Students sign petition to reinstate Sanskrit

An online petition to reintroduce Sanskrit into the University curriculum has 240 student signatures as of Monday morning. The petition was started byVidushi Sharma ’17 and began circulating on Sept. 18.

Sanskrit, one of the 22 official languages of India, is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism.

The University’s policy on Sanskrit has been more inconsistent than those at other Ivy League institutions. Brown offers an entire classics concentration in Sanskrit, including six courses offered on Sanskrit language and culture, while Harvard, Columbia, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania all offer some sort of course sequence on Sanskrit. Both Harvard and Yale provide language tutorial programs or live-streamed classes from other institutions if there are no professors on campus to teach South Asian languages, including Tamil and Hindi.

Classics professor Joshua Katz said it is a shame that the University overlooks this region of the world, considering India’s population is second in size only to China. Katz added that the failure to provide Sanskrit instruction is as grave a mistake as not offering Latin, writing about Sanskrit’s importance as “a major liturgical language,” as well as “a language with a massive literary tradition” and one that has “regularly acted as a major vehicle of cultural transmission.”

Katz is also a trustee of The Daily Princetonian Publishing Company, the parent company of The Daily Princetonian, and a former 'Prince' faculty columnist.

Eric Huntington, Cotsen postdoctoral fellow at the University’s Society of Fellows, also expressed his opinion in favor of Sanskrit, citing its relevance in modern society. The current lack of a system at the University prevents students from becoming proficient and prevents the development of a real group of scholars, he added.

“The Tibetan tradition of Buddhism takes its cues very strongly from Sanskrit texts," Huntington explained. "These are things they’re engaging with in a real way.”

Sharma, the petition's sponsor, is a prospective philosophy major with a strong passion for languages like Latin and Sanskrit.

“There’s just so much opportunity for new scholarship in Sanskrit,” Sharma said, recalling how enlightening and exhilarating her studies in Sanskrit the previous summer were.

David Mazumder ’17 voiced similar thoughts, citing the many outstanding philosophical and religious works of literature that are primarily read in Sanskrit.

“Princeton is such a worldly campus and has such an international reach,” he said. “[Sanskrit] is also the basis of so many different languages … How can you leave out a whole family of languages?”

Sharma expressed her excitement at the amount of encouragement the petition has received from students and professors in only four days. Sharma said she plans to circulate the petition email via eating club listservs and perhaps by sitting down in the dining hall with her laptop to give more students access to the petition directly.

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Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri ’01led a student movement in 2001 to start a Program in South Asian Studies, which led to the reinstatement of the study of Sanskrit for three years. However, in recent years, the University’s provision of instruction in Sanskrit has become more inconsistent. Classics and religion professor Herman Tull taught 13 students in total in 2009-10 school year, and Sanskrit was canceled the following school year and not offered in 2011-12. In 2012-13, the University only offered Sanskrit in the spring semester with classics and religion professor Elaine Fisher. In 2012-13 and 2013-14, she taught six students total in the fall and spring semesters. Fisher has since left the University and the administration has not committed to hiring another full-time professor until at least 2016.

Naomi Lee ’15, an independent concentrator studying linguistics, studied Sanskrit at the University in her junior year, a rare time in which the language was offered both semesters. However, she will not be able to study Sanskrit again at Princeton. According to Lee, the University offers the language once every several years, with no specific faculty whose primary responsibility is to overlook and guide the instruction of Sanskrit, even though Sanskrit is a prominent way of accessing texts and thoughts from parts of the ancient world.

“It’s a big gap in any university with a serious classics or historical linguistics department. It really should be offered. It’s embarrassing that it’s not,” Lee said.