Anyone For Sanskrit?

IS there anyone here who speaks Sanskrit or might continue doing so into the next millennium? Very few is the probable answer. For an organisation which champions the reintroduction of Sanskrit as the lingua franca of India, the RSS is silently witnessing a tragicomedy of errors in its birthplace, Nagpur. That too, over one of the most unique projects for the revival of Sanskrit introduced, ironically, by the Congress government and very nearly scuttled by the Shiv Sena-BJP combine now ruling the state.

The Maharashtra government now seems to be playing ping-pong with the location for the Kavi Kulguru Kalidasa Sanskrit University (KKKSU), unable to decide whether to locate it in Ramtek, 70 km from Nagpur, where there are no takers, or in the heartland of India where there is more hope of attracting a fair number of students. In typical fashion, it is settling for both. As a result, the KKKSU stands endangered—for the academic year 1998-99 which should have begun by September, the university could enrol only five students for six courses to be taught by 10 professors. It has no room for classes either in Nagpur or at Ramtek, has little money and is squashed between the political wranglings of various factions in all the major political parties of Maharashtra—the Shiv Sena, BJP and the Congress.

The KKKSU was envisaged not just as a centre of learning for Sanskrit, of which there are many along the length and breadth of India. It was envisaged as a gurukul, rather than a conventional university, with focus on disciplines like medicine, economics, physics and dance in Sanskrit instead of just literature.

The idea was first mooted by former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, a graduate of Nagpur University and twice MP from Ramtek. Treating the PM's wish as a command, the then state chief minister, Sudhakarrao Naik, asked Sanskrit scholar Shrikant Jichkar to study the feasibility of the project. An ordinance was duly issued post haste and the KKSU, as conceptualised by Jichkar, was all set to come up, a la Shantiniketan, on 85 acres of land donated by the government in the sylvan surroundings around a lake in Nagpur.

So far so good, but soon enough the eternal spoiler, politics, appeared. The demolition of the Babri Masjid and its inevitable consequences for Maharashtra followed. Naik was dislodged and in came Sharad Pawar, who perceived Brahminism and the RSS at work behind the idea of a university that sought to teach pure sciences in Sanskrit and cancelled the ordinance. After vociferous protests, it was revived under pressure from Rao. Jichkar was elected chancellor of the KKKSU by an electoral college comprising high court judges, other chancellors and vice-chancellors of Sanskrit and other universities round the country. Meanwhile, donors in India and abroad chipped in with Rs 100 crore, enabling the KKKSU to commission scholars to translate a host of texts into Sanskrit.

Curiously, the next hurdle came in the form of a BJP-Sena coalition after the 1995 assembly elections. "I would have thought that the saffron parties would have been only too happy to back the university," Jichkar told Outlook. "But no such luck. The Sena-BJP dropped the project because it saw it as a purely Congress programme."

 So even as the ordinance was finally converted into law, there was a stiff price: the university would be a conventional one funded by the government (there was provision of Rs 20 lakh in last year's budget) and it would be shifted to Ramtek. So the Rs 100 crore was returned to the donors, the land grant in Nagpur handed back to the government which now set about buying up some private agricultural land on the outskirts of Ramtek, where real estate prices have suddenly rocketed.

The academic progress has been equally jinxed, with advertisements for the six literature courses eliciting only 20 enquiries though by rule each class must accommodate at least 24 students. Finally only five students took admission for the six courses. Whereupon the Maharashtra cabinet, in September 1998, passed a resolution to shift the KKKSU back to Nagpur. Its vice-chancellor, Pankaj Chande, was summoned by chief minister Manohar Joshi when a delegation led by Jichkar pushed for relocation to Nagpur on the grounds that only a city with adequate infrastructure could attract students.

CRITICS say talk of infrastructure is mere lip service, and that Joshi, who admitted he had been unaware of the non-feasibility of the project in Ramtek, relocated the university in Nagpur under pressure from minister of state for education Anil Deshmukh, an independent supporting the Sena, and Nitin Gadkari of the BJP, who is the guardian minister for Nagpur district.

There's more to the farce. Former BJP MP, Banwarilal Purohit, who is now in the Congress, is also said to have lobbied for the relocation of the university. But when Purohit saw pictures of Chande, who believes the university can be run better from Nagpur, posing with Gadkari at the meeting with the chief minister, he changed his mind. Gadkari is Purohit's bete noire and is said to have been a major player in denying him a ticket in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. So Purohit wrote to Joshi again, saying the KKKSU should be at Ramtek after all.

Meanwhile, M.G. Vaidya, editor of the RSS Marathi mouthpiece Tarun Bharat, chipped in with a rather poetic note to the chief minister: "A mother might give birth to a child but that does not mean she is the best authority on his health. She must depend on the doctors for keeping her child well. So must the government leave the decision on the university to experts who wish for it to be located in Nagpur."

Some Congress leaders with little to do in Ramtek now joined issue and late last month called for a bandh in this temple town against the government's decision to shift the KKKSU back to Nagpur. When told that there were not enough students, they furnished a list of 250 interested applicants: the names are genuine but they are all still on the registers of schools in Ramtek and thus are not yet qualified for the kind of courses being offered by the university.

But minister for education Datta Rane has come up with a please-all formula: the main university might be relocated to Nagpur, with a learning centre in Ramtek. Says Chande: "I have now been authorised to advertise for students both in Nagpur and Ramtek. Never mind the crossfire we are caught in, I am determined to begin some conventional classes this year. The university must come into existence. Teaching must begin this academic session."

Meanwhile, the Maharashtra government has yet to decide what to do with the 75 acres of land it bought up in Ramtek for the university. It might be turned over to just a learning centre while Chande scours for room for the university's computers in Nagpur. These computers have been equipped to handle Sanskrit and Internet connections—Chande claims the computer language today comes closest to Sanskrit. But Ramtek is not yet cyber-linked, nor are there plans to uplink this temple town to the rest of the world. No takers, again.