There could be many introductions to Oscar Pujol. That he is the founder of the Instituto Cervantes in New Delhi. That he established Casa Asia in Barcelona. That he is a Spanish Indologist who spent nearly two decades in Banaras teaching Spanish at the Banaras Hindu University. That he has a PhD in Sanskrit. That shelves can be filled with his papers on Hindu philosophy. That he has written a seminal Sanskrit-Spanish dictionary with 60,000 entries. But this interview with Grin focuses on his identity as a lover of the Sanskrit language.
1. Some scholars define the phrase that Sanskrit is a ‘classical language’ to mean that it is ‘dead’ or can no longer be used in everyday life. Do you agree with that? And if not, why is Sanskrit still relevant today?
The idea of a “dead language” is applied especially to the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin. I don’t think it can be applied in the same way to Sanskrit. The culture that speaks Sanskrit is very much alive. If we go to Athens we won’t find any living temple dedicated to Zeus, but in India we will find plenty of them dedicated to Shiva or Vishnu. Arthur MacDonnell used to say that Sanskrit was more alive at the beginning of the XX Century, than Latin at the time of Dante. Linguistically a language is considered “dead” if it has not native speakers and it does not undergo any change. There are at least 7 villages in India were Sanskrit is spoken and the Indian Census records more 20.000 people who claim Sanskrit as their modern tongue. Moreover, changes have taken place. Neologisms are incorporated and the way today people speak Sanskrit is quite different from classical Sanskrit, even if Paninian rules are respected.
A staunch supporter of the death of Sanskrit could argue that people who today speak Sanskrit are revivalists and not true native speakers and that the so called changes are so limited and contrived that do not reflect a truly living language. If that’s so Sanskrit would have already been dead at time of Panini in the IV Century BC. What a paradox then, because much of the best Sanskrit literature would have come into life from a dead language. I argue that to speak of a “dead language” is a bad metaphor and a worst definition, because life and death are applied to biological entities and languages are not so. Dead is synonymous with lifeless, motionless, inert, but dead languages are much alive and productive. It is bad terminology. A language comes alive every time somebody reads or speaks it, writes or thinks in it.
Sanskrit is meaningful today, because it can still contribute to throw light to some the problems of human sciences. As I have often said Sanskrit is still relevant in many fields like Linguistics, Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Psychology, Naturopathy, Political Sciences, Consciousness Studies and of course yoga and meditation. Concepts that come from Sanskrit and Pali literature, such as non-violence, mindfulness, karma, nirvana, rasa, etc. are continually being reutilised and adapted to modern times. Even more importantly, I would like to point out the relevance of Sanskrit in regard to modern India.
A few days ago I heard a very knowledgeable and bright Indian historian saying that the well-known fable of the elephant and the blind men was an English poem. Apparently, he seemed to ignore that this tale has an Indic origin and is well attested in Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu literature. It was not his fault, but that of the education system in which he has been brought up. Many Indian savants will know everything about Elliot’s aesthetic theory of the objective correlate, but ignore the rasa theory of Bharata, which much anticipates Elliot’s theory. My point is that generations of Europeans have been educated to appreciated the Greco-Latin heritage as the foundation of European culture and are familiar with Aristotle, Plato or Seneca, but the same has not happened in India in regard to Sanskrit. Many modern Indians have no clue of the rich Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil and vernacular traditions, which are at the base of their own civilization. They are not familiar with Shankara, Vachaspati Mishra, Abhinagupta or Sangam literature. This is a pity and saps the foundations of a modern and robust Indian culture. We should not forget that the European Renaissance started with an enquiry into the Greco-Latin tradition that medieval Christianity had bypassed. Should not an Indian Renaissance begin with an enquiry into the Sanskrit and allied traditions?
2. There seems to be a sort of rediscovery of the joys of Sanskrit around the world, why do you think this is true?
You are absolutely right. This happens because, at least in the West, the interest for Sanskrit has shifted from Philology to Yoga, Meditation, Medicine and the Sciences of Well-Being. Sanskrit has a lot to say about it. We live in trying times, where the old structures are crumbling and the new ones are not yet in place. People feel disoriented, depressed and also irritated. There is a growing anger against the other and a desperate search for identity that often takes an exclusivist form tending to demonize people who are not like us. This is happening everywhere, in India, in Europe, in the Americas, in Africa, in the Far East. One way of avoiding this frustration is by getting addicted to something: sex, drugs, Netflix, games, compulsive buying or a strong ideology. Another way of dealing with this is by taking care of oneself and beginning a detached process of self-enquiry. Here Sanskrit comes very handy.
3. What according to you are the most beautiful lines in Sanskrit and what do they mean in English?
This is an impossible question, because it forces you to choose among hundreds of beautiful lines and beauty cannot be compared and much less quantified. But let’s play the game and choose one beauty without diminishing the others.
I would choose a passage from Chandogya Upanishad (8.1.3) which says:
उभे यावान्वा अयमाकाशस्तावानेषोऽन्तर्हृदय अकाशः । अस्मिन्द्यावापृथिवी अन्तरेव समाहिते । उभावग्निश्च वायुश्च सूर्याचन्द्रमसावुभौ विद्युन्नक्षत्राणि । यच्चास्येहास्ति यच्च नास्ति सर्वं तदस्मिन्समाहितमिति ॥
“The space within the heart is as vast as all the space around us. In it are contained the earth and sky, fire and wind, the sun and the moon, lightning and all the stars, what belongs to the heart and what does not, everything is contained in the space within the heart”
The Upanishads are unparalleled, as Schopenhauer recognised. You cannot fly any higher and you cannot go any deeper. You reach there the frontier of thought. You touch the limits of being and not-being. Of course, there are many more genres in Sanskrit, besides the philosophical texts of the Upanishads. In poetry the Meghaduta of Kalidasa, along with the Kumarasambhava and Shakuntala, and the poetic novel Kadambari of Banabhatta are unsurpassable. Kadambari’s Censure of Lakshmi is funny and beautiful, full of puns and metaphors. The Gitagovinda of Jayadeva is another masterpiece. A long list would follow.
4. What, according to you, is the most underrated Sanskrit text that should be read by everyone?
Let me change the question’s framework. All Sanskrit texts are underrated, because so few people are able to read them in their original form. Let’s take one of the most famous texts: the Gita. How many people can read it in the original Sanskrit? Most people have to rely on translations, but as the Italians say: traduttore traditore “translators are traitors”. Much more so in a language like Sanskrit, very many words are very difficult to translate, as we don’t find counterparts in modern languages that express the same range of meaning.
The Gita is written in a simple, beautiful and an almost transparent kind of Sanskrit. How easy would be for a person who already knows an Indian language, to read the Gita in the original form! It would be quite possible to develop a one year course to teach to read the Gita in Sanskrit, introducing as much grammatical rules as strictly necessary. In fact the key to read Sanskrit is the knowledge of compounds words. If you know the structure of compounds, everything becomes easy and if you speak an Indian language, much of the vocabulary is already there.
5. If you were to explain how has Sanskrit changed your life — how would you explain it?
Well, I was drawn to Sanskrit because a verse in the Gita hit me right in the head and answered an unasked question that was troubling me without my knowledge. I could repeat now the feel good stereotype that I didn’t choose Sanskrit, but that Sanskrit chose me. Whatever is true, the point is that I decided to learn Sanskrit to read the Gita, which I did with much effort, as I didn’t know any Indian language at that time. I had the privilege to spend some years in Banaras and learn Sanskrit with two outstanding teachers: Vagish Shastri and Shrinarayan Mishra. I always say that to learn a language is like discovering a new continent. The Sanskrit continent is vaster than all the Greco-Latin literature put together and it is broader in scope. All the subjects are there: from Mathematics to Gemmology, from Erotics to the Philosophy of Renunciation, from Yoga to Logic, from Law to Politics, from ritual to Physics, from the science of celestial bodies to the knowledge of serpent beings… Sanskrit helped me to understand myself better and also the world surrounding me. It also gave me a conceptual framework that is useful in many fields, a systematic way of thinking and ordering thought processes. Sanskrit is like the image of the hidden treasure that we find in the Upanishads. Everyday people pass by it, trod upon it, but nobody knows that it is there at hand. Sanskrit is just there, hidden under the soil you tread, buried under your feet. Dig it and place it over your head.
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