Interview with Sowmya, a full time Volunteer for Samskrita Bharati

Tattva is an international online monthly magazine, published by Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh’s Hindu YUVA.

 http://www.hinduyuva.org/tattva-blog/2008/09/interview-with-sowmya-a-full-time-volunteer-for-samskrita-bharati/

Sowmya Joisa, originally from Karnataka, was born and raised in Seattle, WA. She studied Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a vistarika, or a full-time volunteer for Samskrita Bharati, a non-profit organization and a sister organization of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh. Her vistarakship started in Los Angeles in September 2007 and will come to a completion this September.

Tattva: Tell us about Samskrita Bharati.
Sowmya: Samskrita Bharati is a non-profit organization started in 1981 in Bharat by a few students who studied Samskritam in Thirupathi Pathashala. They were used to speaking Samskritam and they wanted to create a patrika in Samskritam, but since many people did not speak the language, they decided to teach simple Samskritam by conducting sambha-shana (conversational) Samskritam camps. In 2000, the first residential sambhashana Samskritam camp was held in the US. Samskrita Bharati activities currently run in 18 different cities in the US; they focus on teaching Samskritam through conversation. Samskrita Bharati has taken the efforts to teach-ing students the first two steps of learning language, shravaNam (listening) and bhASHaNam (speaking) since most institutions have lagged in teaching the language through speech.

Tattva: What inspired you to learn Samskritam and how did you come in contact with Samskrita Bharati?
Sowmya: My father had taken the Samskrita Bharati corre-spondence course when I was a child. I was also learning Car-natic music, and it was mostly in Samskritam, so I wanted to learn the language. When I went to college, I took Samskritam all four years. But after two years, I was very discouraged because the method of teaching made it difficult to learn. At the end of my 3rd year in college, I attended a Samskritam residential camp in Bay Area with my parents. Here, the focus was spoken samskritam and I got to use a lot of what I had learned. While I did not know much vocabulary, I was able to immediately put into effect what I learned in camp classes.

Tattva: What motivated you to become a vistarika?
Sowmya: I was involved with Samskrita Bharati directly for a year before I decided to become a vistarika. When I first thought about what I wanted to do after college, I had the intent of volunteering my time for something. A lot of my friends were taking a year off to volunteer for Americorp, Peace Corps, etc. During my senior year in college, I had met with Samskrita Bharati volunteers who suggested I give my time for spreading Samskritam. Most of the Samskritam classes are given free of charge. I benefited from that teaching, so I thought I could give back by volunteering my time for the organization.

Tattva: What did the vistarakship encompass?
Sowmya: I started my vistarakship in July 2007. I initially attended a training session in Bharat for a month and a half. After that, I came back to the US and took a two-week tour with a few senior full-time volunteers to talk about Samskritam. I came to Los Angeles, my karyakshetra, in September, For the first few weeks, I did not have a car. So my stay was mostly in one place. Once I got a car, I was able to go to different parts of LA to meet people interested in Samskritam and start teaching classes. My schedule was very fluid and depended on when and where I could have classes. There was a lot of support from the Samskrita Bharati headquarters in San Jose and my host family in LA. This support was very helpful.

Tattva: What is it like being a vistarika? What were your expectations?
Sowmya: When I decided to become a vistarika, I had no idea what it would be like to be one. The biggest challenge was making a commitment to something I did not really know about. For instance, when friends asked where I was going to live during my vistarakship, I did not have an answer for them. However, the whole experience has come out very well. I teach classes, I meet new families, as well as find people who are interested in learning and supporting the learning of Samskritam. This involves a lot of traveling. The process is very people-oriented. Meeting people at homes versus at classes has a very different impact. I spend a lot of time with people, and building relationships with them. I meet people with various backgrounds, and the interesting part is that they all can be brought together through Samskritam. This is the most rewarding part of the vistarakship.
As a vistarika, I had to learn to adapt to the different lifestyles of people. I also had to adjust to the fact that my schedule is bound to change at the flip of a coin. Developing the skill to use every interaction and moment I had to contribute to the cause of Samsrkitam was one that took time. Initially when I met new people, I did not always use the opportunity to bring up Samskritam. Even now, I am still learning and working on it. Being a vistarika has also shown me the hospitality of people. I never had problem finding a family to stay with.

Tattva: What were people’s response to the Samskritam classes? How are classes and other events conducted?
Sowmya: People expressed great interest, mainly because there was no one really available to teach Samskritam. I have run 20 beginner level classes (each beginner level class is 20 hours) in the year. My host family had numerous contacts through Hindu Swayamasevak Sangh, and they helped a lot with meeting new people. I also went to events of various Hindu organizations for getting contacts and publicizing Samskritam classes.
In addition to the regular classes that happen throughout the year, two events were conducted in LA that were very unique. A camp was conducted in Irvine for teenagers. Twenty-six teenagers attended this 3-day camp in January. This was a smaller day camp, and the group was very interested in learning Samskritam. The teachers were also youth. We also had a family camp for the west coast, and we held classes for those who never had exposure to Samskritam as well as for those who have been learning for 7 to 8 years. This year, the camp was conducted in the San Bernadino mountains during Memorial Day weekend. Seventy-four people attended, a very high turnout considering the fact that Samskrita Bharati activities in this area just started the previous September.

Tattva: What was the highlight of your experience?
Sowmya: The highlight was meeting different people from various parts of Bharat. I come from a South Indian family and my interaction with Bharatiya people was limited to a South Indian, Kannada crowd. This experience has broadened my view of Indians and Hindus. The term is much broader than I had previously thought. There is much diversity throughout the country. I do not think I would have come into contact with so many kinds of people had I not been a vistarika.

Tattva: What are some benefits of the work you have done?
Sowmya: On a personal level, I developed interpersonal skills. The concept of calling someone new, introducing myself, setting up time to talk to them, and talking about Samskritam
was something I did not have much experience with before. The experience has made me more independent and confident in life and teaching. The organizational skills one learns as a vistarak become an asset in various aspects of life. Another benefit has been the spread of Samskritam. There is more awareness about Samskritam and more effort amongst people who are actively working to promote Samskritam.

Tattva: What are your future plans?
Sowmya: My vistarakship ends in September. After that I will be getting married. I am currently working towards my Masters degree in Samskritam through a correspondence course. I am in my 2nd year of the course, so I will be working on my final exam. I will also be working on curriculum activities of Samskrita Bharati. Since I have been teaching for Samskrita Bharati, I have realized I could do a lot of projects. But regardless of what I do, Samskritam will be a part of my life.

Tattva: What kind of volunteer opportunities are available with Samskrita Bharati?
Sowmya: There are two types of volunteers: karyakartas and vistaraks. The former include students and people with families and jobs who contribute their free time to Samskrita Bharati. Most of our volunteers fall into this category. There is a lot of work they can do – teaching classes, organizational work, contacting people, networking, publicizing, etc. Vistaraks are full time volunteers. For being a full time volunteer, one can contact the secretary for Samsrkita Bharati and express interest. They would plan out a training session, conducted in Bharat. Training covers not only Samskritam, but also how to conduct events, how to teach, the lifestyle, etc. The length of vistarakship is flexible. Since it takes time to settle in a new place and start work, it works best if you are interested in volunteering 6 months or longer.

Sowmya can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

http://www.hindu.com/2008/11/27/stories/2008112753100900.htm

The real classical languages debate Sheldon Pollock

I have been observing with extreme bemusement the debate over the classical status of Indian languages, since the issue was first raised in these pages in 2006 in the case of Kannada. Yes of course, it is dangerous to introduce invidious distinctions among languages, and yes of course, the scholarship upon which these distinctions are founded is often empirically thin and theoretically weak. But with respect to the core problem of the debate, I am reminded of what the great poet Bhartrhari said: One should not wait until the house is burning to dig a well (sandipte bhavane tu kupakhananam pratyudyamah kidrsah). And the house of Indian classical language study is not only burning, it lies almost in ashes.

Who cares if language X, Y, or Z is given “classical” status if there is no one who can read it? And if the award of classical status is a means to ensure serious scholarship, then there are a dozen or more languages in India — indeed, the entire pre-modern literary past — that is in desperate need of this recognition.

At the time of Independence, and for some two millennia before that, India was graced by the presence of scholars whose historical and philological expertise made them the peer of any in the world. They produced editions and literary and historical studies of texts in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu — and in Apabhramsha,

Assamese, Bangla, Brajbhasha, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Persian, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Urdu — that we still use today. In fact, in many cases their works have not been replaced. This is not because they are irreplaceable — it is in the nature of scholarship that later knowledge should supersede earlier. They have not been replaced because there is no one to replace them.

Two generations of Indian students have been lost to the study of classical Indian languages and literatures, in part due to powerful economic forces no doubt, but in part due to sheer neglect. The situation is dire. Let me offer a few anecdotes. A great university in the United States with a long commitment to classical Indian studies sought for years to hire a professor of Telugu literature. Not one scholar could be found who commanded the tradition from Nannaya to the present; the one professor of Telugu literature in the U.S. who does have these skills will soon retire, and when he does, classical Telugu studies will retire with him. The same can be said of many other languages, such as Bangla, where the number of scholars who can actually read not just Tagore, but Vaishnav pads or the great seventeenth century biography of Caitanya, the Caitanyacaritamrta, are few and far between.

For several years I studied classical Kannada with T.V. Venkatachala Sastry of Mysore, a splendid representative of the kind of historically deep learning I have mentioned. During all my time in Karnataka I did not encounter a single young scholar who had command over the great texts of classical Kannada — Pampa, Ranna, Ponna — to say nothing of reading knowledgeably in the extraordinary inscriptional treasure house that is Karnataka.

Today, in neither of the two great universities in the capital city of India, is anyone conducting research on classical Hindi literature, the great works of Keshavdas and his successors. Imagine — and this is an exact parallel — if there were no one in Paris in 2008 producing scholarship on the works of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Not coincidentally, a vast number of Brajbhasha texts lie mouldering in archives, unedited to this day.

This is even truer of Indo-Persian literature. Large quantities of manuscripts, including divans of some of the great court poets of Mughal India, remain unpublished and unread. When I ask knowledgeable friends about the state of the field, I hear them speak of great scholars in their 80s – and almost no one younger.

Two year ago, I attend a large conference in Udaipur on the present state and future prospects of the humanities in India. I asked the more than one hundred delegates there, some of the best literary scholars in the country, how many of them actually train their students to read literary texts in an Indian language. Three people raised their hand, all Sanskrit teachers.

Nine years ago, H.C. Bhayani, the great scholar of Apabhramsha, passed away. With his death, so far as I am able to judge, the field of Apabhramsha studies itself died in India. To my eyes, the situation with Apabhramsha is symptomatic of a vast cultural ecocide that is underway in this country. And not just language knowledge is disappearing but all the skills associated with it, such as the capacity to read non-modern scripts, from Brahmi to Modi to Shikhasta.

To be sure, I have not systematically canvassed every university in India, and there are undoubtedly some exceptions to the trend I am sketching. But by no means do I think it even remotely an exaggeration to suggest that within two generations, the Indian literary past – one of the most luminous contributions ever made to human civilisation – may be virtually unreadable to the people of India.

There is another Sanskrit proverb that tells us it is far easier to tear down a house than to build it up (asakto ham grharambhe sakto ham grhabhanjane). The great edifice of Indian literary scholarship has nearly been torn down. Is it possible, at this late hour, to build it up again? India has shown itself capable of achieving pre-eminence in anything it sets its mind to. Consider the Indian Institutes of Management, of Science, and of Technology. Universities and companies and organisations around the world compete for the graduates of the IIMs, IISs, IITs. Why should India not commit itself to build the same kind of institute to serve the needs of its culture — not just dance and art and music, but its literary culture? Why should it not build an Indian Institute of the Humanities devoted not just to revivifying the study of the classical languages, but to producing world-class scholarship, as a demonstration of what is possible, a model for universities to follow, and a source of new scholars to staff those universities? It is not too late. The reward of success would be incalculable; the cost of failure would be catastrophic.

A write-up by Swathi Krishnan - Sharaddhaa2008 attendee - who is from Connecticut and will be a 10th grader next year.

Suprabhatham! a cheery voice calls out in Samskritam. The daily wake-up call has been announced. As I groggily open my eyes, I repeatedly ask myself why I am even awake at 6:00 in the morning… during the summer! Eventually (after a few short doses back into the wonderful realm of sleep), I ready myself for another fun-filled day at Shraddhaa, a camp for teenagers to learn the beautiful, but uncommon spoken language of Samskritam.

I first became interested in Samskritam when I took a break after I completed middle school to learn dance and music for a year at Kalakshetra in Chennai in 2006. My mom was taking Samskritam classes, so I tagged along with her to attend a couple of classes. It was there that I began to appreciate one of the most ancient, rich, and melodic languages. As one of my Shraddhaa teachers said during the camp, “Everything just sounds better in Samskritam. Take the word ‘tree’. Compared to English, vrikshah, just sounds more majestic!” After returning to the U.S in 2007, I was determined to learn to speak Samskritam. When I first heard about Shraddhaa, I was excited that there was actually a camp that teaches people my own age.

ARTI SAHULIYAR

Students of, Ganpati Rajkiya Sanskrit College, suffer because classes are often cancelled during rain due to the leaky roof.

"Classes are irregular," said a student from Daltonganj, Rupesh Kumari Tiwary.