Relevance of Ancient Indian thought on present Critical Practice in India

Often in Indian academic circles where a lot of importance and attention is given to critical theories and multidisciplinary studies the non relevance of Sanskrit texts and ancient thought is subtly stressed upon.

At the most these ancient thoughts are considered as some valuable museum pieces which have no bearing on the present art or critical writing scenario.The propounders of such ideas happily take refuge in Western theories and critical practices and quote extensively and many a time quite meaninglessly from these schools of thought.

As a student of Art History I have many a times wanted to and in my own way tried to question this hegemony of Western thought on the mind of our so called intellengensia.With all due regards to Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan and much misquoted Derrida, I really don’t see how their theories are extremely relevant for present Indian art and literature scenario when works by giants like Abhinavagupta, Anandvardhana Batta Nayaka..etc are outdated and unscientific. Now if we argue that the relevance of great theories surpasses time and place then shouldn’t we give if not more than at least equal credit to theories of Indian Aesthetics and philosophy?

Ferdinand de Saussure hailed as father of Structuralism and in a way father of modern linguistic theories was a student of Sanskrit language and his doctoral study was on the use of Absolute Genitive in Sanskrit too.He was profoundly influenced by Sphota doctrine introduced as a philosophy of meaning by Bhartrihari in 500AD. In fact many of the foundational ideas proposed by de Saussure are directly or indirectly influenced by the Indian grammatical tradition particularly by Panini and Bhartrihari. Ironically we Indians today get taught the interrelation between Sign, Signifier and Signified as explained by Saussure but no one tells us about the beauty of Sphota theory….no one tells us about Saussure’s sources. And unfortunately we want to be spoon-fed while Western scholars do the groundwork for us.

To quote another example lets look at Jacques Lacan who for the first time related Freudian psychoanalysis to art. His theories are referred to, quoted from and provoked by most of the present art critics and feminists. In his widely known essay, "Function and Field of Speech and Language," Lacan makes an explicit reference to the Dhvani theory in order to point out that the unconscious does not express itself in language; it reveals itself through suggestion. More narrowly, Lacan traces the sources of the "full word" in what he calls "the power of the symbol," a power that the analyst can evoke "in a carefully calculated fashion in the semantic resonances of his remarks" (Ecrits 1966, 82). He adds, "this is surely the way for a return to the use of symbolic effects in a renewed technique of interpretation in analysis"

Lacan’s precccupation with Dhvanyaloka and his understanding of the text is made clear by his refering to the follwing passage from Dhvanyaloka of Anandvardana:
“A girl, it begins, is waiting for her lover on the bank of a stream when she sees a Brahmin coming along towards her. She runs to him and exclaims in the warmest and most amiable tones: 'What lucky day this is for you] The dog that used to frighten you by its barking will not be along this river bank again, for it has just been devoured by a lion that is often seen around here'....
The absence of the lion may thus have as much affect as his spring would have were he present, for the lion only springs once, says the proverb appreciated by Freud (Ecrits 82).
The example of the girl, the Brahmin, the devouring lion and the dog is one of nearly five hundred examples discussed at length in Dhvanyaloka. Anandvardhana and his commentators and others use these examples from Prakrit and Sanskrit literatures to isolate various properties of speech that facilitate poetic communication by concealing, negating, erasing of primary sense the mukhyartha. Besides being preoccupied with the suggestive functions of utterance in general, in the passages that follow the elaborate reference to dhvani, Lacan affirms the interdependence of analytic and aesthetic uses of language. This connection is particularly relevant to his concept of the "full word," its reliance on the internalization of the poetic resources of language.
Now to conclude my rather frustated outpourings I ask myself do I feel handicapped when it comes to understanding Indian thought and ancient tradition? The answer definitely is yes…My six years of arthistorical training and participation in various seminars and dicussions have not given me any clear insight in our ancient wisdom and thought….If tommorow I want to apply in any university abroad I have to devote two full years to learning Sanskrit properly.Regretfully I confess while I can quote Foucault, Lacan and Derrida like back of my hand I get cold feet when encoutered with Sanskrit texts.My meagre knowledge of Sanskrit is pitiable and whom do I have to blame?