[Reader-list] Sanskrit boulevard

[Pawan Durani]

 Sanskrit boulevard
 Aditya Ghosh
 Hindustan Times
 September 20, 2008

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438a-44b6-979\b-baef18b83359<http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=51aeb44c-438a-44b6-979\b-baef18b83359>

 Prem Narayan Chauhan pats his oxen, pushing them to go a little
faster.  Ziighrataram, ziighrataram chalanti, he urges them. The
animals respond to their master's call, picking up pace on the muddy
path that leads to his 10-acre cornfield.

 Chauhan, 35, dropped out of school early, after Class II. He does
not consider it remarkable that he speaks what is considered a dying
language (or that his oxen respond to it). For him, Sanskrit is not
a devabhasha, the language of the gods, but one rooted in the
commonplace,  in the ebb and flow of everyday life in Jhiri, the
remote hamlet in Madhya Pradesh, where he lives.

 Mutterings under banyan trees, chit-chat in verandahs, pleasantries
on village paths, disputes in the panchayat - in Jhiri, it's all in
Sanskrit.

 And then, a cellphone rings. The moment of contemporary reality is
fleeting. nachronism and Amar Chitra Katha take over as the
conversation begins: "Namo, namah. Tvam kutra asi?" (Greetings.
Where are you?)

 A lost world rediscovered

 Jhiri is India's own Jurassic Park. A lost world that has
beenrecreated carefully and painstakingly, but lives a precarious
existence, cut off from the compelling realities of the world
outside.

 The 1,000-odd residents of this hamlet, 150 km north of Indore,
hardly speak the local dialect, Malwi, any longer. Ten years have
been enough for the Sanskritisation of life here. Minus the
Brahminical pride historically associated with the language - Jhiri
has just one Brahmin family.

 The much-admired 24-year-old Vimla Panna who teaches Sanskrit in
the local school belongs to the Oraon tribe, which is spread over
Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. And the village is an eclectic mix of
Kshatriyas, Thakurs, Sondhias, Sutars and the tribal Bhils. Panna
has been key in popularising Sanskrit with the women of Jhiri. With
mothers
 speaking the language, the children naturally follow.

 Take 16-year-old unlettered Seema Chauhan. She speaks Sanskrit as
fluently as Panna, who studied the language for seven years for her
Master's degree.

 Chauhan is a livewire, humouring and abusing the village girls in
Sanskrit. "I just listened to Vimla didi," she says. "In fact, I'm
often at a loss for words in Malwi." Just married to a man from a
neighbouring village, she says confidently, "My children will speak
in Sanskrit because I will talk to them in it."

 As eight-year-old Pinky Chauhan joins us, she greets me
politely: "Namo namaha. Bhavaan kim karoti?" (What brings you here?)
Her father Chander Singh Chauhan laughs and says, "My wife started
speaking to me in this language, so I learnt it to figure out what
she was saying behind my back."

 Let's get official

 Mukesh Jain, CEO, Janpad Panchayat, Sarangpur tehsil (which
includes Jhiri), recalls, "I could not believe it when I first came
here. It can get difficult during official interactions, but we
encourage them."

 All kinds of logistical problems crop up in Jhiri. This year, 250
students did their school-leaving exams in Sanskrit. "A
Sanskritteacher had to work along with all the examiners of other
subjects," says Jain.


 But there are some positive offshoots too. Thanks to Sanskrit,
Jhiri has re-discovered some lost technologies of irrigation,
conservation and agriculture from the old scriptures. A siphon
system of water recharging, for instance, resulted in uninterrupted
water supply
through the year in the fields. Small check-dams, wells and
irrigation facilities followed.

 "It is matter of pride for us to retrieve these old techniques from
the scriptures. With no help from the government and without using
any artificial systems, we've reaped great benefits," says Uday
Singh Chauhan, president of the Vidya Gram Vikash Samity, which runs
development programmes in the village.

 But Jhiri's pride stops at Sanskrit. The first doctor, engineer,
economist, scientist or linguist is yet to walk out from it. After
finishing school, most village youth join a political party.

 Electricity is a matter of luxury, so is sanitation. Even the
school does not have a toilet, which is the single biggest reason
for girls dropping out at the senior secondary level. The average
age of marriage for women is 14. Even Panna, who was thinking of
doing her PhD, had to give in to the wishes of the wise men of Jhiri
who got her married to the other schoolteacher, Balaprasad Tiwari.

 There is no public transport; an Internet connection is
unimaginable. Jhiri desperately needs to connect to the rest of the
world, to explore its infinite possibilities, to grow.

 But Jhiri is still a success story, especially when you consider
that a similar experiment, started a couple of decades ago in Muttur
village of Karnataka's Shimoga district, failed, because of the
caste factor - it remained caged with Brahmin patrons.

 "About 80 per cent people of the village are Brahmins who know
Sanskrit but won't speak it. This is because the carpenters and
blacksmithswould not respond to it," says Dr Mathur Krishnaswami,
head of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bangalore, who was involved with
the movement.

 "No language in the world can survive until the common man starts
speaking it," he points out.

 Muttur failed. Jurassic Park destroyed itself. Jhiri must not.