Sukumari Bhattacharji: Marxist, Atheist, Sanskritist

The woman who used Sanskrit as the key to understanding ancient India rationally and scientifically.

Pratik Kanjilal | New Delhi | June 15, 2014 1:12 am

The woman who used Sanskrit as the key to understanding ancient India rationally and scientifically

Sukumari Bhattacharji died in Kolkata less than a fortnight before some ministers of the NDA government took the oath of office in Sanskrit. I wonder what the last of the great Indian Sanskrit scholars would have thought of the perplexing conceit of taking a living pledge in a dead language.

Today’s identity politicians, almost all of whom would probably free-associate “Lata” with “Mangeshkar” or “creeper”, and not Sanskrit declension, would have found Bhattacharji equally perplexing. Her family had converted to Christianity; many progressive Bengalis did, a century ago. Christian by birth and Marxist (and atheist) by persuasion, she used Sanskrit as the key to understanding ancient India rationally and scientifically, not as a handy easel on which to paint a modern, retrofitted Hindu identity.

“You don’t know the Ramayana unless you’ve read Valmiki in Valmiki’s language,” she once told me. Very few Indians have done that, and it is an important standard, since the Adi Kavi sings of Rama the hero. Rama’s apotheosis happened afterwards, in interpolations, exegetical texts and folk traditions. The contemporary Ram bhakt would be baffled by such niceties. And by Sukumaridi’s response to the Babri demolition: to read Valmiki all over again, with more care than ever before, to discover if all this fuss was warranted — if there had ever been a maryada purushottam in the first place.

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/sukumari-bhattacharji-marxist-atheist-sanskritist/



She died last month at 92.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Indologist-Sukumari-dead/articleshow/35575670.cms