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.

*Link to an image of the cover page of SBR-9807454, Silverstein &
Hastings*

*Link to reviews of SBR-9807454, Silverstein & Hastings*

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.

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\' 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.

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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^

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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.

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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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