India on Verge of Cultural Ecocide

It would be hard to accuse India of being a country that doesn't care about its past, when in everyday conversation—and even judicial cases —people here reference Hindu epics, Urdu poets and events from across millennia of history.

But Sheldon Pollock, the renowned scholar of Sanskrit and Indian literary history, warned that in literary terms, India is on the verge of becoming a country as brand-new as America. He gave the keynote speech opening the Jaipur Literature Festival Friday morning.

"It is now entirely legitimate to ask, if dismaying and disturbing, if within two generations there will be anyone in India who will have the capacity of reading Indian literature produced before 1800," he said. "I have a feeling that that number is slowly approaching a statistical zero."

There is a lot of anxiety around writing in India's languages other than English and whether authors in those languages are getting their due.

Mr. Pollock's concern is over the loss of the treasury of literature that already exists and has been preserved over thousands of years, in part, he said, through literary festivals like Jaipur that took place several hundred years ago.

The scholar, who teaches at Columbia University, says he has become gravely concerned over 40 years of coming and going from India and learning its classical languages, including Hale Kannada, or ancient Kannada, in Mysore and Bangalore.

The scholar said he wondered at the disarray of the classical institutes he studied in and at the lack of fellow students. Then he realized that there were no other students and "that my teacher had no successor."

"Over the 35 or 40 years coming to India…it's been the same in classical Assamese, it's the same in Bangla, it's the same in Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya and all the way down the long list," he said. "India is on the verge of a potentially cataclysmic cultural ecocide."

That seems like a hard thing to make people care about in a young country that's thinking very hard about its future and about economic growth–both of which seem inextricably tied to English. Although technology has helped a surge of journalism and writing in some Indian languages, English is still the language that most young people are desperate to acquire. But Mr. Pollock makes his argument anyway.

"I don't think I need to make the case in an audience like this that it's probably not a good idea to let the past just pass away," he said. "Within 3,000 years of human consciousness are sedimented not just possible tools for living but possible different ways of being a human being. This is what we're on the brink of losing if we lose our capacity to access the classical past."

As general editor of Harvard's Murty Classical Library, he's trying to do his bit. The $5.2 million initiative aims to translate a variety of works from a slew of Indian languages, including the first English translation of the Akbarnama, or Story of Akbar, one of the emperors of the Mughal dynasty that ruled India.

But he said a lot more needs to be done.

He described efforts by some states to get "classical language status" from the government for their languages as "moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic," suggesting more practical steps are needed.

"In Delhi today there is no one teaching classical Hindi literature at either of the two great universities," he said. "This would be like going to a university in Paris–this is an exact parallel–and finding no one was reading Corneille, Racine or Molière."