'We must know our roots'

Martin Bloomfield, the affable bow-tie wearing head master of the prestigious St James School in fashionable Kensington, invited me to witness the Sanskrit competition in his school. I accepted with alacrity. The school’s Sanskrit teacher, who had studied at Oxford, spoke briefly about the stanzas the children would read, and then led each class to the stage for the recitation. Proud parents sat and heard verses from the , the , the , and the . The recitation was of both the Sanskrit text and its English translation, and entirely from memory. 

As the young girls - from class one to six - in their blue uniforms and pony tails stood and chanted the texts, I sat wondering about the osmosis of culture. Here was a British school in London, with English children reciting lines written thousands of years ago by Indian sages on the banks of the Indus and the Ganga, to an audience more familiar with the latest Harry Potter film than with the intricacies of Hindu metaphysics.  And yet, there was a palpable sense of achievement on the faces of the children, and both pride and interest in the demeanour of the parents and teachers. The recitation was competent and enthusiastic, even if occasionally the accent was inescapably - and understandably - foreign. 

Sanskrit is a near forgotten language in India. Most children I know in upmarket schools consider learning it an imposition, if they learn it at all. Those who do learn it concentrate more on the grammar, and recite by rote, with little curiosity about the profound meanings underlying the texts. Perhaps we take our heritage for granted, while those who are introduced to it from a distance have a sense of discovery and revelation. One parent came up to me and said: "The lines from the Ba-ga-vad Geeta are so beautiful."

To what extent can people from other cultures credibly acquire expertise in that of another? Warren Senders lives in Boston and has learnt Hindustani classical music for the last 27 years. His gurus include the legendary Bhimsen Joshi. 

Recently Warren performed at the Nehru Centre. Wearing a grey embroidered pyjama

kurta

, with a Himachali cap on his head, and rimless glasses perched on his nose, he sat cross legged on the stage, and launched into a masterful rendering of Madhuvanti raag, followed by Gaud Malhar and a folk

dhun 

in

Pahari

. It was strange to see a foreigner so immersed in the delineation of a raag, displaying the same facial movements and body contortions typical of Indian classical singers. His

tayyari 

was great, and it was undoubtedly the result of long and painstaking

saadhana

. Perhaps his rendering lacked the slow, meditative elaboration which is the hallmark of the great masters, and perhaps his accent was sometimes a give away, but the audience was quite mesmerised.

The blind imitation of the cultural attributes of another people leads only to caricature. That was—and is—the fate of the brown sahibs of India. You can only learn authentically of another culture when you have a standing in your own. Warren Senders is a core member of Boston’s Jazz Composer’s Alliance. He records and composes with his ensemble Antigravity. His dexterity in Indian classical music is the result of respect and hard work, but not at the cost of his own cultural identity. The children of St James School who have learnt Sanskrit will go on to know Shakespeare better. The tragedy in India is that so many of those who have been educated in the English language know a great deal about Shakespeare and Dickens, but almost nothing about Kalidasa or Agyeya, or about the literary giants in their own mother tongue.

(A Stephenian, Pavan Kumar Varma is a senior Indian diplomat and presently Minister of Culture and Director of the Nehru Centre in London. Author of several widely acclaimed books likeGhalib: the Man, the Times and the recently released Being Indian, he will be writing the column Hyde Park Corner, exclusively for HindustanTimes.com)