Hacker News Reader

Comment by KhoomeiK | Hacker News Reader

> primarily used for religious purposes

*intellectual purposes. The constant religion-washing of Indian intellectual history is colonial-era propaganda, for lack of a better term. It has gone so far that now the vast majority of people think there is nothing more to India's intellectual past than Hinduism. A very substantive portion of Sanskrit literature, if not the majority, deals with non-religious topics such as linguistics, logic, poetics, astronomy, rhetoric, mineralogy, statecraft, geography, and more.

I agree with your main point though.

View on HN

Care to eloborate?

//A very substantive portion of Sanskrit literature, if not the majority, deals with non-religious topics such as linguistics, logic, poetics, astronomy, rhetoric, mineralogy, statecraft, geography, and more.//

and more source would be nice? The main reason its not is because none of the literature was for the common man. The sankrit literatures have always been for the elites. It is still considered a sin for millioins of Indians to even read a sanskrit text.

None of the pseudo-sceintific bs counts. Stop saying they had the science in them. Its okay to accept our ancestors were stupid instead of tring to glorify all the pseudo scientific non-sense i.e flying vehicles, cure for cancer. Gimme a break dude.

Linguistics: Astadhyayi of Panini, the first generative grammar and arguably kickstarted the Western structural linguistic tradition via Saussure

Logic: Navya Nyāya developed formal logical approaches and proof paradigms 600 years before the West

Poetics: Pingala mathematically defined poetic meters with combinatorics (DeBruijn Sequences, Pascals triangle, etc) over 2000 years ago and the Sanskrit poetic tradition is widely recognized as one of the most aesthetically sophisticated. Check out the Sisupala Vadha of Magha for crazy poetry stuff.

Astronomy: Gupta-era astronomers developed the base 10 positional numeral system to make calculations easier, and as a result, Indian calendar systems have accounted for the precession of the Earth for over a thousand years

Rhetoric: the Nyāya school developed a formal theory of debate that was used in intellectual circles across the subcontinent for centuries. It enabled debaters to identify argumentative strategies and logical fallacies.

Mineralogy and Geography: there's a lot of Puranic literature about this but I'm personally not too familiar

Statecraft: Kautilya's Arthasastra is the most famous example but there are countless other treatises over the ages discussing politics and warfare

Each of these examples I gave are but a small sample of the work done by Sanskrit intellectuals over the past few millennia. Don't blame your ancestors for your own ignorance.

Thank you for this comment. So true. The colonialists came with their world view, made the Indians feel inferior to subjugate them. Indians in turn have fetishized this colonial view and have self hated on their own culture as a result, to the delight and as intended by colonialists. Part of this self hate is this conflagration of Sanskrit with Hinduism, and while the two were closely related, there is such a rich intellectual culture of Indian thought (Both Sanskrit and non Sanskrit thought) that can be appreciated while still being “modern”, let’s call it. I really wish more Indians would understand this.

>The colonialists came with their world view, made the Indians feel inferior to subjugate them.

It is still going on. There is a reason a gang rape in an Indian village becomes global news on BBC and CNN but gang rapes in other countries don't get anywhere the same attention.

The current rape hysteria about India is as old as European colonization and even Karl Marx wrote about:

>During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as "India's First War of Independence" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, Indian sepoys rebelled en masse against the East India Company's rule over India. Incidents of rape committed by Indian sepoys against British women and children were reported in the English press, particularly after British civilians fell into Indian hands after sieges such as at Cawnpore. However, after the rebellion was suppressed, detailed analyses by the British government concluded that although Indian sepoys had engaged in massacres of British civilians after they captured them, there had never been one single instance of war rape committed by the sepoys.[103] One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where forty-eight British girls as young as fourteen and ten had been raped by the Indian sepoys in Delhi, was criticised as an obvious fabrication by German author Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, while the rebellion was mostly confined to the Punjab region.[104]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence#Indian...

This has a modern parallel; anglophone Indian journalists write about local crime in a highly exaggerated manner to get more clicks and views from a global audience.

But you wonder how the colonialists managed to colonise in the first place...

I mean if the culture is rich and beautiful, it's still useless if it crumbles at the sight of the first merchant ship from thousands of kms away.

Point being, the indian intellectual culture is enjoyable but it did not focus enough on what could have made people able to stay free, and stealing part of the invaders ideas to reinforce the local ability is not bad, it's the only way to resist the next wave.

To simplify grossly: less worship, less obedience, less birth hierarchy, more political alliance with neighbours (so that you're not surrounded by sharks when you're in trouble), more national awareness (opposed to tribal), more ability to quickly iterate even if elders disagree (so that you're the one with a big innovative merchant navy) . It feels that's what made some countries rise super fast and start colonising while others went rotten and self destructed.

My country, France, is a few kms away from England and they stopped being able to colonize us long before India, so what was missing in India, so expensive to invade ? (ofc, France also horribly colonized countries and we should have had the maturity not to, but guess what we told our own protectorates when we came: look at England colonizing your neighbour, let us "protect" you so you can compete...)

"Usefulness" means a great deal more than "reliably repelled invaders".

Many civilizations have collapsed or been subjugated and yet produced lasting useful knowledge and beautiful culture we still use and appreciate today.

If they had a crystal ball they no doubt would have reprioritized some things.

It is military innovation more than anything. If they didn’t have guns and other weapons I don’t think they would have had such an easy time subjugating india.

Nothing to do with colonialism. Present day right wing will characterize Sanskrit as word of God

Just because people are perceiving the "present day right wing [characterizing] Sanskrit", doesn't mean that everyone interprets & connects that with Sanskrit.

I engage with the language through Yoga, mantras and chanting,… and zero politicians interrupt that process, nor do I think about them.

Sanskrit has lived even before humans invented the idea of "the right wing".

None of what you describe is actually engaging with language.

Politicians don’t have to interrupt. They just have to make it a part of their agenda and spread fake pride to the masses. It’s better than opium.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com