Sons of Sarasvati Late Exemplars of the Indian Intellectual Tradition

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Traditional Indian panditya (scholarship) has a long and distinguished history, but is now practically extinct. Its decline is remarkably recent traditional panditya Blourished as recently as 150 years ago. The decline is also paradoxical, having occurred precipitously following a broad and remarkable flowering of the tradition between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The important questions this decline poses are the subject of much ongoing work. The intellectual history of the period is still under construction, and the present book represents a major contribution to the edifice.

A notable impediment has been the lack of critical biographies of significant thinkers in this tradition. The importance of personal and social context for reconstructing intellectual histories is widely understood. In the classical Indian intellectual tradition, however, authors systematically exclude such context, making intellectual biography something of a rarity-very rare in English and sparse even in the regional languages.

This book contains translations from the original Kannada of the biographies of Garalapuri Sastri, Srikantha Sastri, and Kunigala Ramasastri of nineteenth-century Mysore, all representing the highest echelons of traditional panditya at this critical period of transition. Their fields are literature, grammar, and logic, respectively. The biographies focus on the personal lives of these scholars and their many contexts.

These biographies are almost contemporaneous accounts, reflecting first-hand knowledge. The translations are accompanied by copious footnotes as well as appendices drawn from the relevant primary sources to augment the biographies.

C. V. RAVISHANKAR has pursued life-long interests in the humanities as well as in science and technology. He is Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. He was on the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

TRADITIONAL panditya, or scholarship acquired in the traditional Indian fashion, through intense study under the academic tutelage and personal nurture of an accomplished guru, is an ancient institution with a distinguished history. Sadly, it is practically extinct in modern India. Its decline is remarkably recent; it flourished in its full glory even in the 19th century, and traditionally trained scholars were numerous well into the 20th century. To a degree, the political changes that occurred in India during and after the 19th century contributed to this decline. Such changes caused the loss of many traditional sources of scholarly patronage, such as the numerous kings, princes, and feudal lords who had long been primary centers of political and economic power in India. These notables generally upheld the traditions of rajadharma, or princely duties, which valued scholarly patronage highly. This subtlety was entirely lost on the British overlords of India, who disdained such patronage as wasteful indulgence [Ikegame 2007]. and focused instead on ensuring peace in their empire and on its efficient administration. To this end, they instituted a system of indirect rule, keeping in power numerous kings and princes to serve as the nominal rulers of their respective states [Ramusack 2004]. Happily, such rulers often con tinued their traditions of patronage. As these traditional institutions diminished, however, scholars were increasingly forced to depend on erratic support from indifferent government institutions.

While the decline of traditional pandirya is a complex phenomenon, its proximal cause is surely the move to Western education, and away from traditional learning, by the last three generations of brahmana families.' These latest heirs to an unbroken line of tradition reaching back five or more mil- lennia would otherwise have been the standard bearers for this rich and ven- erable heritage of scholarship. Sadly, this break has inevitably resulted in the loss of connection not just with Sanskrit, in which are firmly embedded the roots of the rich scholarly values and traditions of India, but also with many subtle aspects and insights of Indian culture. Pollock argues urgently that several millennia of accumulated scholarly heritage is at risk of becoming irrecoverably lost in the next generation or two [Pollock 2009, 2008]. Entire fields of Indian scholarship may already be defunct, or at best rep- resented by one or two octagenarians. Compounding this decline are the many dominant actors in modern Indian politics who associate such scholarship with Brahminic traditions, with which they neither identify nor empathize. There is little immediate prospect of any initiatives by the Indian government aimed at buttressing the walls of this crumbling edifice.

Dimmer still, are the prospects for such initiatives by Indian society at large, or by the brahmana community, whose members stand justly accused of having frittered away their scholarly patrimony through utter neglect. Indifference to scholarship is widespread, whether in India or elsewhere, and such indifference would be no surprise in the absence of an intellectual tradition. Yet, among the brihmaņas, erstwhile custodians of the Indian scholarly tradition, it is common today for even the best-educated descendants of the finest scholars of just two generations ago to be entirely ignorant of their own scholarly heritage.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages