Saviours of Sanskrit during British colonialism in India

Recommendable!

"‘Pundits’ kept Sanskrit scholarship alive in remote settlements as British control swept across India, a major new research project will show. The largely forgotten literary figures and their works – ranging from erotic plays to legal treatises – are neglected treasures of Indian intellectual achievement, its researchers argue.

English speakers are familiar with the word ‘pundit’ but few know that it comes from the Sanskrit word paṇḍita, meaning ‘learned’. Now a Cambridge University-led project is going in search of the pundits, Brahmin scholars, who kept writing poems, plays, philosophy, theology, legal texts and other forms of literature in Sanskrit as Britain tightened its grip on India.

It has long been assumed that the expansion of British power in India from the seventeenth century steadily suffocated Sanskrit scholarship. But the experts behind an ambitious new project argue that the two centuries leading up to the establishment of the British Raj in 1858 were, in fact, a golden age of Sanskrit intellectual thought, literature, and arts. They point to the scholarly activities of hundreds of pundits dispersed across the Indian countryside in Brahmin settlements (agrahāra) and monasteries (maṭha). ..."

Saviours of Sanskrit "Indian literary genius survived British imperialism in forgotten villages, new research reveals."