Kathmandu, Nepal
Maoist rebels set fire Saturday night to Nepal’s only Sanskrit-language university, located in the Dang district in the western part of the country, destroying administration buildings and damaging the university’s valuable collection of ancient texts. The rebels, who are fighting to overthrow the country’s constitutional monarchy, are demanding that the government stop teaching Sanskrit, the language of Nepal’s aristocracy.
According to an administrator in Mahendra Sanskrit University’s office in the capital, Kathmandu, rebels entered the campus and doused two buildings with kerosene. The fire, which police officials say took all night to extinguish, consumed the offices of the vice chancellor, the registrar, and the controller of examinations. All of the student records, kept since the university opened, were destroyed. The university official, who asked not to be named, said that an unknown number of Sanskrit books had been lost in the fire.
This was the second time this year that Maoist rebels, who want to install a communist government, have attacked Mahendra Sanskrit University. In December they set off a crude bomb in the vice chancellor’s office. After the attack, Purna Chandra Dhungel, the vice chancellor, moved to the relative safety of the capital.
The campus lies in close proximity to the Rolpa district in western Nepal, where, last week, rebel and army forces engaged in some of the most intense fighting in the history of the six-year insurgency.
Since the start of the so-called People’s War, one of the major demands of the rebels has been to drop the requirement that all government-aided schools must teach Sanskrit. Sanskrit was the language spoken by Hinduism’s elite Brahmin caste in ancient times. Even though few people speak it today, it’s still a compulsory class for students up to the eighth grade.
Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world and has one of the lowest literacy rates. Discrimination based upon caste remains strongly entrenched. There are also deep language divisions, with more than 100 languages and dialects.
Low-caste Hindus and the groups known as “untouchables” resent that they must learn the “archaic language of the privileged class, while their own mother tongue is ignored,” said Krishna Bhattachan, a professor of sociology at Tribhuvan University, Nepal’s oldest and largest university. He said the Sanskrit proficiency requirement is one of the reasons that on average only about 1 percent of low-caste Nepalis graduate from high school and as few as 0.01 percent graduate from college.
“If there was a compulsory test on Latin, what would be the performance of American kids?” asked Mr. Bhattachan.
