Claremont McKenna College

Whence Sanskrit? (kutah samskrtamiti): The Rise (and Fall) of Sanskrit in the West

HERMAN TULL

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2013

Sanskrit is the classical language of ancient India; composed texts in Sanskrit represent a continuous literary tradition that reaches back at least 3500 years and consists of thousands upon thousands of works. Today, most Westerners have only the slightest familiarity with this great tradition, aware perhaps of a few words stereotypically related to the notion of karma or the practice of yoga. Yet, there was a time when the study of Sanskrit was of great significance in the history of Western education, holding a central place in the development in the early 1800s of the first graduate schools and academic Ph.D. programs in both Germany (where such programs originated) and later in the United States of America. To understand the “rise and fall” of the study of Sanskrit in the West leads us back to the nineteenth century experience of the British colonial administrators and the European Orientalists who first brought Sanskrit studies into the West, that is, to ask, “Whence Sanskrit”? Fundamental to this project is the broad awareness that, in modern colleges and universities in the West, the choices we make in our studies — what we choose to study as well as how we study it — are frequently uninformed; and, as we shall see in the case of Sanskrit, beneath an individual field of study may be found surprising (and sometimes insidious) roots.

Herman Tull has been a faculty member at Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Lafayette College, where he taught courses on the history of religions with a focus on the study of India and its classical language, Sanskrit. Professor Tull’s interest in studying India began during an undergraduate year spent in India, where, as a student at Andhra University, he studied the Telugu language, the mrdangam (the traditional drum of South Indian classical music), and Indian philosophy. In graduate school, at Northwestern University and at the University of Chicago, Tull focused on the study of the religious and philosophical literature of ancient India (both Sanskrit and Pali), writing his dissertation, under the direction of Wendy Doniger, on the origins of the Indian doctrine of karma. Along with a book and several articles on the Indian doctrine of karma, Professor Tull has published widely in the area of Indian studies. Among his recent projects are a study of the goddess Kali and a grammar of the Sanskrit language.