Whose Veda, Whose Story? Reflections on digital adhikāra and the straitening of Sanskrit (original) (raw)

In recent years, digital humanities in South Asia has opened boldly unprecedented horizons in literary culture and participation. By responding to the links between language, identity, and exclusion, these initiatives challenge the way digital tools are developed and deployed, and work to create spaces in which the human cost of South Asia’s language politics is proactively addressed. Yet, while this affirmation of linguistic diversity involves a necessary pushback against Sanskrit’s history of silencing – its marginalisation of literatures and people – it also raises the question of how bringing digital tools and humanistic values to work in the study of Sanskrit texts could help to decentre the very epistemologies that leverage it as an instrument of exclusion and symbol of authority. Through consideration of two key players in the field of modern Sanskrit language education and textual interpretation – Western universities and right-wing Hindu nationalism – this paper investigates the critical background to how post-Vedic conceptualisations of adhikāra, the exclusive and authority-granting right of access to the Veda, shape an historical narrative that obscures the Veda’s broader relevance to non-orthodox and non-Brahmanical heritage communities. It discusses the way that scholarly and political discourses reify Sanskrit in light of this narrative rather than motivating the close examination of Vedic texts based on internal epistemologies of language and experience that challenged and were controlled by later Brahmanical traditions. This paper then reflects on digitisations of Vedic material, comparing their narrowly intended audiences and limited accessibility to the needs of the multiplicity of stakeholders in this heritage. Finally, and with identification of significant precedents in South Asian digital humanities, this paper asks how cross-cultural, collaborative engagements with Vedic texts can shift power-balances and authority in this history’s narration and its telling in the future.