In the lobby of a posh hotel, a professor from Columbia University with a salt-and-pepper beard, wearing a slightly rumpled suit, stands out among the executives talking of “telecom” and “the auto-parts sector.” Sheldon Pollock speaks softly, in measured tones and with thoughtful pauses, even as enthusiasm for India’s economic boom bubbles over in the business conversations taking place around him.
So when he confides that he became a scholar of the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit after the Hindu goddess Saraswati “came to me in a dream when I was 12 years old,” it’s easy to take him at his word—until he bursts out laughing. “I almost got you there,” he says, enjoying a last jest at the West’s clichés about India’s spirituality before his flight back to the United States.
A veteran traveler to India, Mr. Pollock was in town for a friend’s wedding, but he has spent a lot of time here over the past year working on his dream project, a fellowship in Sanskrit for a program he’s starting for the historically underprivileged. Over the years, as he observed all but the elite being excluded from the study of Sanskrit, he wondered why more people couldn’t be exposed to its intelligence and beauty. And now they can be.
The Ambedkar Sanskrit Fellowship Program starts this fall at Columbia with one fellowship for a master’s degree in Sanskrit—which he hopes will lead to a Ph.D.—for a deserving candidate.
Sanskrit, at least to some degree, Mr. Pollock believes, had become a vehicle for the expression of India’s historical social inequalities, based on the Hindu caste system. For centuries the study of the language was reserved not just for Indians, but for Hinduism’s highest caste, the Brahmins. With the Ambedkar fellowship, he’s looking to invert that notion.
“The program is in a sense a natural outgrowth of this long-term concern of mine for the politics of Indian knowledge. I could never do anything about it until now, when I finally have some money to do so,” says Mr. Pollock, who is a professor of Sanskrit and Indian studies.
The fellowship program—which is worth about $60,000 annually—is financed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award that Mr. Pollock won in 2008 (he doesn’t disclose the amount, but it could have been as much as $1.5-million) and by Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The program is named after B.R. Ambedkar, a scholar from one of India’s so-called untouchable castes who received his master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from Columbia University in 1915 and 1927, respectively, and went on to play a central role in drafting India’s Constitution.
The first recipient of this new fellowship program for a master’s degree is Shaminaj Khan, 25, a Muslim woman from a “humble” family in a small village in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. “She’s just enchanted with Sanskrit!” says Mr. Pollock.
A prolific critic and translator, Mr. Pollock, who is 63, believes that learning Sanskrit will empower the oppressed by helping them understand the sources and building blocks of the ideology of oppression, as well as its arbitrary nature. The language, and the literary tradition that has arisen from it, should belong to everyone, he argues.
An Indian scholar once told Mr. Pollock that an outsider had no right to speak about Indian culture. But, he says in defiance, “a poet like Bhartrhari, a great Sanskrit poet, is as much a part of my tradition as it is a part of hers.”
Gopal Guru, who teaches Indian political thought at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, says it is Mr. Pollock’s humanistic approach that makes him not just a good scholar but a great one: “He promotes organic intellectual growth,” Mr. Guru says. And “he’s humorous, very down to earth, and a very fine human being apart from being a great intellectual.”
Some scholars have expressed concerns that the fellowship, because it is restricted to the disadvantaged classes, is politically motivated. But Mr. Pollock emphasizes that the program is not predisposed toward encouraging a social critique of Indian society. Ms. Khan, for instance, is interested in Sanskrit drama and literary criticism.
“There are no prerequisites that students study the ideological formations of precolonial India,” says Mr. Pollock, referring to the period when a majority of rulers in India were Hindu. “We are interested in providing an intellectual opportunity for students to explore whatever aspect of classical learning they are interested in. This is not an indoctrination program.”
The program is also part of Mr. Pollock’s wider goal of attempting to arrest the rapid decline of classical Indian studies—which he says faces an even worse situation in India than that confronting classical studies in the West, simply because India has “so much more to lose.”
The Indian classical tradition is “the longest continuous multilingual literary tradition in the world,” he says. “It’s so extraordinary.”
To revive interest in the discipline, Mr. Pollock has long hoped to translate a series of most of India’s classical texts into English, for a world readership. Now, thanks to a $5.5-million endowment given to Harvard University by the family of Narayana Murthy, one of India’s most successful technology entrepreneurs, the professor will lead a translation project to produce for Harvard University Press the Murty Classical Library of India series. The press will keep the resulting books in print.
Mr. Pollock’s next major goal is to raise an endowment for the Ambedkar Sanksrit Fellowship Program. “With $1-million,” he says, “we can fund one scholar every year in perpetuity.”
