B (indicating the structural entailment of one by the other), the rest might simply be a series of A’s.

I raise these issues about the sequential structure of the sentences because it is relevant to considering our next question, which is: who is talking, and to whom? There are few linguistic clues. In several sentences, a past-participial form (or a second-person pronominal usage of_bhavān_—which is a participial form of the verbal root √_bhū_“be”) is used with reference to either the speaker or addressee. In every case, it is inflected as a feminine noun. So, to illustrate: in sentence (3), “you”bhavatī is feminine; in sentence (4), “gone”gatavatī is feminine (which makes sense: if (3) and (4) do form a cohesive interchange, then the words are both used in reference to the same person); in (5), “met”militavatī is feminine; and in (13), “heard”śrutavatī is feminine.[26] Clearly, then, where we can actually use grammatical cues to identify interactants in these model sentences, the roles of both the speaker, in (4) and (13), and the addressee, in (3) and (5), are inhabited by (grammatically) feminine actors. All this is a roundabout way of saying that as far as we can tell, these are sentences which would be said_by_ women to women. So the heading, “Women,” indicates in this case the role dyad for the sentences: these are useful sentences translated into Sanskrit for women to use with each other.

So what does this say about what women talk about? Or what they are supposed to be talking about? Household chores occupy some of the conversation—although these labors are possibly only done when the maidservant does not show up for work. The last excerpted portion now makes a little more sense, as well. These decontextualized sentences are given as a sample of what women might talk about, each a metonym perhaps for an entire conversation, a single one-sided stand-in for a fully elaborated interactional event. We see that they talk about shopping, as well as the latest marriage news. They share foodstuffs and recipes. They go to the temple together. This last sentence (17) is noteworthy for being the only specific mention of religion or a religious institution in the entire phrasebook, aside from some of the holiday-specific sentences in the section on greetings (e.g., [dipāvalī-śubhāśayāḥ “Wish you a happy Deepavali”).

Husband and Wife, Home and Work

We can continue our examination of topics relating to the family and domestic sphere by looking at some excerpts from the section called “Husband and Wife” (patipatnī). If the sentences in the section on women were intended to be representative of interactions between women, these sentences cover issues deemed likely to be discussed by a husband and wife. Although it is often not clear, again, what the role inhabitancies are—who is the speaker and who is the addressee—judging purely by the content it appears the number of sentences spoken by the husband and those by the wife are roughly equal.[27] Many of the sentences in the section concern a wide variety of domestic activities, such as:

• 21. ēkacaṣakaṁ cāyaṁ karoti kim? Will you make me a cup of tea?
• 22. miśrakaṁ samyak kāritavān asmi. I got the mixer repaired.
• . . .
• 45. dugdhārthaṁ dhanaṁ dātavyam asti. We have to pay money for the milk.
• 46. rajakāya vastrāṇi dattavān. [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :44–45] I gave the clothes to the washerman.

Our typical husband and wife also enjoy “cultural” activities, as evidenced in the following sequence (which we could probably infer to be an intended interchange):

• 49.kaaryakramaH samyak āsīt khalu? The programme was good, wasn’t it?
• 50. ām, sā samyak gāyati [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] : 45] Yes, she sings well.

Interesting in this section is the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the sentences which are apparently voiced by the husband are about work and time (or rather, lack of time).[28] He always seems to be busy, and delays seem only to add to his frustration.

• 12. adya kāryālaye bahu vyastatā āsīt. It was a very busy day at the office today.
• 13. vittakoṣagamanaṁ nābhavat eva adyāpi. Even today I couldn’t go to the bank.
• . . .
• 25. adya mārge yātāyāta-avarōdhaḥ āsīt. Today there was a traffic jam on the way.
• 26. śvaḥ basayāncālakānāṁ kāryāvarōdhaḥ bhaviṣyati. [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :43–44] Bus-drivers will be on strike tomorrow.

Work in the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī is always office work. In fact, “Office” (kāryālayaḥ ) is the one of the only topical headings in the phrasebook in which the situational context is clearly one’s place of employment. Clearly the traffic jams and public transportation strikes are having an effect on people’s ability to arrive on time to the office, for here we find the following sentence:

• 6. pratidinaṁ bhavān vilambena āgacchati. [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :25] You come late every day.

As might be expected, many of the sentences in the this section of the phrasebook relate to routine aspects of everyday life in the office: doing paperwork, taking tea, having lunch.

• 26. sà sañcikà kasya samãpe asti Who has that file?
• 27. àgacchatu, càyaṁ pibàmaḥ. Come, let’s drink tea.
• 28. bhōjanavirāmaḥ kadā? When is lunch time?
• . . .
• 32. śvaḥ sarvēṣāṁ karmacāriṇāṁ kāryāvarōdhaḥ . All the workers will be on strike tomorrow.
• 33. tadviṣayē ahaṁ vismr̥tavān eva. I just forgot about that.
• 34. etat kasya uttaradāyitvam? Whose responsibility is this?
• 35. bhavataḥ kāryēṇa ahaṁ santuṣṭaḥ asmi [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :26] I am satisfied with your work.

The identities of the interlocutors are never very clear, especially in the first group of sentences (26–28). However, in the second set (of which there are more examples that I have not reproduced here) of sentences (32–35), we see that the speaker appears to be in a position of authority, probably in some sort of managerial position, such that he is worried about striking workers, demanding responsibility, and passing judgment on others’ work. In fact, he states this clearly at the beginning of the section, in response to a query:

• 3. kāryālaye bhavān kasmin sthāne niyuktaḥ ? What’s your designation at the office?
• 4.ahaṁ vikrayaṇavibhāgasya vyavasthāpakaḥ asmi. [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :25] I am manager of the sales department.

The sentence (6) above about being late therefore appears to be an admonishment by our manager to some lackey. Actually, there’s quite a number of admonishments, reprimands, and demands in this section—apparently our manager really has to crack the whip for things to get done around the office.

Children, Students, and Examinations

We should not be surprised to find that a topic of conversation between our model husband and wife are the children. Thus, we find the following sequence in the “Husband and Wife” section about a son, “Puskhar,” which appears to be part of a conversation about Pushkar’s poor performance at school.

• 18. parīkṣāyāṁ puṣkarasya uttamaguṇaḥ nāgataḥ. Pushkar has not scored well in the examination.
• 19. ēkavāraṁ vayaṁ śikṣakēṇa saha milāmaḥ. Let us meet the teacher once.
• 20. agrima-saptāhe gamiṣyāmaḥ [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :43–44] Let’s go in the next week.

The section headed with the title “Parents and Children” (pitaraḥ putrāḥ ca) also has the parents there upset with their child’s academic performance. We see now why the parents in the exchange quoted above want to go see the teacher:

• 6. bhavatā bahu eva nyūnāḥ aṅkāḥ prāptāḥ ētasyāṁ parīkṣāyām. You’ve scored very low marks in this examination.
• 7. śikṣakaḥ samyak na pāṭhayati eva. The teacher does not teach well.
• 8. bhavān māṁ pūrvaṁ kimarthaṁ na uktavān? [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :39] Why didn’t you tell me earlier?

When not talking to their children about their performance on exams or urging them to do their homework, parents seem either to be asking them to do things around the house or to be scolding them. For example:

• 39. nikhila, āpaṇataḥ katicana vastūni ānayati kim? Nikhil, will you bring a few things from the shop?
• 40. vastūni svasthāne sthāpanīyāni iti kativāram uktavatī? How many times did I tell you to keep things in their respective places?

The overwhelming concern of parents, however, is with their childrens’ academic performance. This carries over into other sections, as well. If we look at the section on “Students” (chātrāḥ ), there are the typical sorts of exchanges one might expect, such as this one which opens the section, inquiring about where one goes to school (note that it is being asked of a female interlocutor):

• 1. kasmin mahāvidyālaye paṭhati bhavatī? In which college do you study?
• 2. ahaṁ viśveśvaraiyya-abhiyāntrika-mahāvidyālaye paṭhāmi . [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :14–15] I study in the Vishweshwaraiya Engineering College.

The rest of the section has sentences dealing with various aspects of student life, such as coming late to class, borrowing pens and class notes, and running for student council. There is no discussion of examinations, however, since that is a subject which gets its own section, immediately following the one on students.

The section titled “Examination” (parīkṣā )—which contains more sentences than the section on students—concerns various aspects of preparing for exams, such as taking them and waiting for the results:

• 6. sajjatā katham asti? How is the preparation?
• 7. paṭhitaṁ kimapi na smarāmi bhōḥ I don’t remember anything that I read.
• . . .
• maukhika-parīkṣā katham abhavat? How was the viva-voce?
• samyak na āsīt. Not very good.
• phalitāṁśaḥ kadā prakaṭitaḥ bhaviṣyati? When will the result be declared?
• ito’pi eka māsaḥ asti. There’s still one month.
• agrima-saptāhe prakaṭitaḥ bhaviṣyati. It will be declared in the next week.
• pratiśataṁ kati aṅkāḥ prāptāḥ ? How many percent marks did you get?
• mama 80% aṅkāḥ āgatāḥ. I got 80% marks.
• saḥ ekasmin viṣayē anuttīrṇaḥ. He has failed in one subject.

These mostly dyadic exchanges could be conceivably a dialogue between two students, or rather one between parent and student. In either case, we come away with the acute sense that examinations occupy a great deal of thought and attention in our model Sanskrit world.

Commerce

As a final part of our little imaginary ethnography of the Sanskrit world depicted in the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī , we should examine a selection from the section entitled “Commerce” (vāṇijyam ). I reproduce below a sequence which could conceivably be either one or two sets of interchanges, depending on whether we want to interpret the book (pustakam) in sentence (18) as continuing to be the topic of conversation through the final set of sentences.

• 18. etat pustakam asti kim? Do you have this book?
• 19. kṣamyatāṁ, sadyaḥ nāsti. Sorry, we don’t have now.
• 20. kadā labhyate? When will it be available?
• 21. prāyaḥ dinadvayānantaram. May be after two days.
• 22. etāvatā nyūtanamūlyena anyatra kutrā’pi na labhyate. You won’t get it at such a low price anywhere else.
• pañcāśat rūpyakāṇi svīkarotu. Take fifty rupees.
• na, na, tatra vivādaḥ nāsti. mūlyaṁ niścitam. No, no bargaining please. The price is fixed.
• kr̥payā prāptipatraṁ dadātu. [[saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :31] Please give me a receipt.

The utterances and exchanges in this section are noteworthy because these are among the only interactional situations in the phrasebook where the assumption of Sanskrit linguistic competence is expanded beyond what could conceivably be a circle of intimates. That is, under all the other topic headings, the role dyads which we can infer from grammatical and semantic cues presuppose some sort of prior relationship, whether it be one of kinship, of friendship, or among co-workers (or employer–employee). This is true even of contexts portrayed as occurring in public spaces, such as the portions from the section on trains with which I began. If we look back at those sentences, we can see that while they may be interpreted (and once again, it is almost impossible to tell definitely) as being said by a customer to a railway employee, far more likely and consistent with the interactional presuppositions underlying most of these encounters is a scenario in which those phrases are being said by one “intimate” to another. This is what makes these “commercial” encounters stand out, since we cannot necessarily hold that a presupposable prior relationship exists (and in fact, the tenor of the exchange, especially sentences (22) through (24), suggests that this is indeed the case). So, while for the most part the sentences included in this phrasebook are intended for use among interlocutors who can presuppose some mutual capacity for Sanskrit communication, here is at least one example which broadens the scope of imagined linguistic competence out to the larger society. Thus, we are not for the most part dealing with a dichotomy based on Western notions of private and public, but rather a sense where the “interior” Sanskrit domesticity of the home, of close friends and relations, can possibly emerge into the wider “exterior” of the world at large.[29]

The Sanskrit Subject

Having now reviewed several selections from the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī , we should consider the kind of user we can infer from this. Who is the Sanskrit-speaking subject whose world is diagrammed through the sections of this phrasebook? If we look back at some of the portions I have quoted, a definite picture begins to emerge. If the model world painted by the focus and arrangement of topics and verbal exchanges is representative of the sort of world inhabited by Sanskrit speakers, then it is one which is urban and it is what has increasingly come to be identified in India as middle class: married, office-types with children who are concerned about modern life, etc.

When applied to a group of people as a socioeconomic descriptor, the term “middle class” in India has historically been a code for Western-oriented or educated upper caste and urban elites ([Venkatachalapathy 2002] ).[30] In what was largely a two-class system, where the “middle class” was actually singled out, it was closely identified with the upper echelons of society. Middle class employment meant, usually, a civil service job, or at least a secure post in one of the nationalized industry and commerce sectors, such as banking. But since the early 1990s, following in the wake of a series of government policies aimed at large-scale economic liberalization, social scientists have begun to talk about a “new” Indian middle class, as Indian society is described as moving from a two-class society to one with a tripartite division ([Fernandes 2000b] ; [Rajagopal 1999] ), that is, from a society which is divided into rich and poor, or the haves and the have-nots, to one in which there are widely shared (if indeterminate) understandings that society is comprised of lower, middle, and upper classes.

Liberalization has enabled the lifting of many restrictions on imports, thereby allowing a greater range in the production and conspicuous consumption of goods, producing highly nuanced distinctions in status identities. Controls over state media have loosened, transforming the media landscape in India from state-controlled television to a plethora of local, regional, national, and international satellite channels that beam new images of global modernity into hundreds of thousands of Indian homes ([Fernandes 2000a] ). The increased presence of multinational firms has created a new set of service-sector jobs in India, often related to electronics and information technology. But middle classness has its ambiguities, and the pressures to keep up appearances can sometimes be enormous. It can be an enormous source of frustration—frustration which Hindu nationalism has been able to tap, such that much of the core support for political parties like the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) come from these new middle classes ([Hansen 1999] ).

Read as a sort of interactional text, the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī creates a model Sanskrit world and Sanskrit speakers to inhabit it. In the Sanskrit sentences we have seen, everyday life is quite clearly figured as urban through such signs as the traffic jam. It is also certainly middle class. Household appliances, such as TVs and kitchen appliances, figure highly in many parts of the phrasebook. As we noted above, work is always “office” (i.e., white-collar) work.[31] For enjoyment, our Sanskrit speakers go to see plays and music recitals. They prefer buying things in shops with fixed prices to haggling in bazaars.[32] And our speakers are focused on academic performance and examinations—those gatekeepers to employment in the professional sector.

Conclusion

In the project of reviving spoken Sanskrit, the object of Samskrita Bharati has always first been to demonstrate Sanskrit’s quotidian utility, the real possibility of using it as an everyday language. “First people should know,”Kr̥ṣṇa Śāstrī says, that “the Sanskrit language is suitable for [all] practical activity [vyavahārayogyā] in the house, so the twenty-four hours of the day can be lived with Sanskrit” (1999:32). This project has revolved centrally around defining Sanskrit as a “mother tongue” in the multiple senses above, the language used in everyday life, the domestic language, the language of one’s own mother, and the language which is the mother of all languages of India. Following from this definition, the objective has been to create contexts where Sanskrit usage can replicate, where they can create and maintain Sanskrit users. The creation of the Sanskrit household, the figuration of multiple other contexts of Sanskrit use, and the construction of users are all ways of meeting these goals.

Through a kind of ritualized, performative force—seemingly an exemplar of the very domain from which the revivalists seek to divorce Sanskrit—potential Sanskrit speakers can translate their worlds into Sanskrit. In the process, they transform Sanskrit. By focusing on the household and the creation of a Sanskrit domesticity, they refashion what Sanskrit means and what it means to use it. Through a performative act—labeling items in their home, declaring their house as one where Sanskrit is spoken—they forge a new connection to Sanskrit as a language and as a symbol. In domesticating Sanskrit, it is not just brought into the home, but its relationships to notions of domesticity, to private and public, are refashioned. It becomes a mother-tongue, a “vernacular,” and it assumes generative power. And it is the creation of a domesticated Sanskrit that lays the ground for the outward Sanskritization of the world.

But such an approach engenders a paradox of sorts: the laicization of Sanskrit, an attempt to create a prosaic form of the language. If successful this would divorce the language from just those associations which make the language seemingly worthy of speaking in the first place: its associations with orthodox Brahmanical traditions of philosophy, literature, liturgy, and ritual performance. And in fact, it must rely on similar sorts of baptismal rituals to translate the world into a Sanskrit everyday world, word by word, phrase by phrase.

Notes

• Acknowledgments. Research funding was provided by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant. Versions of this essay have been presented at the University of Iowa, the London School of Economics, and the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and I would like to thank the people present at those venues, especially Laurie Graham, Virginia Dominguez, Chris Fuller, Matthew Engelke, Rob Moore, and John Haviland. I would also like to thank especially Paul Manning for exemplary editorial assistance in helping me tighten the overall argument, as well as the three reviewers for the JLA for many helpful comments. Finally, I must thank the members of the Sanskrit households who graciously allowed me into their homes. All errors remain, of course, my own.

• 1 That the very name of the language is a past participle meaning “[that which has been] perfected” or “polished” is a point often noted by both proponents and detractors.

• 2 Note that the transliteration of the name of the language in Samskrita Bharati’s name and in materials quoted in this paper differs from the conventionalized English rendering of “Sanskrit.” In contemporary India, this usage has marked significations for certain types of associations with, or stances toward, the language.

• 3 Of course, part of my analysis also comes from observations of and interviews with several exemplary Sanskrit households in Bangalore and elsewhere in Karnataka.

• 4 For a useful recent overview, consult [Highmore (2002] ).

• 5 The analogies to [Srinivas’ (1952] ) sociological concept of Sanskritization should not be lost on us.

• 6 Aside from the monthly magazines, publications include over 50 books, as well as a multimedia CD-ROM, bhāṣikā , and rūpaka-saṅgrahaḥ , which is advertised on the Samskrita Bharati website as “a video cassette with Samskritam dramas, a ‘how-to guide’ to make your house beam with Samskritam, and ‘all you ever wanted to know about Samskritam villages.’ ”

• 7 Sanskrit-speaking households (affiliated or not with Samskrita Bharati) have also been the focus of much of the Indian media reportage on aspects of the Sanskrit revival movement over the last decade or so (e.g., [Ahmed 1998] ; [Indian Express 2000] ). See also the many features in the Indian press on Mattur, a “Sanskrit-speaking village” in central Karnataka, loosely affiliated with Samskrita Bharati (e.g., [Kushala 2005] ).

• 8 See [Burton (1997] ), [Chakrabarty (1994, 2000] :214–236), [Hancock (1999a, 1999b] ), [T. Sarkar (2001] ), and [Weidman (2003] : 208–213). Samskrita Bharati’s website ([http://www.samskrita-bharati.org] ) declares, “Home is the basic unit of Society where the culture of the Society gets preserved and enriched.”

• 9 Just as [Gal (2002] ) has demonstrated how distinctions between public and private are indexical, discursively constructed, and highly recursive, we should note that the same holds true for these other oppositions which are often laminated over or dependent upon the public–private distinction. For a similar, if less articulate, argument with specific reference to domestic space in one part of India, see [Ifeka (1987] ). See also the discussion of inside and outside space in [Dickey (2000] :469–473).

• 10 For the affective and gendered loading of distinctions between public and private generally, see [Manning (2004] ).

• 11 “The home represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity . . . and woman is its representation” ([Chatterjee 1993] :120).

• 12 See [Irvine (2001] ) for a discussion of the role played by familial and gendered images in the description of African languages.

• 13 There is a large (and ever-growing) literature on the symbolism of women in narratives of Indian nationalisms (both colonial and post-colonial varieties, with some regional variation). To scratch the surface: [Anandhi S. (1997] ), [Bagchi (1990] ), [Chakravarti (1989] ),[Chatterjee (1989] ), [Hancock (1995] ), [Lakshmi (1990] )—although see [Geetha (1991] ) and [Pandian, et. al. (1991] ), [Ramaswamy (1997] :79–134), [Rao (1999] ), [T. Sarkar (1995, 2001] ), [Weidman (2003] ). See [Jolly (1994] ) for an interesting comparison of the role of women as subjects and as signifiers in Indian and African nationalisms. Also note that in modern India, the two figures of women and Sanskrit are also joined in university education, where many Sanskrit departments have few, if any, male students any longer (see [Patton 2002] ).

• 14 I use “reflexive calibration” in the sense employed by [Silverstein (1993] ), in his appropriation of [Whorf’s (1956] ) terms for Hopi categories of assertion.

• 15 While I never observed behavior in Sanskrit homes structured quite so pedantically, I did have many Sanskrit speakers nonetheless assert to me that they engaged in this sort of practice on a regular basis.

• 16 See [Hastings (2003a] ) for discussion and explication as an ideology of signification, as it runs through the post-hoc analysis of Vedic ritual and the metalinguistic apparatus of Sanskrit grammatical science.

• 17 He also recommends the “writing and putting on separate sheets sentences to be used in daily practice”—sentences of the sort that I will be discussing in the next section.

• 18 And Samskrita Bharati is not alone. Murli Manohar Joshi, the Indian Human Resources Development Minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s, had been a tireless advocate of this goal as well: “Sanskrit will become a leading world language,” he said at a conference in Thailand ([India Abroad News Service 2001] ).

• 19 While I have no data on the exact extent of the circulation of this particular booklet, I should note that the copy I possess is from the fourth printing.

• 20 The actual number of sentences is an auspicious number: 1008.

• 21 In this and the excerpts that follow, sentences are reproduced in the order in which they appear. The sentences are numbered as they are in the phrasebook; breaks in the sequential order are also noted by ellipses. Note as well that the English translations of the model sentences from the saṁskr̥ta-vyavahāra-sahasrī are not my own. Rather, they are those supplied in the phrasebook.

• 22 As opposed, for instance, to the completely fanciful dialogues I was subjected to as a student of Chinese, reading about Johnny and June’s (two American exchange students) escapades in the People’s Republic of China, “Your system of government is really not so different from our own.”

• 23 Bearing in mind, of course, [Borges’ (1965] ) cautionary musings on the efforts of John Wilkins and the anonymous Chinese author of the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge to construct universal taxonomies. Nevertheless, analogies here to Wilkins’ auto-analytical language would not be misplaced.

• 24 As, for example, dictionaries and phrasebooks in early modern England (and Europe, more generally) were intended to be read ([Considine 2001] ). This holds true also for dictionaries and phrasebooks of imaginary languages from a slightly later period. Among other things, see the classic and still relevant works of [Cornelius (1965] ) and [Sebeer (1945] ).

• 25 One of the primary inspirations here is [Cohn’s (1996] , especially pp. 38–40) excellent discussion of John Gilchrist’s early 19th-century Hindi dialogues as illustrating the imperative modality of the British “language of command.”

• 26 There is one more feminine participial form in this section, “came” (āgatavatī), but as the English translation makes clear, that is referring to the third-person subject, the maidservant.

• 27 Although I should note that where it is possible to tell, it seems that the wife asks questions and makes requests much more often than the husband. There are too few sentences where the gender identities of the participant roles are clear enough to make anything of this.

• 28 Again, there are very few linguistic cues as to the identity of the speaker.

• 29 On the relevance of interior vs. exterior as the overarching conceptual binarism, rather than private vs. public, see [Burton (1997] ),[Chakrabarty (2002] ), and [Dickey (2000] ). Of course, this is the same opposition I am invoking when I oppose the Sanskrit home to the world.

• 30 There are a variety of reasons for this, but one is that in colonial India, the top of the social hierarchy was supposed to be British, forcing a recalibration of indigenous class hierarchies (but see [Stoler’s (1989] ) classic essay on the problematic status of poor whites in colonial Sumatra—a study whose findings are equally applicable to colonial Indian society).

• 31 In an exchange found in the section on “Meeting Friends” (mitra-melanam), someone congratulates an interlocutor on getting a job and asks where, to which they answer, “kasyāñcit vijñāpana-saṁsthāyāṁ kāryaṁ karomi” (“I am working in an advertising agency”) ([saṁskr̥ta Bhāratī 2000] :7)

• 32 See [Jain (2007] ) for a discussion of the relationships and distinctions between the “bazaar” and the “market” in contemporary India.