In this episode of your cutaway and Q&A interview, Minnie Chandran,
professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Kanpur, and Caramel Patel, professor of religion and Indian Philosophy at Harvard University.
We discuss what it is to do, study and teach South Asian philosophy.
What role should South Asian philosophy as a living tradition of thought play in the discipline and philosophy and what could contribute?
What kind of attitude and methodology should you adopt in approaching the text?
Can we and should we apply subdisciplines within the analytic tradition of philosophy to South Asian material?
What presuppositions should be recognised and abandon? How about terminology, classifications and syllabus design,
particularly in light of the new undergraduate paper here at Oxford titled Indian Philosophy?
We also discuss what is lost or not lost in translation. The question of elitism and the urgent need to learn from and support traditionally
trained scholars within traditional intellectual practises are sincere,
thanks to Professor Chandran and Professor Patel for joining us.
We will now begin the conversation introducing our speakers.
And then he do you want to do you want to begin by introducing me and then I can introduce grandma?
Professor Minnie Chandran is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
Professor Children's research interests include translation studies, both between Indian languages and between Indian and other languages.
In the literature, literary theory,
literary censorship and Latin American literature for children is also a regular contributor to the Indian Express.
Great. And we also have with us today, Parliament she could sell who's professor of religion and Indian philosophy at Harvard University.
His primary academic interests are the history of philosophy in India and its relevance to disciplinary work in philosophy,
South Asian studies and the philosophy of religion.
He's focussed on Buddhist philosophy in India, the old and new epistemology east and Indian traditions of physical exam and scepticism.
And he also has a long standing interest in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of religion.
So this podcast itself serves as our first episode in the South Asian Philosophy Podcast series that we're doing.
One of Oxford Public Philosophies goals is to explore philosophies that are less covered in our curricula at Anglophone philosophy departments.
And in this podcast series, we are looking particularly at the extensive traditions of South Asian philosophy.
Yet when looking at these vast campuses of writings and philosophical work that we might place under this label of South Asian philosophy,
the problem arises of how we might usefully classify this material into a coherent scheme.
Oxford University has recently introduced an Indian philosophy module,
and Oxford Public Philosophy has to promote a healthy intellectual diversity, offered the alternative classification of South Asian philosophy.
Today, we want to discuss some of the issues of classification,
hoping to nuance or understanding a little bit of what these classifications provide and what they leave out.
And we also hope to gain some perspective on the practical issues involved in teaching South
Asian philosophy and what unique philosophical contributions this study might offer us.
So sort of introducing the some of the main sort of overarching topics in the study of South Asian philosophy.
So that's kind of what we're focussing on. And now I want to sort of hand over to our two speakers, perhaps many,
if you'd like to go first to just kind of talk for five 10 minutes about about that overall topic.
Yeah, sure. First of all, thank you for having me here.
I just want to make a minor correction to Young's introduction. I am actually professor, not associate.
That's OK. Sorry. And not perfectly. If I just thought I should correct it, that sort of.
As I said, I'm not a philosophy person, but literature person.
But does this this categorisation problems and categorisation that you were talking about is something that bothers me also,
especially since the term Indian aesthetics, I work primarily in India.
These two things.
So the term itself is a bit problematic because what generally we understand by Indian aesthetics is generally classical Sanskrit aesthetics.
So whenever they mention Indian aesthetics to anybody immediately, the response is Oh yes, rust rasa the knee and all of it.
What people generally tend to overlook.
It's not as if people don't know is that there is an equally valuable body of aesthetics or copies of aesthetics that comes from the Tamil language,
so that all copy and which is almost of the same status as an article.
So even in syllabuses across India, the few places where Indian aesthetics is taught, very rarely that will to be dealt with.
So although not just I've never looked on in the Wirtanen, were the relatively familiar names to look up here.
It's not so thermal aesthetics, I think,
has to be brought together along with Sanskrit and also the other in the you come to the mediaeval period in India.
The influence of Persian aesthetics, I mean, with the rise of the Mughal Empire and all of it.
So I would think that the term Indian aesthetics should ideally cover these three strands that we are talking about,
which is Sanskrit, Tamil and Persian, or otherwise.
Just stick to the category of Sanskrit aesthetics, Tamil aesthetics and Persian or whatever.
I mean, although I work in the area of aesthetics, I should also say that other countries that Persian is very underrepresented and I have come across
very few texts that I would be able to give you regarding the Persian influence on aesthetics in India.
So that is one thought the the other is that whenever I don't know and I'm not familiar with the way philosophy, certain Oxford or anything,
but generally when we approach these ancient texts,
the attitude that people have is one of reverence and unquestioning acceptance and so on in the world.
And I have said this or whenever Gupta has said this, OK, we have to sort of receive it with with the open hands, that sort of assumption.
I think it is also equally important to focus on the on the making of this tradition.
You know, if you look at these thinkers in classical sense with all these philosophers or these aesthetic thinkers in ancient India,
all of them had a very healthy debate amongst themselves.
So what is called the power of a bookshop that they would, you know, categorise or they would catalogue what the people who came before them had said?
And then they would say that you disagree on these. These comes what very often politely but often mean, sometimes not very politely.
Also because when one case that I'm thinking of is the 11th century Kashmiri
philosopher Muhammad Plato and his difference with under-10s concept of doing it.
So my my motto is anything but polite. So later and people wrote about my mother.
This is one thing that people remark about the way he takes on, and everything ended up being a good thing, so on.
So that irreverence, I would say I find my mother very refreshing because it's a very irreverent take on the world today.
And so I think the focus on this aspect, that tradition is not something that is carved in stone,
that it is a living tradition that perhaps you have to question and embody.
That is, I think, an important aspect, which very often we tend to forget when it comes to Indian aesthetics.
The other is about the practical aspect of teaching that you are talking about again, who who is the best person to teach it?
Is it somebody who is in some way connected to the language, to the culture, somebody who knows the language and the culture?
Well, I'm not very sure about that because as an Indian, I must say that when I first approached Indian aesthetics, it's not as if it was.
I did not feel at home with it very honestly. So when I first read my calendar say it was, I was a bit baffled.
I did not understand what the hype was about. VIDEO Honestly, because it took because I was trained in in English literature in a very western way.
So although I have studied in India all my life, the academic training that I've had is essentially Western.
So it really does not help to be Indian or to do not even agree.
I mean, to know a smattering of Sanskrit, all these things don't really help.
What you need is an understanding of the culture, and the language was just beyond this.
So I would say that the Western scholars who are approaching the Indian aesthetics like again,
the ideology starting from the religious who have received so much of flak from various people,
the post-colonial theorists, especially, I think they brought in a much needed analytical approach to the Indian aesthetic so
that that brought in a fresh perspective and that we reinvigorated the tradition.
So perhaps I should see that if it hadn't been for these in the villages, I don't know if you would have approached Indian aesthetics in this fashion.
That tradition continues. Even today we have people like Professor Sheldon Pollock and Professor Goldman
and all of them who are doing very valuable work and very meticulous research,
I should say. And I think that is helping.
Having said that, I should also say that there is a tendency to to downplay some of the very valuable contributions made by Indian scholars,
also like Professor Casey Bondy or Professor Clinton-Era in the area of the Indian theories of meaning.
These are people who have been published in English. Now there is a wealth of critical material,
there is a wealth of thought that is lying out there in the regional Indian languages, which hasn't been translated.
So I am a Malayalam speaker basically, and I can read text in Malayalam and I know how valuable they are.
Like in Malayalam, I can. The two names that they can immediately think of are keeping at an absurdity and critical
somehow that they haven't been translated into English or any other Indian language.
So as Amalia, I can read and understand these texts in Malayalam, and they're helping me immensely in my understanding of Indian aesthetic theory.
I have heard that The Good has written extensively on aesthetics and his ideas of art, and all of it.
Only a minuscule of it has been translated into English.
A whole lot of it is still in Bangla, very frustratingly so because I do not have access to it.
So an ideal pedagogical method would be to bring all of this together.
Now the whole of it is something that will be a problem.
So I mean, these are just my thoughts at the opening.
We could carry it forward later.
Yeah, that's brilliant, it's really interesting and really like touches on the exact kind of issue they were hoping to deal with in this podcast.
Thank you for that. And Professor Patel, if you want to go speak for for sure.
Well, yes, thank you all for inviting me to. I'm really happy to be here and to be in conversation with Professor Chintan about all this much.
What she has said resonates with me too and very much in the same spirit.
So and that's I hope that doesn't make for too much agreement. I thought I might, you know, what are the questions?
Maybe I'll start here. We have so many reasons for wanting to be interested in the question of what
should South Asian philosophy pick out like we come from different places,
we have different reasons for asking that question.
So I don't think that South Asian philosophy is a kind of natural kind term that you can go out in the world and discover.
That means are reasons for what we are looking for will naturally affect what we find and what we count,
what counts as a good answer to the question, but simply to say I might as well just start from my own perspective,
my interest in the question of what South Asian philosophy is or South Asian philosophy is,
or Indian philosophy or Sanskrit philosophy has to do with.
Being committed to introducing.
Let's say broadly, India or Sanskrit or broadening the canon of what's included in traditional Anglo-American Anglophone philosophy departments,
which historically have been rather conservative. So for me, in the term South Asian philosophy or whatever its philosophy,
philosophy picks out an academic discipline, it doesn't pick out an intellectual practise or a way of life.
It picks out an academic discipline because that's the discipline in which I'm
trying to make some sort of intervention or as I like to see positive change.
So that has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages is you inherit.
A meaning of what philosophy is, even though it's quite broad and has a broad semantic range,
if it's defined by the discipline of philosophy as practise in Anglophone universities, you have a starting point.
And the question then to ask is to what degree can or should South Asian index Sanskrit material?
What role should it play in those disciplines and how can it contribute?
There's, of course, a danger in that you might think, oh, look, you're exist, your heritage,
an existing structure and you're forcing that structure or you're forcing South Asian material into that structure in a way that might be a natural.
Of course, that's a worry, whether in fact you're forced to get into something that's unnatural or you're including it in
something that's very natural to it is an open question that can only be decided after one is tried.
Right? So for me, philosophy is an academic discipline.
And when I look at, let's say, broadly into intellectuals writing in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic or even the regional languages and even English,
I see many, many, many people who are writing on issues and writing in ways that fit very comfortably.
Within the academic discipline of philosophy,
and I see many who write in ways that fit that fit within the academic discipline and philosophy, but in productively uncomfortable ways.
So for me.
When I when I think personally about what it is, as we've discussed, it's just too much for any one or any dozen people to get their mind around,
even somebody who specialises in Indian aesthetics, even if focussed on just sounds good aesthetics.
You know it's impossible for one person, let alone one person, to do talk up in Tamil.
And then also the remarkable work done by traditional scholars, whether in Sanskrit itself or in Malayalam or Tamil or anything.
So it's just vast. You got to start somewhere. Where have I started? I've obviously started with some good material.
Why? Well, there's a lot of it. It seems like a very natural starting point if you're interested in working in a philosophy department.
There's also traditionally trained teachers who are some of the best readers and thinkers of this material around.
And there's a history of scholarship. And so for me, basically, the South Asian philosophy practically means Sanskrit philosophy.
It means Sanskrit, shastra and not all Shuster's some justice.
So I don't I don't. Work on Sunk, for example, at all.
I wouldn't even start there. I wouldn't start with yoga either, personally.
So this isn't saying that there is anything produced in the South Asian language or by
South Asian intellectuals that might not have a place in the philosophy department.
Maybe it could. I mean, as you know, people do philosophy with The Simpsons, they do philosophy with movies like The Matrix.
They do fill with Conte and Plato, so it's less about the material and more about what one does with it, I think.
So there's an openness, even though it sounds conservative when I say that for me, at least when I think of.
South Asian philosophy and philosophy, I'm thinking primarily of cells good philosophy,
it's more of a practical place to start and a recognition of limitations.
So maybe we can talk about that a little bit. One.
What are the questions you asked was given how vast all of this is?
Where do you start? How do you start if someone is interested, where do they start?
To me, that's also very simple. You start with a translation of a primary text.
Do not read secondary sources, do not read journal articles.
Start with the translation of a primary text. Why?
Because just like Professor Chapman said.
It's not it's going to it's going to teach you everything you need to know in a way that is going to upset you in some way because,
for example, when you do, when you eat,
if you if you grow up in a Euro-American American educational context and you encounter are part of it or something,
you really do, ask yourself what's all the fuss about? I'm really a candidate play.
Nothing is happening. Why is he spending all this versus talking about trees and forests and king is killing animals?
It doesn't seem terribly appealing. So just like we all need, just like it's possible to acquire a taste through familiarity and experience.
One has to. Learn how to see why the tradition thinks there's a fuss about all this stuff, and that's not easy to do.
It takes many, many hours and hours and hours of reading calculus or botany or something like that.
Gordon Liddy said he saw that for literature,
and it also takes a very long time even for professional philosophers to learn how to see and how to learn from Sanskrit philosophical texts.
So I would say forget all the secondary sources. Don't bother.
Pick a good translation of a primary text in whatever field you're interested in and spend time reading it.
You don't have to like it. You don't have to agree with it. Just spend trying to understand a very simple thing.
Why does this text still exist? The only reason it exists is because people thought it was worth copying.
Preserving. In some cases, for centuries. Why did they think it was worth copying and preserving?
Why is this text considered to be important and valuable? That's sort of part one.
And then you can ask yourself other questions as to, well, why was it important for them?
How could it be important for me if the author of this text were here or if this text were a living being?
What conversations would want to participate in? How would it participate in those conversations?
What parts of this text, what ideas do I want to take forward into the future as resources for me to think with?
And what ideas are best left in the dustbin of history that we can move on from?
So. I guess that's a place where I'll start, and then I hopefully we can go in different directions, so.
Yeah, thank you so much.
And yeah, I mean, I think in terms of that, that practical advice to begin with primary attacks, I think that resonated with that quite a lot.
It's amazing to me how you know, the tent,
the the easiness of reading secondary articles in order to write essays is that but then when you actually go to the primary texts,
it offers a whole kind of new perspective.
I was just reading the issue of when he shot this morning, and it's yeah, there's insights that came from it to the secondary literature.
Seems like, especially in South Asian philosophy was somewhat limited.
It seems unsupervised. So, yeah, thank you.
One one question to ask about that always is why is that the case? How come we can read platonic dialogues?
How come? We read Hume or Locke and even contemporary philosophers and sometimes even parts of country, and they seem to make sense.
But you pick up Kamala or Tara McCarthy or in the world and you're like, What's going on here?
Why is that? You think? I think primarily it is because of academia especially has been largely Anglo centric.
If I may say so. So we are more tuned due to that.
So you have to this is a completely different way of seeing things that it takes time, at least for me, took time.
So that's why I'm saying it doesn't help that I'm an idiot and that they can read.
They even agree. Or, you know, there is some continuity.
I'm not denying that. But even then, it takes time to to get used.
It has to grow and use it as a button said it requires patience and time.
One thing I don't think I appreciated until maybe relatively recently is that,
I mean, it's a nice, it's naive I should have appreciated long time ago is that?
The way we understand it is also historically conditioned in the sense I've grown up in North America.
And I've been educated and snobby North American institutions most of my life until I started studying Sanskrit.
And you're you're conditioned into what it means to read and what it means to think and
what it means to understand and how information and ideas and images are presented to you.
And, you know, day after day, week after week, year after year, you get good at it.
And when you come to classical, at least in my case, classical sounds good material.
It's different, and it takes time to learn how to understand and be open to it.
And sometimes you take that difference and you say this is just weird or this is bad, or if I don't understand it, something's wrong with it.
And that also often happens with Sanskrit philosophy,
because if you've been trained as a professional philosopher, you're pretty good at reading philosophy.
All of a sudden, you encountered that immaturity. You're like, What is going on here?
So I think the way we understand is clearly historically conditioned. There's also something else that sounds good.
Philosophical texts present arguments in a different way.
And if you look at contemporary secondary literature and in philosophy and in most of our academic disciplines,
it's it's processed in a very particular way. It's presented in a certain kind of outline.
You can expect a certain kind of structure, right?
If you read a contemporary Anglo-American philosophy paper, you can outline it without too much trouble.
You know what the thesis is? You know how the sub arguments go.
So it's presented in an abstract way, and it's not presented for a particular audience.
It's predicted for a generic audience, right? That sounds great.
Philosophical text, as Professor Turner also said are presented.
As a conversation, as a dialogue, they're not actual dialogue.
These are not recordings or podcasts or transcripts, right? But it's presented.
The forum is a dialogue. Now what does that mean? Imagine that you and your roommate or partner are having a debate or a fight about something.
And you have another friend who's overhearing this fight, so you're arguing back and forth, right?
Now, what is the structure that that argument takes? It starts somewhere and then you respond to something that someone says, right?
Then you bring it back to the main point respond to something else. It has a it seems to have a more meandering kind of path.
Right?
So if you were to take that meandering path and try to put an analytical outline, it would fault the analytical outline as if we were doing it for,
say, a course in philosophy department or for a journal would look very different, wouldn't it?
It wouldn't look anything like that. So it's an imperfect analogy, but some philosophical texts require that so often when we read an argument,
it's very hard for us to follow the structure or the analytical outline because the kind of outline that we expected to have,
it doesn't have, and that requires a lot of understanding.
And you know that the problem is ours and not the texts, but because if you have conversations,
say in Sanskrit with traditional teachers or traditional scholars, they understand it right away.
In a very different way than we do, and it takes years and years to begin to tune yourself in to how these techs function.
And I think that is a real virtue because look, if. South Asian material were exactly the same as Euro-American material.
I'm not really sure why I should spend most of my adult life learning how to read it and think about it.
I'd rather just read it all in English. But it is different, and it's learning how to learn from these differences.
I think that is one of the very potentially powerful things, but it's not so different that it's just alien.
It's it's very obvious when you read it that some of the concerns are very, very similar.
Some of the some of the and some of the resources are very, very useful.
And so it's a value to do so. Yeah, I think that's why I asked the question.
Yeah.
No, no, it's really interesting and I guess I have a question kind of following on from these points of sort of you guys have been touching on it,
but in terms maybe of like practical issues when it comes to students who who are interested in studying this material,
like how important do you think this sort of the the literary and cultural outsides of these philosophical texts?
So we have these like texts that seem obviously for talking to us people like Taniguchi being a good example,
but then because of that being situated in classical India, and the difference is that that creates that.
I guess the question arises of how important it is to have a general understanding
of classical Indian culture and and reading literary works like those of corridors.
And then how about is how important do you think it is for philosophical students who are studying South Asian philosophy to to be familiar with that,
those kind of border control trends? It's a question to to both of you.
Really, honestly, I don't know. I mean, when you read Plato and Aristotle, do you feel compelled to read Iliad and Odyssey?
And I mean the same question to Professor Bartels, do you read it?
I don't know if reading calendars will help you better understand the term I get the I don't think so because it's again,
the classical Indian notion of literature, I think was very different.
I don't think that literature headed didactic, obviously didactic purpose or anything out of embodying a certain perspective of life or something.
Of course, the artist gave expression to his own viewpoints. That is true,
but to to expect somebody to have read all this classical Indian literature and then only then will they be able to understand philosophy.
I don't think that that is a very practical stance to take.
I don't think an explicit battle has rightly pointed out this is such a vast area.
I don't think that it's humanly possible to do that.
And with the Mahabharata, says 18 sagas, I don't think that anybody has ever read them, but they completely, let alone when one said again, fully.
So I mean, I mean, in its origin, it's so.
I don't know. Yes, of course, an acquaintance with it.
And I also I've been on a slightly different note, although Professor Bartels said that it's a structured differently.
Sometimes they feel that they understand a pin of a good thing and they were that better than, say, the reader or Baudrillard.
Because again, since I am in literature, I have to read Beaudry or Derrida or, you know, people like this.
I understand my own and the Wirtanen, but I should say I think they are much clearer in conveying their concepts.
They do not try to befuddled me in the way very honestly, these French philosophers do.
I don't know if it's my problem.
It could be my problem, but I am much more comfortable with the concepts that are equally abstract and equally difficult.
But reading them, I think, and in the very thing that helps me to understand there is that race to completely bewildered me.
I don't know if that is because I am an Indian. VIDEO Honestly, I can't see because I haven't been exposed to another culture in that sense.
So that is for somebody else to say. I don't know.
But I don't think that a background in classical literature or region that is necessary to to start reading philosophy.
Yeah, I mean, I don't if you have a I have a pretty radical view about this.
I think that the outsides of Sanskrit philosophical texts, social, cultural,
political history are almost irrelevant for understanding the insides of these texts.
The only parts of the outsides that I think are relevant are other texts.
Why? First of all, we don't really know how to date a lot of this stuff or locate it regionally, so where are you going to start?
I mean, if you think 75 years one way or another is insignificant for social cultural history, look, maybe it's useful.
If you don't think regionality matters, maybe it's useful.
So my default is to just say the outside social, cultural, political outsides of these texts are irrelevant for understanding the inside.
Default, I said the only the only things that might be directly relevant would be other texts.
Now, almost no one I know agrees with this. But so I said it's radical. So what do you do?
My view is you start from the inside out. You don't start from the outside in.
And what is the Inside-Out mean, you pick up a text?
From whenever, whatever you're interested in and you just start reading, it is extremely slow, extremely difficult.
And then as you discover things, go read a little bit outside. It depends on the text, of course.
Go read a little bit outside. But start with the primary document and then work your way out.
Do not do.
Do not fall victim to the tyranny of history in the humanities and start with the outside and somehow expect that to make the inside transparent.
In my experience, it just does it. In fact, it it, it confuses you more.
So that's a radical view. And people disagree, and people argue with me about it all the time, and we can do that too.
But that's sort of where I start. But I think that is true. For example, if you're reading each of us, you have initiated.
I mean, what what what material could you read?
I mean, what material would I? Would I recommend that? You have no idea.
Because these sticks sort of stand by them till they're suspended in time, so to speak.
And if you were to ask me to which society I would, I would ascribe them to, I have no idea.
I don't know. So I think I agree completely with that very radical.
I mean, you know, it's something like it depends also what kinds of questions we're asking of these texts, right?
If you're asking, why does this happen? Each other, this philosophical text?
Why did it occur at this time? Why does it have this genre, this shape?
Why does it ask these questions and not other questions, right?
Why is a particular king mentioned in amongst the right?
So those kinds of questions might be very useful to know something about the.
Social, cultural, historical context, if you can locate it. I mean, the issue by Nishad, of course.
Good luck. Right? With any degree of specificity.
So you can ask those questions, I'm not saying don't. I'm just saying,
if you think knowing something about social cultural history or literary history is
going to tell you why someone like Gung Geisha chose to take this view on what semantic,
what the semantics of operative endings are. I think you're I think it's just it's crazy.
He's not, you know, these techs are not drains that somehow are fully determined by the wash and history.
These are people like Young Asians, a philosopher who is an intellectual in his own right,
obviously, he's influenced by his peers and by what he's read.
We don't know what they are. So the best way to figure out what he's doing and what he's thinking is to start with him.
And I think you're going to be hard pressed to trace his actual ideas and his thoughts
and his views and his arguments to some patron or some cultural force going on.
Maybe you could figure out why he wrote more on one chapter versus another by something like that?
Maybe. So my default view is start with the book, start with the individual and work from the inside out.
If I may ask a follow up question, I guess, to both of you. Isn't there a way in which sense in which it's difficult to separate the inside and the
outside as it were in the perhaps in a way in the way we currently understand the terms,
you know, philosophy, culture, religion, I guess politics on the nose or, you know, we understand these terms separately.
But isn't there perhaps a way in which the distinctions between say, you know, philosophy and religion, for example,
or philosophy and literature aren't exactly the same as the way we understand them now in these classical texts?
Does that make sense?
Basically, your the question you're asking is that they're very clear demarcations between these categories and in ancient India,
is that what you're asking? Philosophy, religion, literature? Yeah.
You know, I think again again, I mean, I think the two speakers today here in complete agreement with each other,
see this attitude to a text that you need to know the socio cultural background of the text and the general conditions in which it was located.
This is something that in literature also today we have this tendency and I think this is,
I would say, a problem with the cultural, materialistic approach.
Personally, again, I do not agree with this approach because I do not see yes, of course,
it is valuable to know and understand these factors, but I don't think it helps me understand the literary value of the text.
Like when I read colliders, I read, Calida said, to appreciate the literary aspects of it that the literary merit of it.
It doesn't help in the least. It doesn't add to the literary merit or take away from the literary merit to know
that colliders was writing it was withdrawn or that colliders as patron was.
I mean, the king was unhappy with him or all of it, that this additional material, which might be useful.
So this question of whether, you know, you can differentiate between literature, religion,
philosophy, etc., again, at some point, I don't think it matters that much because.
Of course, philosophy and religion are very closely connected. That is very much there in in in at least in ancient India.
I think literature, I don't think, has to that extent agreed.
But if you think of the epics like The Mohabbat, though, the Ramayana there, it becomes difficult to distinguish between these three categories.
I would say because you can think of them as literary text, it's for some people,
these are very sacred spiritual texts, and of course, they are highly philosophical.
So if you're reading something like the epics of the piranhas? Yes.
But if you're reading something like colliders or you know what is strictly classified as literature, I don't think that that matters a lot.
I don't know if I've answered your question, but yeah. And.
No, it's I think it's it's helpful to think about it for sure.
You know, as I said, a general just saying the ethics, even within the tradition itself, the ethics.
How to classify the epics is contested. Some people think the epics are short stories, a certain kind of technical treatises.
Some think some of the epics are Covance. Maybe you want to call Kabir's literature.
Some people say they're IP horses, whatever that means as a genre. So what bucket to put a text in?
I think tells you more about the person putting it in the bucket than it may about the text itself.
Right. So there's a reason as to why a person wants to classify it someone.
Sure, you learn something about the object. You also learn something about the person or their reasons for putting it in a bucket.
So I'll say that to start. The second thing is, you know, terms like religion, philosophy and literature in English.
I don't actually know what they mean at all. I mean, if I'm supposed to identify a book as a religion book.
OK. What do you mean by religion if you tell me what you mean by religion,
I might be able to help you as to whether this book fits in that bucket or not, but I don't really know what it means.
These terms have a huge semantic range in English, and so unless it's further specified, I can't even tell you.
Where it belongs. That's why when I started, at least for me, philosophy started as something very narrow.
It just started as a kind of academic discipline that's defined not even globally as defined in sort of, you know, Anglophone departments.
And so that's sort of a way of not answering your question by making it by sort of phrasing it this way.
But maybe the spirit of the question is I think that.
There is no reason to assume. That somehow all these things are all mixed together in a way that you can't tease them apart productively.
Oh, you know, in in in South Asian material, I mean, look, we're dealing with over a millennium.
Of work. Well, over a millennium of work over a vast geographical area produced by very well-funded people for many,
many centuries, there is so much stuff out there.
And we're not even talking yet about the Persian and Arabic material that's literally rotting in manuscript libraries all over India.
So. People who say, Oh, you can't separate X and Y and classical India, or Y and Z or you, you know, these labels are harmful or helpful.
I. I think those are very important questions to ask.
But for me,
I have very little patience with people who think they have clear answers to it because I don't see how they could have a clear answer to it,
considering that we only are, we only know the tip of the iceberg. I think it's productive to say.
Well, there's a way in which here's what I mean by religion for this conversation,
here's what I mean by philosophy for this conversation, it seems to me that in the in philosophical texts,
whatever that means, relate,
religion and philosophy as I understand it for this conversation differently than your American texts do of this time and place that seems productive.
But religion, philosophy, literature, it's probably probably just me, but I don't really know what they mean.
So it's hard for me to answer. Maybe you know what they mean, and you have a specific idea of of what what it means to ask.
I don't know, put you on the spot, but you know what I mean?
Like, there's something there's something important about the question you're asking right about how they like, can you separate them?
And this is the spirit behind the question that somehow the categories that we use in the American
Academy can distort material that means we're pressured into putting certain texts into boxes.
And that pressure that comes from the existing boxes and the need to classify in a particular way the university demands of us is distorting,
is that the spirit of the question and how to and how, how to how to deal with that?
Or I don't put words in your mouth. So I'm just I'm not, I'm not sure.
But. I suppose I was trying to ask.
I mean, this is slightly irrelevant, but I am also interested in Chinese philosophy and in Chinese philosophy,
say in Confucian texts, poet pope poems are often featured and also the sociopolitical circumstances of their time is very important.
And there's also a lot of discussion about, you know, a lot of people ask, So is Confucianism a religion?
And I think the accepted answer is it's not really a religion. And so.
I felt like sometimes there's a way in which we use the word philosophy,
but and philosophy might mean certain questions and certain ways of answering, I'm not sure.
But I don't know. I I'm getting confused now.
But. I don't know, I thought I was maybe interested in whether.
You know, the a text could be all of the above, the philosophy and religion and literature,
you know, or whether literature could never be fought here. You know what?
It was, you know, what we mean when something's not right?
I don't know, I just thought that perhaps if we look beyond the Anglo-American tradition of the electrician,
sort of the philosophy that I'm used to when we look beyond that, maybe we find radically different forms of doing philosophy.
I guess that's sort of what I was getting on. I mean, I think it's absolutely true, and I think you picked out some really good examples,
so obviously we know that Anglophone philosophy analytic philosophy is one way of doing philosophy.
You don't have to look to other places to see different ways of doing philosophy. We just have to look within the Euro American tradition itself.
Right? Read pragmatism. Look at the philosophers who I don't read Hegel, Heidegger writes.
For the French philosophers, it's it's totally different. So obviously, the Chinese material that you pointed to is really different, right?
Because it's so different than the Sanskrit material in so many ways,
it's it seems to be infused in a certain kind of politics and a certain way of poetry and aesthetic.
It's a whole different. It's a whole different way. And we have to ask, is it part of the same conversation or is it a different conversation, right?
Or if the writer of those texts were here today and if they were in a philosophy or what department would they be?
And if they were at Oxford today, what department would they want to teach in? Right.
What courses would they teach? How what conversations would they want to be a part of?
I think asking the questions in that way might, actually might help us.
Get to what we're really after. And help us get a better feel for what kind of distortions might be there,
but to just think what it requires to do that to what it requires to do that is to really be able to think with.
And about these texts and these figures right now to really inhabit.
Those arguments, or at least those materials and see what you can do with it.
I think a good place to look at this question of literature, philosophy or religion would be,
you look at the work of someone like I've been over Gupta, right? I've been over Gupta, who clearly was a shave, a theologian.
No question. Clearly on aesthetics. Clearly rote works in epistemology and metaphysics as part of a kind of broader philosophical theological picture.
You can ask the question there. How does each part of a systematic corpus relate to these terms that we use?
What are the harms in characterising one of his tests one way versus another?
Right? Or something like that? Yeah, I think it's primarily a question of how you read the text.
Like, for example, even car leaders, although he said the literature by itself, I mean, classical sense with literature stands as literary literature.
Khalid US, for example, appearing on a show on the little girl, was a known show, right?
And that is that is a good take away from it. So was it a reflection?
I mean, the recognition that he's notion this recognition of Shakuntala?
Can you think of it as the prototypical philosophy? I, I don't know.
See it. So it's a question of interpretation. You can approach any text in whichever way you want.
Nothing is preventing you from doing it. And I think the epics, especially the Mahabharata, would be very fruitful in that sense.
I mean, all these things that you're talking about literature, religion, politics,
all of it sort of come together in that epic, specifically both Ramayana and the Mahabharat.
So again, you see two DVDs in literature, we do all sorts of things to text, so I am coming from a discipline where anything goes.
So this question of can we read it in a particular way? We would say yes, of course we are fine with it.
And actually, as you may know, in the Sanskrit tradition of commentaries itself, that's very common.
So you'll find the text, say the Amaru. There's a you'll find you'll find a poem that, at least to most readers, seems to be about neurotics,
and you'll find a commentator who interprets it being as being a devotional work, right?
Devotional work to God. So one has to ask, all right, is what is the epistemic significance of these commentary or practises?
What does that tell us about how they understand what a text is versus what a text can be?
What do we do with that information in our academy today?
So there's a reception histories of texts, right?
And in the South Asian world that can be in the form of literally so-called commentaries on texts and commentaries.
Aren't exegesis right? Their interpretations? Or it could be writing new versions of a mob heart that I mean a story.
That's a kind of commentary. It could be artistic representations, which are commentaries.
So there's many ways in which we can look at a reception history of a text and reception.
Histories sometimes can be identified in time and place an agenda.
And so maybe you can learn something about two of the issues we talked about the
issue of social and cultural history and how it was viewed at a particular time,
and maybe also the question you're asking about. And that professor was saying it's not about maybe what a text is always.
It's about what you can do with it.
And we have concrete examples of how people in South Asia, what they did with these texts, we'd have to agree with them.
We can just say this is what they did with it. Maybe that helps us with this question. But I think trying to say in advance.
Without some proper scene setting, is this a work of philosophy?
Is this a work of religion? Is this a work of literature? It might be of less value that are initially.
Might seem. Yeah, thank you, I think that sort of approach to focus more on the insides of texts and to sort of initially like bracket,
the question of what the outsides can tell us is is a really useful and practical approach,
specially when we're talking about the how vast all of this material is.
But then to go through the study of the insides to sort of reveal more and more what
the cultural situation was so that you can have this sort of growing understanding.
I think it's quite a flexible one, I think. Yeah, it's sort of from my very limited experience how it feels to kind of enter into these texts.
But perhaps perhaps we can sort of move on to sort of a related question and
perhaps perhaps one that you too might have slightly different perspectives on.
But I'm interested in and both of you initially talked about a little bit about
the role of Sanskrit when it comes to classifying South Asian philosophy.
And it seems like perhaps you, you offered maybe complementary but slightly different approaches,
meaning you talked a little bit about how the Sanskrit approach to Indian aesthetics like limits limits our view
because it ignores perhaps common aesthetics and Persian aesthetics that are both really interesting and influential.
And then all you talked about how the Sanskrit tradition itself is so wide and vast
that it's a great place to start when we when thinking about Indian philosophy.
So I wonder, perhaps a question this sort of could relate those two perspectives and sort of create discussion
is thinking about how self-contained Sanskrit is as a kind of body of philosophical literature,
like how important are not texts, not in Sanskrit, in the world of Sanskrit philosophy.
And so that might give us perspective on how useful it is to think of Indian philosophy in terms of Sanskrit philosophy.
And what do you mean by Sanskrit philosophy per se?
You mean just three texts in Sanskrit sort of dharma, keerthy type things and type things.
The mom's the type, things like that. Yeah, I mean, things like, I think Shastra or I guess that is a kind of somewhat open question.
So I guess limiting it Sanskrit philosophy to it's a text written in Sanskrit, then what exactly would class as philosophy?
But yeah, I guess. I mean, the most obviously philosophical texts might be the Shostak texts, at least in my understanding.
Are we asking? I mean, I think that. Are we asking a broader question? Sort of.
We know that there are many.
There are intellectuals working in a very wide variety of languages at certain moments and South Asian intellectual history.
We know there are people writing in Sanskrit and Tamil and other regional Latin bridge, for example, in Persian and Arabic.
We also know that many of these intellectuals, especially with the Persian Arabic set up in South Texas, have lived near each other.
Right, they are. They live near each other, live near each other.
It's not. They didn't know each other. They lived around each other. They probably saw each other.
They talk to each other. And are we saying, OK, look, you have all these people, all these smart, serious intellectuals living together?
What influence do they have on each other? Do we see evidence of that influence?
And you seem to be asking the question.
We have that, say, 17th century when we have these Persian Sanskrit intellectuals, we have scholars from all over India.
They're all over what we call India there. What influence do they have?
Is a Sanskrit thing. Close? Was it opened? We have evidence, cetera. I think that's the spirit of the question.
Let me give you an A. Let me make a little bit of analogy.
Then I'll try to answer it and see what Professor Jonathan thinks about it. And let's think of Oxford.
Or Harvard? And let's think of all the people who read Plato and read can't.
Right. I take it they recount in English faculty and theology faculty, probably Plato, too.
They might read it in the philosophy faculty. Do they talk to each other at all?
At all. I'm sure they go to a high table together. I'm sure they go to the pub together.
Do they talk to each other really close to each other about it, really in a way that shows up in their work?
Two people from the philosophy faculty site, faculty and English faculty who write on current and constant critique.
Why they know each other, they like each other. Why don't they say to each other?
Why don't they, why don't we see evidence of their interactions? Different audiences.
Does that mean there was no influence? No, but it just it's not visible.
So with I can talk about this sounds good in Arabic and Persian step a little bit.
It seems to me that even if you have a Sanskrit writer in 17th century Benaras,
a Persian writer and Arabic writer writing on issues of epistemology and metaphysics, they're writing for totally different people.
There's no evidence, none that I've been able to find of any kind of deep level interaction.
Of any type, where do you see interaction? So, for example, you see interaction certain kinds of theological and religious traditions, right?
So you see writers of Persian like Finda, risky drawing on yoga traditions are certain to punish gods.
Right, that's clear. You can also fear exactly why he's drawing on those who pirate.
It's it's it's not clear the exact nature of that interaction is not necessarily one of mutual influence.
It might be one of consumption. Right. We also see examples of people writing poetry.
There's some flash, a copy, it's right in different parts, actually to copy it in different languages.
We see examples in bridge, for example, of people incorporating sounds could be done to traditions and writing bridge versions,
which has a whole vernacular Vedanta tradition, which is huge. But the idea that in these kinds of scholastic traditions.
There is a lot of mutual interaction. Intellectual interact.
I just see I mean, almost no evidence of it. It's shocking how little there is and trying.
Given given how many people there were and how much time they were all together, it's shocking how little there is.
Does that mean there was none? No.
What's interesting, though, is not that there might be some, so that's important to figure out what that was and what the nature of it was.
What's interesting to me is why there's so little. And the best I can come up with is it's like Harvard.
A lot of people said he can't. A lot of people who read Plato don't talk to each other because they have different audiences.
So I'm sitting in my house as a sounds with intellectual.
Suppose I live next door to someone who writes in Persian or live next door to celebrate in Tamil or or Arabic.
We meet, we talk. We have languages in common. We talk about whatever.
But when I write, I'm writing for this jet stream that goes over there. He's writing for this jet stream that goes over here.
Someone else is writing for a jet stream that looks south. And that's it.
I mean, this is simplistic answer, but it's trying to share the spirit of at least sort of what I think and maybe get a little bit at your question.
I don't know, Professor Jonathan thinks about this. Yeah, I know.
I think I agree that sounds good, at least doesn't show any evidence of being influenced by other languages.
It's, you know, it's just there. But again, it's also that it's a matter of dispute.
But there are people who say that the toll Caribbean was influenced by the Nazi shastra.
But then there are people who say that the disaster was influenced by Aristotle's politics.
So I mean, I don't want to go into that at all. But there was a lot of interaction between the parties or the regional Indian languages,
as you would say, like have a grudge or Reagan between Tamil and Malayalam.
There was a lot of interaction going on and at least in the matter of politics, I mean, not in the sense of poetic concepts.
If you think of it what Malayalam has today, or if you can call something like Malayalam politics in daily Sanskrit.
So including the metas and all of it.
So even in Malayalam Malayalam poems that it didn't most of the metres that are used Sanskrit metres not read in metres.
Of course, occasionally we do have the reading metres, but Malayalam is a language that is heavily sensitised with a little bit of Tamil influence.
So but this is happening only in the, say, 15 to 16 centuries.
So till then, what happened between Sanskrit and other portions like, say, for example, the Maharashtra Library,
you have somebody like Raja shake it up writing in Sanskrit, but apparently his wife wrote in Maharashtra separately.
So these are things I mean, obviously people who are bilingual, can we really call them bilingual?
Or was it just, you know, somewhat a language that is related to to Sanskrit?
These are things that we don't know. But there is one movement, if you think of it, that that spread across India.
And I would say this is a philosophical school rather than literary. One is the movement.
So the movement that started around the six to seven centuries in Tamil Nadu,
which was begun by a vision of eight scholars in Tamil Nadu, interestingly takes on various shapes that as it progresses across India.
So what is essentially a Hindu movement in Tamil Nadu becomes a lower-cost sort of movement with in Maharashtra,
for example, the whole with all the the.
Poor pilgrimage and all of it, if you look at micrometeorites and bridge and and bridge by composers,
I shouldn't say Mira Road because Beatles sang and so sang in blood pressure and and Dorothy and all of it.
So this philosophy, perhaps. I mean this.
I don't know if you can really call it a philosophical school because this was the.
The School of Diversion or Apathy, where the middleman between God and the ordinary believer disappears.
So despite the lack of contact or the lack of give and take between Sanskrit and the other pressures,
you have this sort of a woman that is spreading across India. Now the question is how did it?
How did it from the 7th to the 14th centuries?
I mean, if you think of from the vision of eight nine miles up to the state, the name of who somebody in Bengal you have,
if you look across India, you have various poets who belong to this particular school.
I would think that this is one very good example of give and take amongst Indian languages in Indian schools of thought.
If I may call it, I mean, I don't know, philosophers may disagree, even call it a philosophical school.
Because it doesn't have that sort of, I suppose, disciplinary rigour that you would associate with a particular philosophical school.
But I really do not know how to classify.
I mean, the the problem with categories again, how do you understand the book?
I mean, there are people who would say that it does not.
You cannot really call it a movement because it is not the movement in the usual sense of the word,
because it was not spearheaded by a single leader and it did not have a manifesto, which is true.
So it is rather a decentralised sort of thinking that so various representatives of it, they're very different from each other and very alike also.
I mean, if you think of Kabeer and Mira or Barnaby or people like that far removed in in space, time and culture and language.
But that is something in common with all of them that even today that the Dalit woman in India often falls back upon, say, somebody like Ryders.
So they draw inspiration from people like this. So the Buckley movement, I think, is something that might provide an interesting insight into this.
I mean, I mean, one way to think about this, too, is let's take Persian, Arabic broadly Islamic cultural influences.
We see influences absolutely almost everywhere music, food, architecture, painting.
Every sense there's somehow influence, and it's even hard to decide what came from where, but influence is obvious.
What's so shocking and what's important is that you see nothing like that in Sanskrit intellectual work or in Persian intellectual work.
Basically, for Arabic intellectual work, with the only exception that I know.
Is.
With Persian reception of sort of these kind of yogic traditions and also in an shots that I say or somebody in the introductions to some of his must,
must never you begin, you see influence of sort of broader intake of unconscious shastra, but the other way around, you just don't see it.
But you know, there was tremendous interaction, you know, there was tremendous learning in some other every other aspect of life.
So. People say, is this a bad thing or a good thing?
What do you mean, a good thing or a bad thing? It's it's what we see.
So let's try to understand why that might be the case.
Some people say, Oh, it's because Sanskrit intellectuals are very conservative and rabbinical, and they didn't want to talk to anybody else.
OK, maybe, but they sure ate the food. They sure were changed their clothes.
They sure listened to music. They listen to artistic traditions. Maybe the answer.
So I said, Oh, they just had different audiences.
I mean, but so people who this question becomes important because it's obviously historical interest and intellectual interest,
but people often have an agenda in why they ask it and what they think counts as an answer.
And that gets to be a little bit troubling. Just like what sounds with in general, as you know,
contemporary social scientists and many people who work in modern South Asian studies have a certain picture of Sanskrit,
partly due to the politicisation that is really. It's it's really naive.
I don't know how else to put it, it's really naive. And.
And that naivete results in distortion. And that naivete result in.
Turning your back on things that might be of incredible value to you, right?
People who no one I mean, I hope nobody thinks that just because something is and sounds good,
this gets back to the authority point that Professor temporarily raised.
Just because something's in soundscape doesn't mean it's good. It's a language, for goodness sakes.
There's good stuff. There's bad stuff, there's offensive stuff.
There's stuff that's worth, you know, wishing was never produced and forgetting from the past, and there's stuff that we can learn from.
So I guess part of part of asking you about this is to say we to always be sensitive, I think, as to why we're asking certain questions.
And whether there's actually something we have at stake. In what the answer is and why,
and I think this issue of interaction can be asked from with many different perspectives and for many different agendas,
what's most striking to me is just how little, how shockingly little there is.
And it's a next question of how to interpret what that means.
We also don't know very much as we keep talking about, right? I mean, like I said.
There could easily be Persian and Arabic manuscripts that show other kinds of learning.
Maybe there are Sanskrit manuscripts that show learning from Persian Arabic,
though I doubt it in a significant way in these areas, right versus science.
We know that there were translations from science fiction and back, so they were translations.
But personally, I don't know any aesthetic text in Persian.
I've been looking for it. I haven't really come across one. So I don't know, and I'm equally puzzled by this.
So if there was translation activity, in fact,
but I think did have an office for translation and his son may not be able to send, but data show Johnson so he had.
He translated personally. He translated, the pig would get in the bush and all of it.
So there was a lot of translation activity happening.
But then Woody, the alligator, hamsters or any of the Ngubeni should say things did get translated into question.
That didn't happen. But the protesters did the sense with the language adjusted over influence motion or again, the reverse happened.
This is something that we never get to know.
I don't know if Ponderosa Dog another would give an answer because he's somebody who lived during the time of Shahjahan.
So but even then, I don't know. I don't think he shows any influence in that sense.
And you the translation projects, it's almost predictable, it's often predictable what was translated and what wasn't.
So if you look at which you find, the shades were translated. Not all of them.
And you can pretty much figure out why they would translate. Why the ones that were translated were translated has to do with the theological
interest or the practical interests of the particular Persians who were engaged in it.
Now that said, with the influence of, say, other kinds of, you know, we also know that poetry was translated and things like that,
you know, things like that be dynamo that shook us up, that these are translated to Persian.
That feature is not a translation, right? Look, that the the primary question we're asking is, look how hard it is for us.
To point to. Intellectual interaction at the level of scholastic texts or writing, it's not hard in almost any other aspect of life.
It's obvious if you look at governance and political structures,
look at even my so you can see influence music, food, as I said, clothing city planning.
Science. It's this is this kind of scholastic intellectual work is the exception.
And that's interesting in a lot of ways, it's interesting that it's an exception.
It's important that it's an exception. But you can't take it. As being somehow of broader significance, because everywhere else you look.
How do you separate them out? You know, this kind of thing.
So I think that again,
the context in which we ask the question becomes very important and the reasons we're asking the question become very important.
And what we do with our answers and how we interpret it becomes very important, particularly in this, I'll say,
politically charged climate of today regarding sounds good and what classical,
whatever that means, South Asia means or should mean for the future and investing.
And those historical details are really interesting. I guess for me,
the question comes out of it sort of fits into this sort of broader question about like with the Indian philosophy
might should be introduced at Oxford for undergrads this year to focus primarily is on Sanskrit literature.
And so I guess I guess this question arises from, like I said, apply Indian philosophy.
This geographical term gets located in Sanskrit in particular and when how, how appropriate that location is.
But from from what you guys have been saying,
it does seem that that Sanskrit as a sort of coherent intellectual, Walden's makes references within itself,
largely even if there's these other broader influences that are important to understand that it could be understood coherently within itself.
It's my understanding, you know, the way to think about this label Indian philosophy module is.
You know, Indian, if we associate the word India and India with the modern nation state and its borders and
its agenda is obviously the term Indian philosophy is highly limiting and problematic.
Right. But there's other, you know, the word India and India and Indian, all those derivatives.
It's a historically sensitive term at different points in history, picked out different regions.
If we have an Indian philosophy module, I'm not saying that's the term I would take.
But if we pick an Indian philosophy module, why don't we just tell us, tell what we mean by it?
Here's our Indian philosophy module. Here's what we mean. Yes, it turns out that most of what we do is Sanskrit philosophy,
but that's due right now to the current staffing and the place we decided you got to start somewhere.
We decided to start with some. So we decided not to start with Arabic writing in South in India as Indian philosophy,
we decided not to start with English writing in India as Indian philosophy, we're choosing to start with Sanskrit.
That doesn't preclude other things, but we're starting over time.
Let's see how it grows. I don't think there's. I mean, as long as one is self conscious and aware.
And I think in principle, open, it's fine there gets to be a worry for me if someone says if suppose Oxford had decided to
start an Indian philosophy module and start with Indian philosophy written only in English.
Right. Now. By my own way of talking about it, they would be entitled to do that right?
Would I criticise it? I would criticise, depending what their objective is, if they said that we believe this.
It depends on what their story is as to why they're starting there, whether I would criticise it, I personally,
because I have limited imagination, have a hard time imagining what story they could tell that I would find very compelling.
But it's I'm open to it. I just don't see.
I guess I'm I guess I'd like to know more about it. I understand why.
What are the worries about, say this label? Suppose they just suppose you could change the label to South Asian philosophy tomorrow.
The module is going to get a new name South Asian philosophy. What do you think the advantage of that would be?
Yeah. Well,
I guess OAP's thinking is that we want to make sure that all of the influential voices involved in this philosophical material are accounted for.
And I suppose there's also perhaps, you know, political worries,
contemporary and ancient about the role of Sanskrit in and perhaps the potential hegemonic role of Sanskrit in India.
So I guess those are worries that sort of arise and just wanting to acknowledge voices
where they have been influential and if those are in other languages other than Sanskrit.
Understanding why Sanskrit has come to operate in the role of this sort of paradigmatic philosophical language in India
and the Andes are sort of open questions that we have and so not ones that I have any sort of conclusive answers to.
I just think that in terms of what BP and its interests and what's the kind of questions it wants to explore, it's interesting.
And I think those are, of course, very important. Whenever I mean, if we're if we're including something called,
if we're trying to capture intellectuals who worked in broadly this geographic region over 1400 years,
we want to make sure that we are open to all the voices. The question is, what's the best way to do that?
Is the best way to do that to. Ask one great entry point is to ask about the name, right?
But changing the name solves nothing. What would actually solve something is coming up with a syllabus.
For, of course, the deals with South Asian philosophy that say, focuses on everyone or focuses on a whole tradition other than Sanskrit tradition.
If the curriculum is heavily Sanskrit.
And that there's many reasons why that would be the case, some good, it's some pragmatic, some maybe not so good, depending on who you are.
Then the best way is to provide another syllabus. Or set of syllabi and say, Hey, does this fit within the purview?
And if the answer is no, they have to put their money where their mouth is and explain, why not?
And if yes, then you have to see if there's anybody on the planet who can teach it.
So. Well, I'm. The spirit.
Of asking about classification is incredibly important because it takes us to very serious real places, right?
But as a practical matter. If what we actually care about is making sure that important voices aren't left out.
I'm not sure that's the I guess it's an open question. I'm not sure that that's where we ought to put our energy.
It seems we want to put our energy putting together and syllabus and taking that to the powers that be and saying, Hey,
we've noticed we have this great whatever x module philosophy module and we're
concerned we want to know whether we're concerned that it's so Sanskrit heavy.
And we want to know whether the module is capacious enough to include something like this.
Why or why not? I mean.
I guess that's part of my my question. If it's practically oriented, I have this question if it's a theoretical matter.
Then that's great, too, that's that's different kind of classification again, from the practical point of view.
I think that any any goes on in philosophy will be heavily edited with to Sanskrit because if it is,
if you're worried about representation at a certain point of time, scholars across India say, Do you have post-corona who supposedly is from Kerala?
He also wrote in Sanskrit. So this is one language that is linking, maybe this was the language of knowledge or whatever.
So in that sense, India at one point thought and expressed itself in sense for whatever reason.
And again, I don't know, I don't I'm not getting into the reasons for it.
So the representative ability in that sense until the mediaeval ages, at least if you wanted to study Indian philosophy,
I don't think there is any other language to to study it from, really honestly.
So I don't think there's somebody in brackets, huh?
But we can Bali, which, of course, that is the that's it.
But majority media part of it is Sanskrit.
I mean, we cannot know it's all sense critic, at least.
Yes. Yeah. So so I think this is a really good point because.
One of the problems people have, what sounds good is they think it's elite. The question is, when you say, what do you mean by elite?
You don't really get very much.
So we tend to think, ah, people tend to think that intellectual elite, social elite, political elite, financial elite all come together.
And that those who are that Sanskrit somehow picks up all those forms of being elite, which is demonstrably false.
Philosophers. We're never fight, we're almost never financial elites, nor were they social or political elites, they were intellectual elites.
You read people like even people who say, like, say, someone like Manu.
And the monument had a mission where people think, Oh, well, this is the example of elite,
if you just read the text, you realise that the people who composed many were hardly elite.
Yeah.
Maybe they're educated and so forth, but they weren't elite in any other way, they were bemoaning the fact that no one's paying attention to them.
So we can begin to unpack things, which helps us understand what our concerns are and maybe focus them more.
I think I think a debate that is going on in India right now, again about education should be in English or not.
I think this is somewhat similar if you think of, because for Indians, English is the language of education and that is the language of the elite.
About 0.01 percent of Indians know and understand English, but still education is almost exclusively conducted in English.
So should it be in English or should it be in the Indian land?
One of the Indian languages is that question. I mean, it's an ongoing debate that is never an answer to it.
So I would say that the position of Sanskrit in ancient India was somewhat similar.
So if you need to study something from ancient India, I don't think that.
I mean, when are beginning our course on Indian philosophy, I think Sanskrit is an option.
I mean, that is the only option.
And I don't think you should be worried about the presentation because again, within Indian philosophy, again, of course,
all of you would be better judges of this than me, but they were very different schools, a philosophy that did not agree with each other, right?
So you are getting the viewpoints of completely different classes of people that are workers, for example.
So you have a representation of difference.
It is not as if it's a completely agreed to homogenised ideology that you're talking about.
And I think that to avoid negative signalling. Right.
That can be a worry that, oh, look, yes, we agree that this labour is important,
we agree that most of the books that we have are pedagogical materials we have read and sounds good.
So we're going to start there.
If one is concerned about the signal that sends in a contemporary context, that's very easy to correct with a decent description.
Right, so I. I think that it's ongoing and, you know, it's an ongoing question.
How to how to how to manage this over time, but practically. I don't see any problem with this at all.
As long as they're open. To an equally compelling syllabus, right?
I mean, you could have a whole course if suppose all the Persian Arabic tracks in produced in South Asia city, it were translated.
You can have years and years and years and years of courses on Arabic and Persian language philosophy produced in South Asia by South Asians.
Now you can ask, should that be called? That wouldn't be called Sanskrit philosophy.
It could be called South Asian philosophy if all you mean it was produced in the geographical region.
The question there will be will be interesting ask is how different is that philosophical work than work producing the same language and say,
Iran or the same language produced in Syria or Egypt, right?
Where their areas of difference? Where are there areas of commonality?
Is there something regionally inflected that reflects, as you would say, social,
cultural, historical conditions or that show some influence from their neighbours?
These are all great questions that we are nowhere close to answering. And so in the face of that ignorance.
What do we do? Of course, we try to correct it. But at the same time, we have.
If our if our objective is to introduce new authors.
Into the discipline of philosophy. To write about new authors to include new materials.
What practically where do you start? And is there intellectual justification for that practical start?
To me, the answer is just it's it's not. I don't think I think it's very difficult to say you shouldn't start with sounds good.
And it's not only it's not a practically reasonable place to start.
If someone said I'm going to start teaching South Asian philosophy by starting with Arabic and Persian,
I would just think that's not the right place to start. Could you do it?
Yes. Would I want to wait until I have enough material to start a programme there?
No. That's just me, maybe.
And again, we know so little that I don't know. I mean, I'm open to learning from somebody about it.
My worry is different. My worry is that. We.
We don't have good enough materials. We don't have good enough translations.
That we that some people think the only way you can study sounds good philosophy is by learning sounds good.
And as someone who spent most of his adult life trying to learn it well.
You know, I'm not sure we should wait for people to have to learn some skills as well, you know, to the extent I've had to.
It doesn't make any sense. We have friendly people doing good work with Conte, who don't read German and Greek and read Plato and Latin and German.
We should. We should allow. We should have the confidence in the material.
To allow people to study and learn and do philosophical work or static work without learning the primary language, it's not for everybody.
And we have to have the confidence to allow people in our universities to misuse Indic material in the same way they misuse Playtone,
Condon, Reagan and Hagel.
But what it means, what's different in a field like this, where there's relatively little available is people have to work together better.
And in fact, what happens is that people kill each other off.
So those of us who work with primary languages in primary taxi, those who don't read the language shouldn't be doing it.
Those who don't read the language are doing higher so-called higher level
philosophical work than those people who are doing textual work or somehow backwards.
Right. So what has to happen is people have to support each other. Those who can read the text well should be able to correct.
Often those desperate need to correct those who aren't reading the text or making interpretive mistakes based on.
Not be able to read the primary languages and those who mean those who are great philosophers
who may not read the primary languages can teach those who do how to read the text better also.
But we don't do that. We tend to kill each other off in the ecosystem of the university, and that's a problem.
So those are more worries for me than the issue of, you know, is somehow the label Indian philosophy leaving too many people out.
I don't see necessarily why it does. I don't see practically that it has.
And I suppose these are sort of cautions that OPB has, but there's more cautions and open questions.
And if the answers are that there is an intellectual justification for these things, that's a comforting thing.
And so, yeah, thank you for your perspectives on that.
And and it's great that you moved us onto the issue of translation and language and the importance
of that because because we we sort of had some questions in in that realm and in healing,
you had some thoughts on this. Maybe if you'd if you want to, um.
So on the yeah. Now, Professor Chandra, go ahead.
Yeah. Um, I suppose on a question of translations, we have several questions, but one that comes to my mind right now as well.
Is anything ever lost in translation? And if there if there are things that are lost in translation, well, is it possible?
How is it possible to make up for that?
So is it possible to convey, say, in English, what would be lost in translating, say, Sanskrit term, which is what is lost?
That's something that is at all communicable converible in English.
That's an issue that we perhaps wanted to discuss. Is something lost in translation?
Yes, definitely. A lot of things are lost in translation, and that is not necessarily from Sanskrit to English,
but you translate it from any language to any other language. Something definitely definitely gets lost.
But does that mean that languages are untranslatable? No, I don't think so.
See the problem, especially when you translate Sanskrit philosophy, I suppose,
is again, this this very simple term of Maya that we have in philosophy.
How do you translate it into English? Maya usually is translated as illusion, as ignorance and things like that.
So that, I mean, people will have differences of opinion.
But given all of these things, I still think that we should have translations.
And if you are talking about untranslatable native of languages, we wouldn't be getting anywhere right.
I mean, we can't sort of sit back and say, Oh, just throw up our hands and say, OK,
this is we cannot translated into into English, then where would we be getting?
So I think it is the I never think about whether I'm reading the right thing, for example, when I'm reading Plato or Socrates or Aristotle.
Why is it that I should be so worried when I'm reading a translation of the when the ships, for example?
And so one reason could be that it is very strange. The strangeness of it all could be the reason why people are worried about it.
But I would agree with the premise of the battle that if not to insist on knowing Sanskrit first, tend to read a sensitive text.
That's a very, very daunting task. It's not an easy language, and even if you learn it, if you do manage to learn it,
which I think is very difficult, it's difficult to understand the nuances.
So at best, if you really want to insist on that,
perhaps a smattering of Sanskrit might help in the sense that when you feel that the translation is a bit awkward,
if you could perhaps refer to the into the text and see what it says in the original, if you know that much of a sense, perhaps that might help.
But by and large, again, I am speaking from the literary point of view.
So again, I have there are multiple translations of colliders, for example,
but you have the intelligence at which Wilson has translated make a do that is in the in the 19th century,
and you also have later translations of make do with them.
And that's a very contemporary one. Also, very honestly, I prefer the artist Vincent Van, because by and large,
it is what you call a faithful translation in the sense that it has translated managed to keep the spirit of it.
It has managed to come up with a matriarchal pattern,
which is more or less aligned to the original calendar and because Calida says Make Them is composed in a very slow moving metre commander Granda.
Of course, there is no translation of a metre from Sanskrit to English. You can't do that.
So it is. Wilson has more or less succeeded in capturing that,
whereas I find that many of the little ones that that have been done by Deans themselves are not really very good.
So in these matters, I would say use your discretion in one matter,
but I cannot talk about philosophy in that sense because I am talking about literature.
So what matters in literature? The qualities that I look for in the literary work are very different.
So there is a marker, for example, who's a very who's a great Sanskrit scholar.
So he has translated calendars. And I would say that they're actually painful to read because Scully is.
Literally word for word translation, which sometimes does not make any sense.
But I always have garlic because garlic gives me a whole lot of information on, say,
the etymology of the other word or like all of the other uses this word, the word, the various retentions and things like that.
But for readability, I would most probably go back, go to somebody else like Barbara Strolla, me or somebody.
So in these matters, I'm very eclectic. But coming back to your original question about what is lost in translation, I think.
Don't worry about that. Forget that because if it does, if at all, it's some consolation to you.
There is a loss in every communication like like right now and I'm talking to you.
I'm not really sure if you understand mean that I spirit that I am talking.
So in that sense, is this something is lost essentially live communication.
So translations are, I would say, good.
You can trust that it's my take on it.
Yeah. I mean, I think I guess I always start with this so young.
I assume you're at least bilingual. Fully bilingual, right?
So you have a great personal experience. With translation.
And the limits. And the advantages,
there's also advantages to having to translate something that you may understand in Korean that you need to put into English or vice versa.
So I think that people who are fully who have the privilege of being able to work hard to be fully bilingual,
you have great insight into some of these questions and you should feel free to apply them.
I think when you think about the translations of literary or poetic text from another language.
There are. I also think that the importance of a translation depends on what you're trying to do with the text.
So if you're trying to give an interpretation. Of, say, a poem, right?
Take Qaeda says, make a deal with them. You know, if you have an inaccurate translation, you're not going to be interpreting us as Bob.
So there is something about accuracy and reliability, but then what counts, what's enough for being accurate?
So Professor Jonathan talked about the metre and it's it's a slow metre.
So the first version, you know, she had gone to her guru and asked, What a dick.
So the question is, does the metre convey something about the content?
Of the poem, and if so, then obviously you need to understand the metre because you're not going to get it from my car teacher's translation, right?
So again then, but different translations may offer you different things and it really depends on what you're after.
And I think it's because something is always lost and sometimes it's something significant.
It's not fair to expect maybe one translation to do all things as the original one translation is going to replace the original,
but a translation can. Of certain kinds of tests and get you pretty far.
Just take a difference. Think of the difference between a translation of a shopping list.
It's a grocery list. Go buy milk, eggs, cheese or whatever. Close the translation of an instruction manual for your computer.
The translation of a poem, translation of a philosophical text, I mean, there's different.
Different things are lost, and it matters to different degrees, depending on what you're trying to do.
So with philosophical texts, prosthetic tech, scholastic texts.
Translate. Translation is extremely difficult.
Just like with any tech, but it's it's difficult because as you saying terms like Maya, there's technical terms we have to write.
An English technical, philosophical Sanskrit is difficult.
So is technical, philosophical, English. If you expect the translation to somehow not be technical and not be difficult.
That's that's crazy because that's the nature of the original text itself and you're always making choices.
Like, do you translate a word like onion them a simple word as awareness or cognition?
Sometimes it means knowledge. So I guess.
I think that. We shouldn't wait to figure out.
Translation theory before we start translating, and people shouldn't feel afraid to start translating on their own,
but you should also remember that there are, I think there are better and worse translations.
Some are just irresponsible and should be thrown away.
But there's many versions of a responsible translation, and we seem to keep working together to do it.
For example, there are very few. Good translations of Sanskrit,
philosophical texts that you can use in a philosophy curriculum for people who don't know Sanskrit, there just aren't enough.
There's into logical translations, which can't which can't be read by most people unless you already know the language.
So there's going to be a whole range.
Now the people who do say there are some people think that a translation is an English reconstruction of sounds good, right?
So in English, let's say Corey and Mark II, some are English reconstructions of sounds that some people say that's not even close enough.
Is that what you want as a translation, or is it translation someone who's supposed to be able to read English words and have Sanskrit thoughts?
Is that what a translation is? So, you know, I think we need to be just much more open.
About. How we understand it, what a translation is and what its expectations are in a particular context for a particular purpose.
I don't want them to be wrong.
That means if there were a if the S.R. McCarthy were here and he read my translations of its text and you knew English was fluent and said,
this is just not this is just wrong, I'd be upset. Right?
But if you said I would translate it differently. Fine. That's OK. I don't make mistakes.
But I think we sometimes worry about this a bit too much.
Or not worry about it enough, depending on what the case may be. Till then, how plausible do you think this is for both of you?
How would you think it's the case that we philosophise or we think differently in different languages?
Like. Do you think it's the case that when we do philosophy in English, we'll do it in a different way than say,
we did it in in another language saying a friend pays different kinds of Indian languages.
Do you think it's the case that we fundamentally. Think differently when we use different languages.
I would think so, because, again,
this is one of the pet theories of translation studies scholars that each language represents a culture so an entire culture.
So it's basically in that sense that untranslatable we do think differently.
That is true. But if that had really been the case, then we wouldn't be talking to each other at all.
Right, so I think personally, I think that there is a lot of us being made about this so-called, you know, quote unquote untranslatable.
So rather than focus on that, I think we should focus on on, you know,
translating and understanding mutual comprehend civility rather than incomprehensible attack.
So there are certain things, of course. I mean, all of us are human beings and we do understand certain things, of course,
certain culture specific things that there are certain worldviews that you might not understand,
and especially when it comes to philosophical takes, maybe there will be difficulties.
I I'm not downplaying all of that. That is that we cannot get away from it.
But this realisation, if you approach them with this realisation that this text is different and different,
it does not always mean that it is hostile to you and I and that and you take that extra effort to understand it.
Just as I took the effort to understand my colliders, right,
I built a bridge as I did not help me at all because, you know, I made the effort and I was immensely rewarded.
So in the same way, I think the translated text that you're approaching, you should trust it.
Basically do not approach it with this hermeneutics hermeneutics of suspicion, right?
So trust it. And I think if you have this realisation that, yes, what you understand might have other connotations and all of it.
I think that goes a long way in helping you understand the text.
So especially since I am not talking about literature here, and of course,
the primary purpose of a philosophical text is very different from that of literature.
So if it's a literary text, I wouldn't tell you this because the purpose of literature Oregon is to,
you know, interpretation and this open multiple, open ended or all sorts of things.
We can have that. But a philosophical text, I suppose, especially a strict text, cannot have that.
So I think by and large, yes, these stakes are translatable.
I don't think that there is a problem and this awareness helps.
It's what I would think. Yeah, I agree, I think they're translatable.
The question of whether the specifics,
the grammatical ity of a language conditions and therefore determines the kinds of thoughts you can
have and whether it does so in such a way that it makes that it somehow unique to that language.
I mean, as you know, that's a that's a tough question,
an old question and one that it's really fascinating and I don't have a educated view on it at that level of specificity.
All I can say is I have no if there are significant differences.
I at least have not experienced it with sales growth in English and Marathi or German or whatever.
So for me, the default is that we can be bilingual and there may be limitations to being bilingual, but I'm not sure those limitations.
I don't mean to put it this way. I think we can be bilingual or multilingual.
I'm not sure the limitations of that.
I don't know where the limitations of that impact my ability to do philosophy with the text written in the language.
Other than, say, in another language, does that make sense? It's acknowledging there may be limitations.
I don't know what they are, but I have not yet experienced any place with those limitations somehow significantly
or negatively impact my ability to read or understand philosophical text.
One thing about sunscreen that we have a huge advantage is that there is still there are still remarkable.
Traditionally trained Sanskrit scholars in India.
They. There. So, you know, they're needed, they're basically his.
Consumers, readers, producers of sounds good, in a sense. And so you and they're multilingual.
In some itself or in the regional language or in English and learning from them and talking with them and interacting with them.
Gives you even gives at least me even more confidence that we're not missing a lot.
Right. Look, so there's a theoretical question, and there's a practical question, both to me are fascinating.
I personally haven't experienced anything or have any reason to experience it somehow.
The grammatical nature of sounds with is such that the kinds of thoughts that you can have in Sanskrit can't be conveyed in English.
That's just my experience. Yeah, thank you so much.
And I, yeah, you sort of touch on the issue of traditionally strange South Asian scholars, which which was something that we wanted to talk about too.
And yeah, so so kind of building, I suppose,
on this more charitable way of thinking about the nature of translation relationships
between languages and and being optimistic about the possibility of translation.
I guess that that sort of opens the door perhaps a bit more to to the usefulness of these traditionally trained South Asians.
I suppose we're interested in the practicalities of of what role they could and should play and how students who are
interested in South Asian philosophy could speak to the limited ways and ways that they can interact with such scholars.
And and how you think they could function in departments, in Anglophone departments, perhaps and quite interested in that question.
I suppose that's a question that all of the parties could possibly unsaid.
No, I think that President Bush made a very good point when she started about people, about scholars who are writing in Malayalam, right?
Aw, come on. Let's say Malayalam.
Some of these scholars who only wrote in regional languages are some of the greatest readers and scholars of these texts that we've yet seen.
And yet their work is completely unknown because to access their work, you have to read Malayalam and not just read Malayalam.
Two years of Malayalam is not going to give you access to their work. You have to really read Malayalam.
And, you know, at least in the Anglophone world, not enough people do that.
Certainly with Malala, they don't.
And even with language like Tamil or Hindi Urdu, where it's more common, even their people don't do it to the extent that they should.
That's also saying some scrap scholars write books in some script.
They write books in modern Sanskrit. That means it's not as if they're brilliant.
Not enough people use that either. So one way in which one can benefit from traditional learning is to learn the
modern version of a language and read secondary literature in that language.
That's absolutely one way in which it can be done and it's not done.
One reason it's not done is in many programmes the languages of secondary scholarship you're supposed to learn are French and German or Japanese.
I mean, there's no reason why you shouldn't also be able to learn or instead learn, depending on your area of interest.
Madeleine. Or Canada? But what to do?
Or even sounds good. So this is a prejudice of the contemporary academy that needs to be corrected.
No question. That's one way. The second thing is there are some people who are really trained in both.
Professors who trained in the traditional way came to the West did PhDs and teach in your American style universities, right?
That's another way, the third way and the way in which many students do is they they like I did or like many of my students,
you travel to India and you ask a traditional teacher. If he or she will teach you in the traditional way, which is in sounds good medium.
And you study with them, it takes months and years.
One thing that's changed recently is that for the first time, how many of these traditional teachers are willing to teach over Zoom?
They're now willing to have their classes recorded. And this is all new.
And when I started doing this many years ago,
it took me almost four or five months before some of my teachers were willing to let me tape record them on a tape recorder.
Right. So there are ways and there are now many people have tapes of the traditional teachers teaching,
there are DVDs of them teaching all in Sanskrit medium. You can go to YouTube and find them teaching.
So there are many ways one can learn from them.
One of the problems is that often what is learnt from them is not acknowledged and properly recognised, that is a huge problem.
And. I don't see a simple solution to that other than people who do learn.
Really acknowledge and try to really document how they've learnt and what they've learnt and provide some way of recognition.
For these traditional teachers. But the greatest readers.
Interpreters. Thinkers about sounds good philosophy.
Are. Speaking, teaching, writing in.
Sounds good. Most of them.
Not most of it, I would say, a significant number of them. Don't have the level of comfort and experience writing in English.
To write in English. And if they do. To write in the genre of English required for their work to be recognised in the academy.
Right. I mean, we spent years learning how to write a philosophy paper.
Just because someone is a brilliant Sanskrit philosopher, and as we know, the tax work in a different genre,
it doesn't mean even if he or she knows English fluently, that doesn't mean you can write a philosophy paper.
It requires special training. So their work and their expertise is tremendously underappreciated and under-recognized.
And this is terrible. And we should try.
I mean, many of us do we try to spend do what we can to try to correct this.
We don't get there's not a lot of support within South Asia itself. For this kind of work.
And so it becomes difficult. But there's many if you if you want to learn.
From traditionally trained people, you went to learn from scholars in the region about local intellectual practises.
You absolutely can. Requires learning of modern South Asian language.
And it requires going there and meeting them and sincerely studying from them,
or it requires learning the language well enough that you can make use of YouTube and DVDs.
It would also be good if universities are able to bring traditionally trained scholars to do PhDs in the West.
Be good for there to be exchange programmes. So we do these things.
It's small scale and they're always fraught.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But this is what's required.
And those of us who are institutions that have high visibility stationery, right,
like Oxford or Harvard or other places, it's we have a special responsibility to try to do something about this.
I fear that we're doing too little, too late. And I worry what the impact is going to be a generation from now.
The number of traditionally trained teachers.
Is dwindling for a variety of reasons, many of which are obvious to those who understand modern India, right?
And the role of the humanities in modern India. And so I'm.
I'm actually very worried about this. I'm not optimistic. I'm hopeful, but not optimistic.
And if we lose this, we will have lost something. I'm I'm I'm sorry that speak of all, I'm sorry that I can't give you anything more positive on that.
I mean, so it's not really the not very positive in that sense.
So, yeah. The one thing that gives me hope is that.
You know, is that despite how difficult everything is despite the situation and are genuine reasons for being pessimistic?
You still find counterexamples here and there, you still see remarkable people despite these truly horrible circumstances.
By their sheer will and grit and perseverance.
Being flowering examples of what this can be, and that's what gives me hope, but it's self,
you know, and you need to have an ecosystem to sustain it and it'll be a tragedy.
It is a tragedy happening, and this is despite the modern,
the current government claiming to support Sanskrit learning or traditional learning or whatever,
it's this is this is not providing deep enough or proper support for a long term project of
ensuring the continuity and continued development of traditional intellectual practises.
Yeah, that's my rant. I'm sorry.
No, no, it's a really important one, and I think I mean, I've been lucky enough to the Oxford Centre of Hindu studies,
which set up a small programme in Nepal for some students, and I was invited along to go and learn from some tradition trained scholars.
And so, so yeah, I had a little bit of experience that I think Oxford Doctors and the Hindu studies is doing important work with that.
It is limited at the moment in the process of setting it up,
but they want to make a relationship with the Nepal Sanskrit University and as part of my experience that I found it absolutely inspiring.
How much? I mean, as you both are saying, how much these how deeply these scholars understand.
But in this specific sense of how much that memorised and the emphasis on memorisation and like reams of text that they could just say of by heart.
And so I find that feature of traditional South Asian scholarship really fascinating.
I wonder, I wonder as well what what both of your perspectives are on what that kind of education offers
philosophy and philosophical education and what advantages and perhaps to some extent,
what disadvantages as well, because traditional scholars maybe spend more time on memorisation than they do on writing papers,
at least compared to us in the modern West and often to my understanding,
trained within particular intellectual lineages and teachers that will follow these texts in a way
that sometimes and perhaps it seemed as as many were saying earlier in a sort of more devotional way.
And so, yeah, I wonder what you think the relationship between the traditional and the modern ways of learning are in those regards.
I would say even this very traditional way of learning by rote that that happens with Vedic scholars especially.
And I find that Kerala has a very strong tradition of these sort of Vedic scholars.
In fact, it has a centre where they teach the Vedas in this manner.
So again, this immense capacity to memorise the whole of the.
So in fact, they can they can specify which passage, which line they're referring to again with through a certain sign language.
So this is something that happens within that close circle of Vedic scholars.
I think that it is important in the sense that because it carries on the tradition in a certain and a certain way,
because the inflexions of the way the languages, the inflexions of the language and the mantra in all of it is carried forward.
They don't write papers, obviously, because they belong to a completely different intellectual tradition.
Let's so again to people like us in academia.
Again, we write papers, which very honestly, nobody reads.
Very few people read. So I would say that we send that they don't need papers.
It's a different tradition that we are talking about. So what we have to now look at is what we stand to gain from the.
So if you think of it that way, the traditional systems of knowledge of the traditional or the people trained in these traditional ways
of acquiring knowledge and the least interested in in modern contemporary academic sort of practises.
So the problem here is, again, as I said, bridge these two two words as it were.
So how do you view this as part of the bottles point and got many of these people are not fluent in English.
They might be bilingual and they're Indians. Then most probably they know Sanskrit very well and another Indian language, but perhaps not English.
So this is a major. This is the problem that I was talking about when I first broached the topic that you have a whole lot of people writing in the
regional languages but are not comfortable with the English or have not been translated into English so that how do you stop that?
Well, that treasure of knowledge that is existing there and I don't have, again,
as I said, proper answers to it unless people working in this area take active steps.
So, for example, from universities like Oxford or Harvard, if you reach out to these people and you,
you take an effort to reach out to them and try to tap into these sources of knowledge.
I don't think that anything can be done because they said these people are not ambitious in the usual sense of the word,
if you understand what I'm saying. So I don't think they will reach out to you and say he's really interested in this or something like that.
So it's for you to reach. I think Varanasi, for example, you have a whole lot of people, Varanasi using the treasure trove, so to speak.
So you have a whole lot of Sanskrit scholars over there. I think the problem is knowing how to reach out to the.
In that sense. No, I mean, I agree with that.
I would just. Just to pick up on some of the things that you said, I mean about. Memorisation.
To me, it's very simple. Try it. Take a text if you're interested in poetry.
Take a poetic text, if you're interested in philosophy, take one of the guarantors.
Go ahead. Just memorise 50 verses or 50 lines and then you tell me whether it's helpful or not and in what ways it's helpful or not.
When I studied the traditional ways, of course, I had to memorise texts. I found some of it incredibly helpful.
I never found any kind of rigidity or.
Conservative and being required to memorise it and remember, different teachers are different.
Some have different personalities, just like we do in the West. So memorisation very simple.
Try it. Tell me if it helps you, it helps you keep doing it.
If it doesn't. Forget it. Simple. Second,
the idea that somehow traditionally trained teachers are more conservative because they study with a particular teacher or in a particular lineage,
I think is a bit. Ridiculous.
I have I know scholars in the modern university who are big constituents who seem or
process philosophers or huggy aliens who seem like totally they drank the Kool-Aid.
They don't seem very critical at all to me. In some cases,
so I'm not I don't see anything amongst which I like good people and I don't see anything amongst good people who who are traditionally trained.
It sounds good to make me think they're any, any significant way more or less conservative or less creative.
Than anybody else we know. One thing to remember is style.
So as you know, in the classical soundscape world, being original is not considered a good thing.
Why? Because if you're original, that means a person who taught you was wrong.
Now, does that mean you think your teachers are always right? No, of course not.
Does that mean that when you claim to be interpreting them faithfully, you're not making radical innovations?
Of course not. Of course you are. You just don't announce it like we do.
Oh, look, I improved on what my teacher did. So, you know, people confuse style.
With conservativism to discover if there's a real innovation, however, what you have to do is really, really think and really, really read, right?
So I don't. I don't think there's I don't think there's anything.
About the very best examples of traditionally trained people. That somehow.
Shows. Significant negatives. Relative to even the negatives, the negatives we find in our own.
Systems of learning amongst the very best people, I'm talking about the best people,
right, we all know that we well, we want to compare different kinds of vehicles.
I'm going to talk about ones that are fully functioning, right? We don't talk about ones that are partly broken.
I'm talking about fully functioning.
And, you know, the kind of memorisation that produced I was talking about Vedic memorisation is for preservation purposes.
So that's why it's so particular. Other types of memorisation memorising say, you know, Barnini or the amateur.
That's not for preservation purposes, that's for pedagogical purposes, creativity purposes, learning purposes and then memorising chastity texts.
Or passages of shots or Texas for yet another purpose, so there's no such thing as memorisation.
In a sense, there's memorisation of different kinds of texts for different purposes at different phases of one's educational career.
But it's certainly important, and I would just simply say, try it.
And see where you find it useful, yeah,
I've had some really brilliant experiences with the very limited ones that I've had, but yeah, so I found it interesting.
It was it first is just really fun to memorise them and then to have them in you mind.
And so it does sort of feel like there's some unconscious way in which you're chewing on the grammar and the
things will sort of slot in and that there's a kind of process that happens when when you've memorised them,
even if you're not consciously going over them again and again. And that's the way that the Sanskrit teaches that I was interacting with.
We'd talk about it and talk about it is like, you've bitten it now you have to chew it for a couple of years in a way that
I think wasn't really reflected in the way that I've been taught in Oxford.
So, yeah, it's a sort of different perspective that with memorisation,
it's sort of perhaps a different sort of sense of how learning happens in your mind as well, which I find really interesting.
The other thing to worry about memorisation is that, you know, even in your american-style universities,
memorisation was very, very common until relatively recently late in the history of our institution.
So I mean, I think it's just obvious that memorisation is a very useful pedagogical aid and also for philosophical texts,
especially texts that were designed to be heard. And it's useful, like learning vocabulary lists,
a lot of these percussion acronyms are like conceptual vocabulary lists in verse four seasons, which is practically useful.
So I think it's some like magical thing that solves all problems are.
You know, creates all problems. It's a tool.
When that we should celebrate, I think another difference is that, you know, when you're starting out, learning sounds good and by starting out,
I mean, your first 10 years, memorisation is going to have a very different role for you than after you've been doing it for 10 years.
I might ask as well if either of you know,
any tradition or any scholars that sort of bridged the gap between this traditional traditional train style and the modern western style,
perhaps perhaps people who were trained in that and then writing in English now.
And any any any particular individuals that you think would be helpful for this course of trying to get these voices heard a bit more.
And you know, if you know any of the top of your head and perhaps we can reference them in the in the bibliography of this podcast as well.
If not, that's also fine. But I think it's actually too many to mention.
So many of the people, many people of a certain generation and even some today who are working in Euro
American style universities and writing in English were all traditionally trained.
Just think at Oxford, right? Diplomatic law was recently changed.
Professor Diwakar Attari has traditionally trained in the West people like a guard, but they were traditionally trained.
People like Alexis Sanderson were traditionally trained. People like me were also traditionally trained.
I mean, so it's there's too many. The question, though, is whether those people have some special skill in trying to help support.
Traditional learning in India or to help bridge this gap.
Right. And every person I know, Dominic Logistics and everyone I know.
It is cares about this and and does what they can and tries to get students and support the project.
It's very it's it's. So everyone is.
Everyone I know who does this is doing what they can in some way.
There hasn't been a large systematic.
Well funded effort to do so for a variety of reasons and the ideal structure for doing this would be a nation state, right?
I mean would be the resources of a government. Because it takes to do this takes it's not money.
Money is not the problem here. If money were the problem, it could be easily fixed.
The problem is much more serious.
To really solve this problem, there has to be certain kinds of cultural change, a certain kind of reorientation of what's valuable.
A kind of transformation of parts of the humanities and South Asian institutions.
Right. It's it's a big, big,
big problem in some ways to try to really make a visible dent within a generation out when you're outside the region in some ways,
because I don't think it's a money problem. My experience, not primarily a money problem.
I think at the individual level there have been items like in the likes of Sir David Shulman,
he comes regularly and he works closely with them for his career.
So he has done a lot for that. And he also manages to get these artists and managed to get them over to to his place.
So at the government level, yes, I don't think there is anything happening.
But scholars at their individual levels are trying to do this.
So actually, in that sense, the effort has to come from outside India rather than from within India.
And because again, the people here will not know what to what to do, how to reach out.
So that is one of the things that I see happening that's positive is actually, you know,
things like YouTube and the willingness of traditional scholars to be videotaped and taught teach.
It's really extending the impact and I think extending the visibility. So that's actually I see really positive.
But in that sense, I suppose it's easier for you these days than it used to be.
The date is back, so I don't think they'll be for me when I was a student.
Yeah, yeah, I think so too. I mean.
I mean, when I was a student, you know, the only way for me to do it was to go to India and spend four months or a year or two in different cities,
going to the homes of traditional teachers and studying and then going home and preparing and going back.
And I did that for years. But now it's much more accessible, but I don't I mean, this is not the.
If there's going to be serious effort to somehow.
If we're going to be successful in intervening in this, there need to be a dozen different efforts, a dozen different kinds of things tried.
I'll give you some examples. So you know that there's the clay Sanskrit library in the Moorthy Classical Library
of India and what the libraries may have been involved with since the beginning. That's one kind of effort that's necessary.
The traditional teachers, some of them make DVDs very useful way.
Maybe more scholars in the West acknowledging and finding ways to recognise traditional teachers is really important.
The work that David has done with the artist with artists has been really important.
Maybe looking at certain kinds of Indian institutions where they've supported this.
So for example, for, you know, 20 years ago,
the Sanskrit department at the University of Sydney would bring traditional teachers and teach their students and then tape them.
So there's lots and lots of things that have to be tried.
Maybe having grants where you give it to individuals who are trying to do something, just individuals.
Someone says, I need funds to buy books.
Finally, this kind of thing, so many, many things need to be done, but it's going to be a multipronged effort and it's going to require a generation.
I think another problem is that right now, there are actually very few people working on Indian philosophy in a very serious way in India.
I think that's the biggest tragedy of all.
So these questions that you're raising, perhaps they're are valid at Oxford, but I don't think they're valid for philosophy students in India.
So it's very difficult at this point of time, so for example,
when I have a question in Indian aesthetics or philosophy and we do have a philosophy discipline here that I good,
nobody is working in the area of Indian philosophy. So I think primarily that is another major reason.
So a serious study of Indian aesthetics and in philosophy is today perhaps paradoxically happening outside India, not within India.
And so that could also be a major reason for this, you know, glaring, yeah, no, I think it is.
Yeah. It's immediate. I think it is because the natural, the natural institutional home and cultural home is not being invaded,
is not made, has not made sensible, sustainable investments in this area.
In my view, since the modern nation state was created, but that's a separate issue.
So I work in Indian aesthetics. I don't have a single colleague, I don't have students who are interested in it.
Everybody thinks I'm a person because I am happy.
I would know that I have a problem with it, but still that if very, very few people working in this right now within India,
you know, one thing that's been although most everything about the pandemic has been horrific.
One good thing that has come from the pandemic is actually that people have become very
comfortable using Zoom and getting to know each other over Zoom and working together over Zoom.
And it really is helping to bring the world closer together.
And so those even though there's always going to be very few people who are interested in Indian scholastic traditions and intellectual traditions,
I hope that with Zoom, people feel comfortable and empowered to work together.
There's no reason for someone in Kanpur, right,
or professor attending to to not be able to reach out to anyone she wants anywhere in the world who's interested in aesthetics and say, Look,
I had this question, what can you help me or can I help you in the end,
because there's so few of us as we get to know each other that we need to learn how to make better use of each other.
And that's something that we've been very bad at. We tend to do it very formally through journals.
It's kind of ridiculous. We should meet and have tea and talk about it, and I hope with Zoom we can do that.
Yeah. And I think that's actually going to make a big difference, but it requires it requires us to have a new kind of humility.
For me to say, for me to have the confidence, to say, Look, I don't know, I'm just going to call Professor Chandler and I'm going to ask her.
It doesn't matter if he thinks I should know, or if he thinks I'm foolish,
I'm just going to reach out to her, ask if she wants to have Zoom tea and talk to her about Malayalam.
And vice versa, I mean, this is what we need to do. There are many reasons we don't want is this cultural thing which we can change.
The second is the fact that as you young and as you will learn.
Being a professor, you're you have too many you're doing too many things at once.
And so there's also a time question. But this is the kind of thing we should make time for.
And I think one thing I love about this podcast and the work that you're all doing is it creates
those new connexions and it creates opportunity for people to know that they should reach out.
They should ask questions, and we need to connect up with each other because our strength will come from learning how to work together.
You will not come from doing things in silos and complaining it won't.
A brilliant thank you. And can I just ask, how are we doing for time it because I know that we said, Yeah, I want it all.
So I wonder it's getting late. Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah, it has been. It's been a long recording.
There's some really, really interesting stuff there. So we thank. Thank you.
Great to meet you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you.
Nice to meet you. I'm looking forward to maybe having some teeth. Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, no, it's it's really fantastic to have this discussion and to meet you and thank you so much for contributing.
I appreciate the thing.