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Mature academic studies on Sanskrit literature are uncommon, despite the sheer volume of Sanskrit texts composed over almost three millennia and the importance of Sanskrit for Indian civilization. Simona Sawhney's thoughtful book of essays is a rare flower in an upcoming field of what one might style "Sanskrit cultural studies". The author dexterously avoids the Scylla of philological/indological pedantry and the Charybdis of Hindu chauvinism. In this, as in every other regard, Sawhney's approach to Sanskrit and its literature is ground-breaking. Especially novel about Sawhney's approach to Sanskrit is the perception that during the past two decades a "total appropriation of the Sanskrit tradition in India by the Hindu right" (p. ix), and the premise that "Sanskrit becomes a prop in the staging of a violent drama of cultural continuity, and the hatred of all those to whom both origin and history appear as a relentless saga of injustice" (p. 5). Even more poignant is her confession that her decision to learn Sanskrit "crystallized only in the aftermath of December 6, 1992 ... the destruction of the Babri masjid ... and the violence that both produced and followed that destruction" (p. ix). The shame and horror of the ensuing rise of the violent Hindu right forced Sawhney to take a hard look at the Sanskrit tradition, in whose name, allegedly, the Hindutva forces wished to destroy the body politic of the secular democratic republic of India.
The immediacy of an age-old tradition in these contemporary historical events accounts for the book's title. Sawhney has written it "as a way of asking how we might read Sanskrit texts today, not to present a hypothesis about how they may have been read two thousand years ago" (p. 15). Moreover, the modernity of Sanskrit refers "to the appearance and status of Sanskrit texts in modern India and to the ways in which they have contributed to reflections on literary, political, and cultural modernity" (p. 16).
Sawhney carries out her programme of the modern reading of Sanskrit across five chapters. In her first chapter she discusses readings by Rabindranath Tagore (the famous Bengali poet and Nobel prize winner) and by Buddhadeva Bose (another Bengali poet and literary critic) of, respectively, Kalidasa's play Shakuntala