"Revival" Of Spoken Sanskrit In Modern India: An Ethnographic [PDF]

The "Revival" Of Spoken Sanskrit In Modern India: An Ethnographic And Linguistic Study Principal Investigator: Michael Silverstein Co-Principal Investigator: Adi Hastings University of Chicago 9807454 Silverstein This dissertation research project by a cultural anthropology student at the University of Chicago will examine recent attempts in India to promote and broaden the use of spoken "Simple" Sanskrit. While the classical Sanskrit language has been supported by authorities as a medium of scholarly and literary discourse, it recently has been promoted by political groups as a future lingua franca and emblem of a specifically Hindu nation. Through careful ethnographic and linguistic study oftwo such projects in Karnataka, an organization in Bangalore which gives classes and promotes simple Sanskrit, and a model "Sanskrit-speaking village" in the central part of the state, the project will contribute to the literature on language death and revival. Methods include a formal linguistic analysis of the relation of spoken Sanskrit to Classical literary Sanskrit; an ethnographic study of how people in different speech communities gain competence in this new language, and an examination of the production of textual materials on the language's structure and use. This project will provide information on a case of language revival for political goals that will be valuable for theory building when compared to other attempts such as Hebrew and Latin. In addition the project will contribute to training a professional social scientist and add to our knowledge of this important region of the world.

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PROJECT SUMMARY THE "REVIVAL" OF SPOKEN SANSKRIT IN MODERN INDIA: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC AND LINGUISTIC STUDY This project examines recent attempts in India to promote and broaden the use of spoken Sanskrit. Sanskrit has long been a superposed medium of scholarly and literary discourse throughout the subcontinent. But recently, imagining Sanskrit as the future lingua franca and emblem of a specifically Hindu nation, several privately-funded movements are attempting to turn Sanskrit into a truly "popular" language by, most prominently, encouraging the use of what they call "simple Sanskrit" in everyday conversation. Through a careful ethnographic and linguistic study of two such projects in Karnataka-an organization located in Bangalore and a model "Sanskrit-speaking village" in the central part of the state-this project addresses questions concerning both the emblematization of language as a salient criterion of community definition and the relationship between popularization and simplification. In order to accomplish this, the proposed project: (1) examines the symbolic positioning of Sanskrit, and specifically "spoken" Sanskrit, in the rhetoric and practices of the two organizations; and (2) documents structural and sociolinguistic aspects of the variety of Sanskrit being promoted and the ways in which it is taught and learned in actual sites of practice.

Adi Hastings - Project Description THE "REVIVAL" OF SPOKEN SANSKRIT IN MODERN INDIA: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC AND LINGUISTIC STUDY RESEARCH PROBLEM AND AIMS Attempts in India to promote and broaden the use of spoken Sanskrit represent one of the most extraordinary language "revivals" in recent-era politics of language and culture. Sanskrit has long been a medium of scholarly and literary discourse throughout the subcontinent. But recently, imagining Sanskrit as the future lingua franca and emblem of a specifically Hindu nation, several privately-funded movements are attempting to turn Sanskrit into a truly "popular" language by, most prominently, encouraging the use of what they call "simple Sanskrit" in everyday conversation. Through a careful ethnographic and linguistic study of two such projects, both located in Karnataka, this project addresses questions concerning both the emblematization of language as a salient criterion of community definition and the relationship between popularization and simplification. In order to accomplish this, the project: (l) examines the symbolic positioning of Sanskrit, and specifically "spoken" Sanskrit, in the rhetoric and practices of the two organizations; and (2) documents structural and sociolinguistic aspects of the variety of Sanskrit being promoted and the way in which it is taught and learned in actual sites of practice. With regard to Sanskrit as a political and cultural symbol, the working hypothesis is that the movements under investigation have fashioned Sanskrit, India's "classical" literary language, into a sign which both represents and points to membership in an imagined "Hindu" national community. It appears that in promoting explicitly conversational Sanskrit, these organizations are trying to recapture elements of a perceived Hindu heritage, and in doing so to reinstate or "revive" what they see as the most important element or unifying thread of ancient Indian civilization. Thus, Sanskrit, once symbolically identified as the exclusive property of certain restricted communities (entailing access to and mastery over certain forms of privileged knowledge), is now used to invoke a generalized, primordial "Hindu" cultural heritage. This move parallels in many ways the invocation of Hindu~va ("Hinduness") and the revisioning of a unitary Indian cultural history more generally by Hindu nationalist organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ("National Organization of Volunteers") and its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party ("Indian People's Party") (Andersen and Damle 1987; Embree 1994; Jaffrelot 1996; van der Veer 1994). In this context, Sanskrit is no longer functioning in the role of a "classical" language (if indeed it ever was; cf. Kelly 1996), but is rather seen to be a superordinated language of politico-religious unification. Is this process the nationalization of a sacred, prestige language, and if so, how does this happen? What is perceived role of the prestige and power of Sanskrit in forging a link with a national "Hindu" culture? In his study of the Coorgs of South India, the anthropologist M. N. Srinivas (1952) introduced the term "Sanskritization" to refer generally to a process of caste mobility by which a lower caste attempts to raise its status and position in the caste hierarchy by the imitation or adoption of behavior and beliefs associated with ritually high status groups. While it has been noted that the processes Srinivas documented often have very little to do with the Sanskrit language itself (Steal 1963), I would like to modify his term and apply it to the emblematization of Sanskrit through a different sort of semiotic process covering a much broader field of movement: the organizations in question are engaged in what I would call a process of "Sanskritification" (cf. "commodification"), whereby the Sanskrit language itself turned into a possessable attribute, a socially distinctive diacritic which seeks to index a "direct" and tangible link to a national Hindu past-the relation of the whole nation to a field of national culture (for an ethnographic case with interesting parallels see Errington 1992, 1995 on the "modernization" of Javanese). This project will also involve a descriptive analysis of some of the structural and sociolinguistic features of spoken Sanskrit. More pertinently, however, the proposed project will explore the relation between the formal features of simplification and the aims and goals of the spoken Sanskrit movement as a whole. Obviously, simplification is seen as a way to make the language more accessible (which of course raises the question: what is the reasoning behind the assertion that Sanskrit in its full Classical form "too hard" to learn?). Is there, however, a motivated logic to the process of simplification? This project adopts the perspective of recent work in linguistic anthropology which has highlighted the role of language ideologies both in the mediation of language structure and language use (Silverstein 1979, 1985), and in the imagination and formation of various socio-political orders (Gal 1991; Irvine and Gal In press; Woolard 1989). The "simple Sanskrit" is not just a reduced model of the Classical Sanskrit grammar, but constructed through a process of selection-certain features are attenuated or discarded, while others are foregrounded. This project will look at the relationships between the technical, formal principles of simplification and the principles and prerogatives of the movement as a whole, and how the participants understand these relationships. A thorough treatment of the particular ideologies of language informing spoken Sanskrit movement requires analytic perspectives both on the institutional, prescriptive contexts of the promotion of "simple Sanskrit" and on the actual communicative contexts of usage. LITERATURE REVIEW This research builds upon a wide body of recent theoretical and empirical work in anthropology, linguistics, and Indology. Most generally, this project draws on recent work in linguistic anthropology which highlights the importance of language ideologies- socially-situated commonsense notions about language and the world-in mediating language structure and use (Briggs 1992; Friedrich 1989; Silverstein 1979, 1985, 1993, In press a; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994), as well as their role in the sociopolitical histories of ethnic nationalisms and cultural revivalisms (Anderson 1991; Irvine and Gal In press; Woolard 1989; cf. Lelyveld 1993 and Washbrook 1991). This latter body of work looks at the various processes through which language becomes a salient parameter whereby various sociopolitical orders identify themselves as against others. In particular, Anderson's (1991) concept of the nation-state as a "(linguistically) imagined community," although beset by theoretical and empirical problems-most notably the inattentiveness to issues of power and authority in the selection and inculcation of a "standard" language-is nonetheless a particularly fertile notion. By building on these analyses and others, this project will seek to examine the particular role of Sanskrit in the imagination of a national "Hindu" state and its entailments. In this connection, the research also relies upon a growing body of work dealing specifically with the phenomenon of "religious" nationalism in the South Asian subcontinent, and especially their refiguration of South Asian history as "Hindu" (Banerjee 1991; Basu, et. al. 1993; Chatterjee 1986, 1993, 1995; Dixit 1986; Embree 1994; Gold 1991; Jaffrelot 1996; Kapferer 1988; Kaviraj 1992; McKean 1996; Thapar 1989; van der Veer 1994). To a great extent, much of this work has ignored the politics of language in the recent waves of religious nationalism, much less what role is ascribed to Sanskrit, India's "classical" language (cf. Burg 1996). This research will have a great deal to contribute to the ongoing discussions of religious nationalisms in India and the various ways of revisioning history. The study and instruction of Sanskrit itself has engendered a unique diversity of disciplines devoted to the language and its texts, from the extremely formalized development of disciplines designed to understand and transmit liturgical and philosophical literature in precolonial India (Acharya 1996; Pollock 1985) to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of academic Indology (Cohn 1996; Trautmann 1997). Although a background issue for the present project, the relation of the "spoken Sanskrit" movements to other Sanskrit-oriented disciplines, and indeed, the question of what roles each grant Sanskrit both as a language and a symbol deserves some attention. This project will also engage with recent Indological scholarship on the subject of the current and historical role of Sanskrit in South Asian societies. The complex social stratification and the concomitant highly diversified formal and functional stratification of languages and linguistic forms in India has engendered much sociolinguistic research in recent decades (e.g., Gumperz 1961, 1969 for an early programmatic review; Singh and Lele 1996; cf. Schiffman 1996 and Shapiro and Schiffman 1981), of which some has dealt with the sociolinguistic position of Sanskrit in precolonial India. Under a model of diglossia (Ferguson 1959), it is widely accepted that Sanskrit existed in precolonial India as the superposed "high" register of literary and scholarly production alongside the more regionally restricted vernaculars (Cardona 1990; Deshpande 1979; Hock and Pandharipande 1976; Lee 1986; cf. Aklujkar 1996).1 It is an accepted fact that Panini's grammar of Sanskrit (composed cat 350 BC) has exerted an enormous standardizing influence throughout the history of the language. However, recent studies have shown that the idea of Sanskrit as a monolithic language, changing little over the course of two millennia, is no longer entirely tenable (Deshpande 1993; Houben 1996 and references therein). Rather, Sanskrit has existed in a dynamic relationship with the other languages of India up to and including the present day, serving both as a source of innovation and as a recipient, and filling a variety of functional roles. _____________________________________________________________________________ ' Particularly useful here is Gumperz' (1972 [1968]) definition of dialectal and superposed variability as two ways of talking about speech variation within a community of speakers. Dialectal variability constitutes regional, class-based, etc. differences in speech, whereas superposed variability constitutes a set of "ways of speaking/saying the same thing" or registers at the disposal (ideally, of all) of some community of speakers. The Sanskrit language existed for millenia as the superposed literary register throughout India, where regional variation in fact became over time a question of stylistics. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ The exact extent to which Sanskrit was a "spoken" language (not to mention the "mother tongue" of some social group) in precolonial India has long been a matter of some debate (a summary of l9th-century Indological debates on the subject can be found in Rapson 1904, where the question is: was Sanskrit a spoken language at all?). However, several authors have recently begun focusing scholarly attention on a class of Sanskrit texts produced in medieval India which purport to be "manuals" for the instruction of spoken or conversational Sanskrit (Deshpande 1993; Salomon 1982; Wezler 1996), suggesting that at various points in precolonial India there was a perceived need to revive or reform Sanskrit as a spoken language, even if only among certain closed communities (the texts appear to be addressed primarily to communities of lay Brahmans, i.e., those that were not ordinarily involved in serious philosophical, literary, or ritualist practices). There seem to be some similarities between these historical phenomena and the current attempts to promote spoken Sanskrit, and it will be interesting to see if there are any correlations. We can probably say that Sanskrit has long been in use (to varying degrees) as a common medium of oral communication among intellectual and priestly classes, but there is little evidence that it has been extensively used in broader, more prosaic contexts-this is one of the reasons that a "revival" of spoken Sanskrit is put inside quotation marks in the project title. We may a priori distinguish three "different" Sanskrits: the full Classical Sanskrit, the Sanskrit used for scholarly communication among pandits and such, and the coversational "simple Sanskrit" now being promoted. There has been a sharp decline in the number of people who study Sanskrit in India, even more so in the number of those who have active command over the language, a trend especially noticeable in the last two decades. Hock (1983, 1992) rightly links the decline in the use of spoken Sanskrit today to the current state of the Sanskrit educational system. In modern India, the formal systems of Sanskrit education have fallen steadily into disrepair since Independence (Gerow 1973). In its early years, the new secularist Indian state, concerned primarily with modernizing Indian education so as to "catch up" with the West, did not for the most part see much use in perpetuating systems designed to transmit knowledge seen to be both religious and elitist, and thus only invested nominal resources into the maintenance of traditional and Western (university) Sanskritic education. Rather, resources were put towards the standardization and promulgation of the modern regional and national languages-primarily Hindi, the new "national" language of the Indian state (Brass 1974; Das Gupta 1970; Nayar 1969; also see Lelyveld 1993 on the colonial roots of Hindi). A "Sanskrit Commission" organized shortly after Independence lamented the thencurrent state of Sanskrit (Government of India 1958), and although the Commission made various recommendations for the improvement and revitalization of the Sanskrit educational system, little action was taken. The particular organizations to be examined in this project have taken this task upon themselves. Despite the enormous amount of scholarship directly addressing the Sanskrit language, Sanskrit as actually spoken and used in modern India has received little scholarly attention, with only a few exceptions (Hock 1983, 1992; Nakamura 1973; see Aralikatti 1989 for a purely syntactic account; see Deshpande 1996 for an account of "priestly" Sanskrit in modern ritual contexts). Thus, a first and absolutely essential step in this project will be a linguistic and sociolinguistic description of spoken Sanskrit. Among anthropologists, few have attempted to address with any depth issues relating to Sanskrit in contemporary India. PRELIMINARY RESEARCH Through intensive training in anthropology and linguistics, I have developed a number of analytical skills and strengths that should prove advantageous for the sort of anthropological and linguistic project outlined in this proposal. I am currently in the fourthyear of a joint Ph.D. program in Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago. I have completed all course requirements for the Ph.D. in both the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Linguistics. In May 1996, I high-passed the six M.A. exams in Linguistics. In June 1997, I passed the Anthropology Ph.D. qualifying exams (in the fields of: language and semiotic theory; language, knowledge, power, and ideology; history and anthropology of South Asia; and the social anthropology of Sanskrit). In Winter 1998, I will take the Linguistics Ph.D. qualifying field exams in morphology and in Sanskrit grammar and grammatical theory. I plan to defend my dissertation proposal before members of both departments and advance to candidacy in Spring 1998. Part of my coursework has involved Sanskrit study, and I am currently engaged in my sixth year of formal Sanskrit instruction (I studied Sanskrit for the last two years of my undergraduate education). I also spent six weeks in India at the University of Pune in Summer 1996, intensively studying a basic Sanskrit grammatical treatise under the direction of Dr. Saroja Bhate in the Department of Sanskrit and Prakrit Studies. While the emphasis in this course of study has been on developing a reading knowledge of Classical Sanskrit, with little (if any) focus on actually speaking Sanskrit, I have built a firm foundation in the basics of Sanskrit grammar which should provide ample basis for the acquisition of conversational Sanskrit. In my pre-field trips to India (see below), I often had to rely on Sanskrit to conduct interviews, and I was able to do so with some amount of success. In addition to Sanskrit, I have spent the last year studying independently the grammar of Kannada (the regional language of Karnataka) through descriptive works and the use of audio tapes.2 I am currently taking coursework in Tamil. For the last six years, most of my academic work has dealt with the languages and linguistic phenomena of South Asia. I wrote my B.A. thesis (Hastings 1993) on the dialectical relations between ancient Indian philosophies of language and the prescribed use of language in two ritual traditions (highly regimented contexts of language use). For my Master's thesis (Hastings 1994), I looked at conflicting definitions of "language" and "dialect" in the Linguistic Survey of India, a massive colonial documentation project carried out by the British Raj in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing that the particular linguistic ideologies which lay behind the classificatory conundrums in the Survey bespoke two very different notions of what the relation between "languages" and "dialects" was supposed to be. These conflicting ideologies implied in turn two different conceptualizations of the relation of the British colonial regime to its Indian subjects. In the last two years, I have made two pre-field trips to India. In my first pre-field trip in the summer of 1996, I visited many public and private institutions devoted to Sanskrit study throughout the country, including the two sites detailed below, in an attempt both to make an informal assessment of the current state of Sanskrit education in India and to explore possible options and avenues for fieldwork. During these visits, I attempted to interview both students and instructors, and I was able to develop a rough picture of the current status of Sanskrit in India, at least as seen through the eyes of institutions specifically devoted to Sanskrit instruction. On a return trip in August 1997, I revisited the two prospective field sites, carrying out initial investigations, primarily in the form of interviews, and securing permission to conduct extensive fieldwork. In addition to contacting the two sites of research, over the course of my two pre-field trips I have made contacts with members of other organizations involved with Sanskrit study in the area, including Shri Pejavara Swamiji and Shri Praladhacharya at the Purna Prajna Vidyapeeth and Shri Mattur Krishnamurthy at the Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan in Bangalore, Shri Ananta Hebbar at the Hariharapur Gurukula, and Dr. V. Muralidhara Sharma at the Rajiv Gandhi Kendriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth in Sringeri. I have also spoken to Dr. D. R. Nagaraj in the Department of Kannada Studies at the University of Bangalore, and he has expressed his willingness to assist me in my research.3 _________________________________________________________________________ 2 This method of instruction is necessitated by the fact that Kannada is not formally taught anywhere in the U.S. 3 Affiliation with a degree-granting institution in India is a prerequisite for the granting of a research visa by the Indian government. A formal application for a research visa has been submitted to the Indian government and is pending approval. __________________________________________________________________________________________ RESEARCH DESIGN The primary goal of this project is to investigate the relation between the linguistic practices and ideas of community attached to the promotion and use of spoken Sanskrit in modern India. Given the three "different Sanskrits" that play a role in contemporary India (see above), the aim is to understand the ways in which these three versions are drawn up into the mobilization of Sanskrit as a political and cultural symbol. This project involves several components: (1) an examination of the structural and lexical parameters of "simple Sanskrit" vis-a-vis Classical Sanskrit; (2) an investigation of the different competencies of people in the relevant communities of known and aspiring speakers; (3) a careful ethnography of communicative regimes in contexts where Sanskrit is intendedly spoken in everyday domains of usage; (4) interviewing and gathering of textual materials on the language structure and use. Through these investigations I hope to arrive at an understanding both of how native ideologies of language affect the kind of reductive pidginization that "simple Sankrit" represents, and of the processes of the emblematization of the Sanskrit language to socio-political ends. The most basic task in this project is the documentation and description of "simple Sanskrit": how does it differ from "classical" Sanskrit, what are the loci of innovation and change (i.e., what features or classes of features are targeted for simplification), and what are the areas of overlap? Following from this, the project will involve a close scrutiny of the linguistic competencies of people involved with all levels of the programs. The question here is really whether the organizations under investigation are imparting any utilizable knowledge of the Sanskrit language. If the "simple Sanskrit" being taught differs in significant respects with Classical Sanskrit grammar, why and how do these organizations maintain that mastery of "simple Sanskrit" enables access to the vast library of literary, religious, and philosophical texts which purportedly constitutes the cultural heritage of Indian civilization, and is it an adequate resource in relation to the long tradition of intellectual production in South Asia? Is "simple Sanskrit" envisioned as a steppingstone to mastery of the fully elaborated Classical Sanskrit grammar? Also, to what degree has "simple Sanskrit" become a register in the diglossic mode? Finally, this part of the project will involve an assessment what level of competency is sufficient to be considered a "speaker" of Sanskrit. A careful ethnography of the actual contexts of usage of spoken Sanskrit is absolutely crucial to this project. As a participant in spoken Sanskrit educational programs, I will observe first-hand the rhetorical and pedagogical methods employed to teach "simple Sanskrit." In addition, use outside of the classroom should be particularly illuminating. Close attention will be paid to phenomena such as code-switching (expected primarily between Sanskrit and Kannada, if any), as well as the actual domains of functional usage (is spoken Sanskrit, despite insistences to the contrary by the specific organizations, still restricted to certain, highly-regimented domains of conversation; why or why not?). I will also be attentive to Dravidian influences on "simple Sanskrit." For example, the prevalent use of the sentence-final particle vaa as a question marker is unprecendented in the Sanskrit grammatical treatises, and yet is a common feature of Dravidian languages. Finally, material will be collected through interviews (which will also serve as corpus data for the analysis of spoken Sanskrit) and textual materials in an attempt to understand participants' personal views on Sanskrit and its conversational value, as well as the institutional and prescriptive aspects of the "speak Sanskrit movement." In the literature published by these organizations in particular, I expect to find explicit statements about the normative standards imposed on the structure and use of Sanskrit in conversation. Important here will also be the coverage given over to the Sanskrit movements by the popular media in India. While the amount of work to be done may seem quite exensive, the fact that little to no work (linguistic or ethnographic) has been done on Sanskrit in contemporary India, much less spoken Sanskrit, necessitates that a great deal of ground-work be done. In addition, there is a great deal of overlap between the various components outlined above. All of these activities should, in turn, illuminate the central questions of the relations between native language ideology and both creation of a register of "simple Sanskrit" and the emblematization of Sanskrit as a cultural and political symbol representing a lost Hindu past which can only be recovered with the right key-Sanskrit. SITES OF RESEARCH The project will be conducted in two sites: an organization called Sanskrita Bharati, and Mattur, a model "Sanskrit-speaking village" in central Karnataka. These sites were chosen because each is exemplary in some way: Sanskrita Bharati has, in the last few years, risen to the forefront of current nationwide efforts to promote spoken "simple" Sanskrit; Mattur has also recently achieved a place in the popular geography of India as a "Sanskrit village." In the summer of 1996, and again in the summer of 1997, I was able to make contact with and visit both of these sites, and I have secured permission to conduct fieldwork. One of the reasons for conducting field research in both sites is that while the aim of the two organizations is similar (namely, the promotion of spoken Sanskrit), the context and means of effecting this aim is entirely different. Each site offers the opportunity to document and observe different levels of engagement with the Sanskrit language. Sanskrita Bharati has its main compound, which they call "Aksharam" ("letter" or "word"), in Bangalore (the administrative headquarters have recently been relocated to Delhi-a sign of the increasing nationwide scope of the organization). The compound is a three-storied building in a southwestern suburb of the city, containing offices and (limited) housing for people involved with the organization. Sanskrita Bharati coordinates a variety of activities, the most important being their ten-day "Speak Sanskrit" shibhiras (camps), wherein participants are taught the rudiments of simple Sanskrit in ten two-hour sessions. As one might expect, twenty hours is hardly ample time to acquire much of the language, and Sanskrita Bharati has a host of follow-up activities, including a Sanskrit-throughcorrespondence course, various books and audio cassettes in simple Sanskrit, and Sambhashana Sandesha, a monthly Sanskrit magazine (the organization is also involved in the production of the Sanskrit version of Candamama, a monthly magazine of children's stories published in each of the constitutionally-recognized languages of India). They have also recently begun conducting Sanskrit instruction through the internet, and are in the process of putting together a video version of the ten-day course. In addition, the compound serves as a training center for Sanskrit sevavratis (literally "missionaries"), who, having "devoted their lives to Sanskrit," travel the country, teaching the language. In the summer of 1996, I met with representatives of Sanskrita Bharati in Pune, Chennai (Madras), Varanasi, and Delhi, and with Dr. Sadananda Dikshit of the Loka Bhasha Prachara Smiti (a more regionally-restricted spoken Sanskrit organization) in Puri. Mattur is in central Karnataka, along the banks of the Tunga River. It is about six hours by bus from Bangalore and about ten kilometers outside of Shimoga, a small industrial town and the district headquarters. A small agricultural village, Mattur was settled some time ago by Sanketi Brahmans (a Brahman subcaste originally from Tamil Nadu), and has a tradition of dedication to Sanskrit study. In the last few years it has received a great deal of Indian media attention as a place "where everybody speaks Sanskrit" (e.g., recently, David 1997). While this appears to be a slight exaggeration, the village has, over the last fifteen years, been encouraging the use of spoken Sanskrit in everyday interaction. In addition to the relatively new Sanskrit pathashala (school) in Mattur, there is also a Veda pathashala (to train priests in the recitation of the Vedas, the main holy books of Hinduism), although I am not sure how long it has been in existence. The population of Mattur is estimated as 2,000 people, comprising around 350 households, about a third of whom are actively involved in Sanskrit study and related activities. Kannada is the main language of the village (in addition to Sanketi Tamil, spoken by about 400 people; cf. Ananthanarayana 1968; Nagaraja 1993). Sanskrit has been introduced as a compulsory subject in the local private grade school. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS The first portion of the project will be spent at Sanskrita Bharati with a view toward getting a sense of their educational methods and projects, and developing a sense of the personal and institutional networks involved in the promotion of conversational Sanskrit. Since Sanskrita Bharati produces a wide range of educational materials and coordinates classes all over India, this is where I expect to find the most explicit statements about the motives and processes behind the simplification and popularization of spoken Sanskrit. In other words, "what is their linguistic theory?" I will be especially interested to participate in and observe the various Sanskrit activities organized by Sanskrita Bharati, not only to get a sense of the educational methods employed, but also to assess the demographic parameters of the people involved: what groups does conversational Sanskrit appeal to, and what groups are targeted by the organization? As a participant, I will also be getting a first-hand introduction to simple Sanskrit. Additionally, I will conduct ethnographic interviews with both instructors and students in order to elicit personal views on Sanskrit and the value of conversational Sanskrit. I will also collect and analyze the promotional and instructional materials distributed by the organization in order to understand the specific methods used and obtain official statements as to the nature of "simple Sanskrit." Finally, I plan to observe and participate in the day-to-day administrative activities around the compound. In the summer of 1996, I visited the Sanskrita Bharati compound for several days, and returned for a longer period in August, 1997, during which I was able to secure permission from Janardhana Hegade, the chief administrator, to conduct more comprehensive study. In order to more comprehensively document the formal and functional uses of conversational Sanskrit and the ways in which it is taught, I will spend the second portion of the project in Mattur. Relative to Sanskrita Bharati, Mattur is where I expect to find more implicit involvement with the project of simple Sanskrit. Initial familiarity with the village and its inhabitants will be established by house-to-house surveys. I will tape and analyze spontaneous conversation in order to understand the linguistic and sociolinguistic dimensions of simple Sanskrit as it is actually used, conduct interviews with inhabitants of the village on their views of Sanskrit and the characterization of Mattur as a "Sanskritspeaking village," and participate in and observe the various formal and informal educational programs held in the village. An important aspect of this part of the research will be to look at the sociolinguistic contexts of usage of Sanskrit and the two other languages of the village (Kannada and Sanketi Tamil). Given the history of the interrelationship of linguistic and social stratification in India, I expect that to some degree social relationships in the village will be mediated through language choice and use. I briefly visited Mattur in August 1996, and again in August 1997. Shrinidhi, who is in charge of the Sanskrit activities in Mattur, expressed his willingness to allow me to come and stay for an extended period of time. The analysis of the structural features of spoken Sanskrit will entail breaking the features down into three classes (based on modes of intervention in the language-fashioning project): (1) the full Classical Sanskrit forms which are never explicitly dealt with by instructors or the institutional literature; (2) features which are dealt with explicitly and excluded from the "simple Sanskrit" register; and (3) features that are explicitly dealt with and included. I will attempt to correlate statistical tallies of token frequencies with dimensions of markedness, salience, etc. in order to understand explicit and implicit rationales for including or excluding this or that feature. Careful textual analysis of literature and interviews will hopefully yield further insights. RESEARCH SCHEDULE During the first stage of my research, I will spend four months-September through December 1998-working at the Sanskrita Bharati compound in Bangalore. The bulk of my research will take place in and around the compound, although I will attempt to make contact. A large majority of my time will be spent in the classroom, not only as an observer, but as a student as well. The final eight months of the project-January through August 1999-will be spent living and working in Mattur. By the time I begin this phase of the project, I will have had an intensive exposure to spoken Sanskrit and should be much more at ease in using Sanskrit conversationally. This will allow me a certain amount of freedom to be attentive to codeswitching phenomena and the like. I will have already begun analysis of the transcribed data while in the field, an activity which will continue upon my return to the U.S. I anticipate beginning to write up the results of my research in September or October 1999. I anticipate presenting some of the findings at professional meetings such as the Association for Asian Studies and the American Anthropological Association. Final results will be discussed in a dissertation for a joint Ph.D. in Anthropology and Linguistics which shall be defended by Spring 2001. Provisions will be made to deposit copies of the dissertation in the appropriate institutions in India. The dissertation will contribute to an understanding of the current state of Sanskrit in India, the historical and political contexts of language revival movements, and more generally, the role of language in the emergence of cultural nationalisms and the definition of various orders of "communities."

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Silverstein / Hastings