SOUTH 3
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9 JANUARY
BANGALORE,
1997
INDIA
Tenth World Sanskrit Conference By JAN E. M. HOUBEN
I
t was only after more than a century of modern, interna ✓ tional Sanskrit Studies that the then Indian Government took the in itiative of organizing the First World Sanskrit Conference in New Delhi, 1972. The next year the International Association of Sanskrit Studies (IASS) was founded at the Paris session of the International Congress of Orien talists. The Second World Sanskrit Conference took place in Turin, 1975, and from then on World Sanskrit Conferences have been held under the auspices of the IASS every two or three years in different parts of the world. Sanskrit has been taken in the broad sense of the word, as the con ferences give room for discussions of research in Pali and Prakrit litera ture, art and architecture, and other related areas.
This time the host institution was the Taralabalu Kendra in Bangalore, capital of the South-Indian state, Karnataka. The Taralabalu Kendra is not only a centre of learning but, in accordance with its name, also an ed ucational centre for children, and it is associated with the Lingayats or Virasaiva. The latter is an early Hindu reform-movement, which originated c. 12th century AD in Kar nataka, and which adhered to the use of Sanskrit but did not want to reserve its use and the accessibility of sacred texts in this language to lim ited groups and sections of society. The c. 1200 registered participants and many more ‘last moment sub scribers’ gave the organizers an enormous task of which they acquit ted themselves in a laudable way. The conference programme provided ample opportunity to dive deep into specific advanced topics of research in numerous fields (divided over 20 sessions), while in accordance with
ASIA
the educative orientation of the host institution the social programme of fered more recreative and popular applications of Sanskrit studies in the form of Sanskrit plays by profes sionals and by children, modern Sanskrit songs, etc. The academic programme includ ed sessions on Agamas and Tantras; Art, Architecture and Archaeology; Buddhist Studies; Jaina Studies; Modern Sanskrit Literature; Music and Performing Arts; Philosophy; Sanskrit Scientific Literature; San skrit Medical Literature; Grammar and Linguistics, etc. Most of the pa pers were presented in English, a good number of them were in San skrit. The programme also included Pandit-Parisads, ‘meetings of tradi tional scholars’, with presentations and discussions entirely in Sanskrit. The next, that is, Xlth World San skrit Conference is to take place, just like the second one in 1975, in Turin, Italy. ■
Dr Jan E.M. H ouben is attached to the Kern Institute (Leiden) as a Research Fellow o f the Foundation for Research in the field o f Philosophy and Theology.
15 > 16 J A N U A R Y 1 9 9 7 PONDI CHERRY, INDIA
The Resources o f History
Traditions: Transmission or Invention? A symposium on Indology and the Social Sciences was organized in Pondicherry 11-16 January 1997 by the French School for the Far East (EFEO) and the French Institute o f Pondicherry (IFP). The two themes o f the symposium were ‘Sources and Time. The Destiny o f Texts’ (11-13 January) under the direction o f Franqois Grimal and ‘The Resources o f History. Traditions: Transmission or Invention?’ (15-16 January) under the direction o f Jackie Assayag. Below follows a short assessment o f the latter part o f the symposium. By JACKI E ASSAYAG
he goal of the symposium was to examine tradi tion or the immemorial. This was not done by de lineating in it the lines of resistance to change but, contrari wise, to show its discontinuity, its disintegration, and even its reversal. On the basis of some examples in South Asia, the symposium also de scribed the constant modification and readjustment of these traditions which are too often thought to be fixed in an eternal present. This was deemed essential, considering the
established idea that Asia, if not ac tually immobile, is at least ‘retarded by its traditions’, in order to provide some depth by assigning its rightful place to the passage of time. In fact, whatever the nature of the extreme ly varied ‘sources’ examined by the participants of the symposium may be, the traditions appear to be com plex, historical (re)constructions. They certainly do not constitute an unchanging heritage passed on from generation to generation. In spite of the differences in deal ing with the material presented, the participants in the symposium showed how the actors make use of these resources in situ which they
argue are elements of tradition, in order to ascribe meaning to the pre sent world and to their own actions. Naturally, the social actors do this by recalling the past in an attitude either of fascination or of revulsion; and such uses are mostly pragmatic and motivated by some specific in terest in conformity with the needs of that moment. But they always do this with the help of traditions that they re-invent in order to fulfil cer tain needs of a particular era which today are focused on forms of identi ty, ethnicity, and nationalism. A number of contributions offered an exploration of some examples of these general re-configurations of the individual and the family, of the group and the community, of re gions and the nation that are found in Hinduism, Islam, and Christiani ty in particular. Therefore, these so-called ‘tradi tions’ appear today, and certainly more so than in the past, more as processes than states; socio-cultural
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PUNE,
16 J A N U A R Y
1997
INDIA
Indology: Past, Present and Future By JAN E. M. HOUBEN
rom 13 - 16 Janu ary 1997, the Uni versity of Pune hosted a seminar enti tled ‘Indology: past, pre sent and future,’ which was jointly organized by the Univer sity of Pune, Department of Sanskrit and Prakrit Languages, the Indira Gandhi National Centre of the Arts (New Delhi), and the Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi). The organizers had invited papers addressing topics like the shift of the accent in Indology from ancient and medieval India to contemporary India, the ‘Western’ versus ‘Indian’ discourse in Indolo gy, Neo-Hindu attempts to actualize ancient Indian teachings for the pre sent, etc. In addition, they invited papers dealing with the state of the art in Indology in different coun tries. The thirty-five participants of this seminar hailed from different
dynamics sustained as much by the faculty of forgetting as of recall. However, these traditions give way quite readily to anachronism, that is to say, to a projection into the past of some desire of the present time, the easiest and the most common meth od of creating a history that is useful to the construction (of the image) if the individual, the group, the com munity, the region, and the nation. And the agents of history often do this by opposition or by comparison with different forms of ‘otherness’, notably that of the neighbouring and/or distant ‘stranger’. This enquiry into the fundamen tal and multiple reality of cultural traditions in South Asia thus helps to find an answer to the uncertain ties which arise in the destiny of a society whose actors increasingly consider themselves as a part of a multi-cultural and multi-regional setup, and in an ever growing Asiatic configuration because of intra-na tional movement and globalization. For in the end these are indeed the social and political questions raised by the evolution, divergence and re versal of traditions: how far will this rise in new constructions of identity, be they ethnic or nationalist, or the powerful emergence of various radi cal movements, success in destroy ing the historic heritage of a ‘secular’ faith which has enabled India, de spite the recurrent alarmist forecasts since her Independence in 1947, to be an example of how socio-ideological pressures in the heart of a continent can be handled without leading to civil war or geographic fragmenta tion.
corners of India, and further from Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, China, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Po land, Russia, Sweden, USA, and other countries. Among the highlights of the seminar were the presentations by some of the eminence grise of Pune-based Indology: A.M. Ghatage discussing philosophical problems with which he was confronted in his lexicographical work, S.D. Joshi with an overview of trends of research in Paninean grammar, and M.A. Mehendale with an overview of Mahabharata research. The proceedings of the seminar with the full papers of the participants will be published in due course by the Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi). ■
Dr Jan E.M. H ouben is attached to the Kern Institute (Leiden) as a Research Fellow o f the Foundation for Research in the field o f Philosophy and Theology.
The proceedings of this sympo sium will be published in one vol ume by the EFEO and the IFP in 1998. The symposium was organized with assistance from the Office of In ternational Congresses in the French Department of Foreign Affairs, the French Ministry of Culture, the École pratique des Hautes Etudes, the various services of the French Embassy in India as well as with the support of the Indian Council for So cial Sciences Research, the Centre d’études de 1’Inde et de 1’Asie du Sud (CNRS and EHESS), the French Con sulate in Pondicherry and the Alli ance Frangaise of Pondicherry. ■
Dr Jackie Assayag is the head o f the D epartm ent o f Social Sciences, French Institute o f Pondicherry, India.
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