Author: Pavan K Varma
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: July 4, 2004
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/2004/Jul/04/181_864901,0041.htm
Martin Bloomfield, the affable bow-tie
wearing head master of the prestigious St James School in fashionable Kensington,
invited me to witness the Sanskrit competition in his school. I accepted
with alacrity. The school's Sanskrit teacher, who had studied at Oxford,
spoke briefly about the stanzas the children would read, and then led each
class to the stage for the recitation. Proud parents sat and heard verses
from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagwad Gita, and the Bhagwata Purana.
The recitation was of both the Sanskrit text and its English translation,
and entirely from memory.
As the young girls - from class
one to six - in their blue uniforms and pony tails stood and chanted the
texts, I sat wondering about the osmosis of culture. Here was a British
school in London, with English children reciting lines written thousands
of years ago by Indian sages on the banks of the Indus and the Ganga, to
an audience more familiar with the latest Harry Potter film than with the
intricacies of Hindu metaphysics. And yet, there was a palpable sense of
achievement on the faces of the children, and both pride and interest in
the demeanour of the parents and teachers. The recitation was competent
and enthusiastic, even if occasionally the accent was inescapably - and
understandably - foreign.
Sanskrit is a near forgotten language
in India. Most children I know in upmarket schools consider learning it
an imposition, if they learn it at all. Those who do learn it concentrate
more on the grammar, and recite by rote, with little curiosity about the
profound meanings underlying the texts. Perhaps we take our heritage for
granted, while those who are introduced to it from a distance have a sense
of discovery and revelation. One parent came up to me and said: "The lines
from the Ba-ga-vad Geeta are so beautiful."
To what extent can people from other
cultures credibly acquire expertise in that of another? Warren Senders
lives in Boston and has learnt Hindustani classical music for the last
27 years. His gurus include the legendary Bhimsen Joshi.
Recently Warren performed at the
Nehru Centre. Wearing a grey embroidered pyjama kurta, with a Himachali
cap on his head, and rimless glasses perched on his nose, he sat cross
legged on the stage, and launched into a masterful rendering of Madhuvanti
raag, followed by Gaud Malhar and a folk dhun in Pahari. It was strange
to see a foreigner so immersed in the delineation of a raag, displaying
the same facial movements and body contortions typical of Indian classical
singers. His tayyari was great, and it was undoubtedly the result of long
and painstaking saadhana. Perhaps his rendering lacked the slow, meditative
elaboration which is the hallmark of the great masters, and perhaps his
accent was sometimes a give away, but the audience was quite mesmerised.
The blind imitation of the cultural
attributes of another people leads
only to caricature. That was-and
is-the fate of the brown sahibs of India. You can only learn authentically
of another culture when you have a standing in your own. Warren Senders
is a core member of Boston's Jazz Composer's Alliance. He records and composes
with his ensemble Antigravity. His dexterity in Indian classical music
is the result of respect and hard work, but not at the cost of his own
cultural identity. The children of St James School who have learnt Sanskrit
will go on to know Shakespeare better. The tragedy in India is that so
many of those who have been educated in the English language know a great
deal about Shakespeare and Dickens, but almost nothing about Kalidasa or
Agyeya, or about the literary giants in their own mother tongue.
(A Stephenian, Pavan Kumar Varma
is a senior Indian diplomat and presently Minister of Culture and Director
of the Nehru Centre in London. Author of several widely acclaimed books
like Ghalib: the Man, the Times and the recently released Being Indian,
he will be writing the column Hyde Park Corner, exclusively for HindustanTimes.com)
