When it was banned in 1988 in several countries, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie faced government censorship. Today, cancel culture is empowered in every hand that holds a cell phone. Also, today, the entire text of Satanic Verses is available on various websites, openly accessible for anyone to read.

Be it obscenity, religious blasphemy, offensive portrayals of personalities, businesses or organisations, or national security, finding a reason for banning of books has never been difficult. Even the Bible has been censored in various instances.

Rushdie himself questioned the relevance of bans on books in an age when they could be easily downloaded anywhere. Also, with a host of platforms enabling self-publishing, beside blogs, personal websites or even social media for that matter, attempts to muffle any voice seem rather ironical. Despite this, a simple internet search reveals a list of over 40 books banned nationwide in India alone. Withdrawals and sanitisation of books is another matter altogether.

Also Read| CyberOne: Xiaomi unveils humanoid robot capable of sensing human emotions

Take Wendy Donigers The Hindus: An Alternative History, all copies of which were recalled and destroyed in 2014. The Red Sari by Javier Moro, thought to be based on Sonia Gandhis life, was published five years late in 2015.

The Polyester Prince by Hamish McDonald did not even go to print as the publisher, HarperCollins, feared legal action from the Ambani family. The stories of banned writers Taslima Nasreen, Perumal Murugan and Tehmina Durrani in more recent times, and the likes of Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai are well known, if one recounts writers from the subcontinent alone.

So what makes a book more liable to be questioned? As Meru Gokhale, publisher, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India, points out, While it is correct that content can now be posted online on any platform, a book from a mainstream publisher will have a permanence that a social media post likely does not, so books generally face a higher level of scrutiny.

Geetanjali Shrees book Ret Samadhi was published in 2018, but it was in 2022, after it won the International Booker, that someone found objectionable content in it, forcing cancellation of an event in Agra where she was to speak. Subsequently, a tweet in her support asked: What next for her?

After the shocking attack on Rushdie, Congress leader and author Shashi Tharoor tweeted: A sad day, worse if creative expression can no longer be free & open. Controversial writer Taslima Nasreens tweet said: If he is attacked, anyone who is critical of Islam can be attacked. I am worried.

It was fearing such attacks that Malayalam novelist S Hareesh had withdrawn his novel Meesha (Moustache) in 2018 after receiving threats to his life, saying he was too weak to take on the powerful. Author Perumal Murugan had reacted by saying that he didnt think protests and retaliations were a result of writers crossing their line, but targeting authors was politically motivated instead. Murugan had himself given up writing after being targeted for his Tamil novel Mathorubhagan.

On their part, publishers are playing it safe too. As Gokhale of Penguin India says, There is a balance we are always seeking to strike, we are mindful of the laws of a particular country, while at the same time respecting the rights of freedom of expression of our authors.

This signals a trend. As author and TMC MLA Manoranjan Byapari told FE in a recent interview: At one time, artists undertook an important job to wake up the people. Now they are all silent. It is a matter of grave concern. Clearly, while much has changed in the 34 years since Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, the attack on him shows that things remain the same when it comes to taking offence over written words.

See more here:
Intolerance vs free speech: Dichotomy of the internet age - The Financial Express

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Global Publishing Market 2022-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The publishing market is poised to grow by $19.2 billion during 2022-2026, decelerating at a CAGR of 1.22% during the forecast period. The report on the publishing market provides a holistic analysis, market size and forecast, trends, growth drivers, and challenges, as well as vendor analysis covering around 25 vendors.

The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current global market scenario, latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment. The market is driven by growing impact of e-books, increase in Internet penetration and speed, and changing business dynamics of publishing industry.

The publishing market analysis includes the platform segment and geographic landscape.

The publishing market is segmented as below:

By Platform

By Geographical Landscape

This study identifies the rise in number of indie and self-published authors as one of the prime reasons driving the publishing market growth during the next few years. Also, the growing popularity of pod and interactive advertisements in print magazines will lead to sizable demand in the market.

The report on publishing market covers the following areas:

Key Topics Covered:

1 Executive Summary

2 Market Landscape

3 Market Sizing

4 Five Forces Analysis

5 Market Segmentation by Platform

6 Customer Landscape

7 Geographic Landscape

8 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends

9 Vendor Landscape

10 Vendor Analysis

11 Appendix

Companies Mentioned

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/fswi8j

Excerpt from:
Global Publishing Market 2022-2026: Growing Impact of E-Books, Increase in Internet Penetration and Speed, and Changing Business Dynamics of...

Though it is not the same as good psychotherapy, dont underestimate the power of the basics, she told me. Making sure your young person is getting enough sleep, theyre getting enough physical activity, theyre eating a balanced diet. If possible, keep them busy with purposeful activities. These things go further than we sometimes expect.

There are resources you can use at home, books and online programs, that can help your family. The online resources that come most recommended are often rooted in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (C.B.T.), which usually involves efforts to change thinking patterns, according to the A.P.A. Patricia Frazier, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, has, along with colleagues, studied the effects of internet-delivered C.B.T. programs (I.C.B.T.) on university students and found that they were feasible, acceptable and effective.

These I.C.B.T. programs tend to be a combination of text, videos and exercises that help explain the roots of anxiety, then encourage users to identify what may be triggering overwhelming feelings, and then offer exercises to help address these feelings. For example, the free app MindShift C.B.T., from the nonprofit Anxiety Canada, allows you to log your daily feelings and then write a short journal entry about the reason behind the feeling. You can also list symptoms you may experience, like racing thoughts, chest tightness or nausea. It gives you a series of tools to use, like guided audio for calm breathing or test anxiety, or coping cards that provide affirmations like Learning to sit with some uncertainty will help me worry less.

Frazier told me the body of research on the effectiveness of I.C.B.T. programs is incredibly strong. She pointed me to this 2019 review in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, which found that I.C.B.T. works and can be as effective as face-to-face therapy. But its worth noting that these studies were done on adults, not on children or teenagers, and that many of them had a trained professional helping to run the I.C.B.T. programs.

Patrick McGrath, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied the effectiveness of I.C.B.T. in adolescents, told me that parents looking for reputable resources should start with the websites of childrens hospitals and professional organizations. He recommended Magination Press Childrens Books from the American Psychological Association, as well as the C.B.T. Toolbox series of books. As for online resources, he said that he refers people to MAP, or My Anxiety Plan, also from Anxiety Canada, which has a multipart online course for teenagers.

McGrath mentioned CopingCat, which includes an online resource called Camp Cope-A-Lot. Its an animated program that helps teach parents and kids ages 7-13 C.B.T. skills and that was developed by Khanna and Philip Kendall, a professor of psychology at Temple University. She told me that she sees the program as a learning resource, not necessarily as a therapeutic one. The C.B.T. skills she teaches in talk therapy, like identifying triggers of anxiety and using tools like journaling and breathing, are learnable concepts, and therapists are just better and more trained to teach the concepts, she said.

Read more:
Opinion | Kids Mental Health Is a National Emergency. Therapists Are in Short Supply. - The New York Times

Get your weekly fix of comics news and reviews, plus special guest Matthew Arnold. You know him from his work on shows like Emerald City and Siberia, and his Comixology Originals series Eden is soon to be in print via Dark Horse Comics on August 30th! We talk about the series, his work with Netflix, and more!

You can stream the AIPT Comics podcast below or find it onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Before the interview, we recap the biggest news of the week. Marvel certainly made waves this week with new series announcements for Deadpool,Murderworld: Avengers, Thanos: Death Notes, and Planet Hulk: Worldbreaker. DC Comics extended Poison Ivy for a second six-issue story arc, Chip Zdarsky and Jorge Jimnezs first Batman arc ends December 2022, and Superman: Kal-El Returns special was announced.

Dave:

Nathan:

Standout KAPOW moment of the week:

Nathan DCeased: War of the Undead Gods #1 (Tom Taylor, Trevor Hairsine)

Dave Ghost Rider: Vengeance Forever #1 (Benjamin Percy, Juan Jose Ryp)

In our Judging by the Cover segment, Dave loved James Stokoes X-Men #13 and Nathan talks upJames Stokoes DC vs. Vampires: All Out War #2. Check those out below!

Become a patron today to get exclusive perks, like access to our exclusive Discord community and our monthly comic book club, ad-free browsing on aiptcomics.com, a physical trade paperback sent to your house every month, and more!

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AIPT Comics Podcast Episode 184: Crafting worlds: Matthew Arnold talks 'Eden' and its move from digital to Dark Horse AIPT - AIPT

Public Theology for the Common GoodA public theology for the common good relies upon an image of a just, sustainable, participatory, and planetary future. How about Isaiah 11? Is the Peaceable Kingdom only a heavenly dream? Or, is it Gods promised future?

The public theologian offers discourse clarification and worldview construction for the sake of the global common good (Peters 2018). Just to be clear, public theology is not a disguised form of evangelization or an attempt to usurp the public square for religious influence.

Built into the worldview of a public theology for the common good today is the assumption that the public theologian contributes one voice among many. Many voices are sounding for attention, to be sure. This includes a variety of religious voices. If anything, the post-colonial public theologian within the liberation theology camp admonishes the world to listen to all voices, especially those voices previously muffled or ignored.

There is no global choir. No unison. No harmony. Only cacophony. What the public theologian intones will be heard solely by ears listening for charity of heart, sound reasoning, and wise judgment.

Public theology is conceived in the church, critically refined in the academy, and offered to the wider culture for the sake of the global common good. Maybe even the galactic common good.

Are we talking about three different publics: church, academy, and wider culture? Not exactly. Hak Joon Lee refines the notion of public. Public refers not so much to a locale as a posture of doing theology, namely, the dialogical openness to everybody in pursuing the common good of a society. Because social media provides the same media through which both church and academy communicate, all theology is already and unavoidably public theology.

Our point here is this: the public theologian speaks as one voice among many on behalf of a single common good. So says Jayme Reaves, a Baptist from Americas Deep South with a theology doctorate from Trinity College, University of Dublin, Ireland.

If theology in its most basic sense is the study of God, then,also in its most basic sense,public theology is the study of God done by or for the public,or as it pertains to issues in the public sphere. Public theology is theologyaboutandforthe public. If something is a public issue, public theology has something to say about it.[1]

Then Jayme Reaves hits our nail on the head with a sledgehammer.

A concern for the common good cannot be based in the denomination or supremacy of the Christian faith. We cannot achieve common good unless we are willing to question our own power and be willing to share it with others whose voices are not heard.

Pope Francis embraces in different terms a vision of a just, sustainable, participatory, and planetary society. He makes clear that the public theologian speaks with one voice among others, even though what is said has universal application.

100. I am certainly not proposing an authoritarian and abstract universalism, devised or planned by a small group and presented as an ideal for the sake of levelling, dominating and plundering, says Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti (2020). For the future is not monochrome; if we are courageous, we can contemplate it in all the variety and diversity of what each individual person has to offer. How much our human family needs to learn to live together in harmony and peace, without all of us having to be the same!

The number of concerns we could register in a public theology for the common good would make a list longer than s decimal points. Like a circle with a center, at the center of the common good we find the flourishing of Gods creation, especially human flourishing for each individual as a benefit of the collective. Todays public theologian works out of a futuristic vision of a just, sustainable, participatory, and planetary society.

Even if such a vision is conceived in the church and critically refined in the university, it is offered to the planet as a whole. Susan Codone, on the faculty of Mercer University, writing in Christianity Today (August 7, 2020), says

public theology is a purposeful effort to place our faith in the public square and make room for others to join us.we can challenge the systemic social problems of racism, sexual abuse, misogyny, and domestic violence with couragehoping for change, not retribution.

Secular ears are wary when listening to religious voices. Public theology also understands and accepts that 1) we live in a diverse, multi-faith society and 2) there are many people who are wary of religion, Codone warns.

This public wariness borders on the hostile. We are moving into a post-Christian society and this is reflected in increased expressions of anti-Christian bigotry, writes George Yancey in a Patheos post.

Myresearchhas confirmed that those with this bigotry are more likely to be white, male, wealthy, and well-educated. So, it is very well connected and powerful individuals who have the type of anti-Christian prejudice that will continue to trouble Christians.

Yancy adds advice for us. This loss of cultural power is critical as Christians consider how to prepare to operate politically in a post-Christian world.

Concern over hostility toward religion in general and Christianity in particular has risen to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Samuel Alito has issued an ominous warning: Theres growing hostility to religion or at least the traditional religious beliefs that are contrary to the new moral code that is ascendant in some sectors.

Justice Alioto added his concern that our stable and successful society in which people of diverse faiths live and work together harmoniously and productivity while still retaining their own beliefs is under threat.

Channeling the lateRichard John Neuhaus, the justice cautioned against a privatizing of religious belief and practice where the cultural expectation is that when you step outside into the public square in the light of day you had better behave yourself like a good secular citizen.

While Alito is right to worry about the erosion of religious liberty, his speech partially misdiagnoses the problem. Although he referenced multiple faith traditions, he revealed his real concern to be opposition to traditional religious beliefs by those subscribing to the new moral code. This depiction sets up an antagonism between supposedly secular progressive ideas and conservative religious understandings, with the latter needing special protection from the law and the government.Public theologians tend to be supportive of the more progressive ideas.

Public theology, says contemporary Dutch scholar, Toine von den Hoogen, is that it is the form of theological investigation which is aimed at the modern media mediated complexes of meaning which arise in the construction of world views and cultural zones from the fusions between religion and culture, religion and economics, and religion and politics(Hoogen 2019, 10).

Little more than a century ago, another Dutch theologian and statesman introduced a nascent form of public theology to Europe. That was Abraham Kuyper, Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. The government, too, is the servant of God, Kuyper reminded us(Kuyper 2022, 251). The public theologian continues to remind us of this.

Kuyper spoke to a Christian society. We do not. Ours is a pluralistic society. Todays post-colonial or liberation theologian will publicly raise one voice among many for the common good of the many. When offering to the public square discourse clarification and worldview construction, the public theologian must be careful to speak with charity of heart, sound reasoning, and wise judgment.

Ted Peters pursues Public Theology at the intersection of science, religion, ethics, and public policy. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He previously authored Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003). He is editor of AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction? (ATF 2019). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited the new book, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics hot off the press (Roman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2022). Soon he will publish The Voice of Christian Public Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.

This fictional spy thriller, Cyrus Twelve, follows the twists and turns of a transhumanist plot.

The Public Theology of Rudolf von Sinner

The Public Theology of Katie Day

The Public Theology of Binoy Jacob

The Public Theology of Robert Benne

The Public Theology of Paul Chung

The Drumbeat African Public Theology of Mwaambi G Mbi

The Public Theology of Valerie Miles-Tribble

The Public Theology of Kang Phee Seng

The Public Theology of Jennifer Hockenbery

Karen Bloomquist: Another Worldview Must Be Enacted Today

Global Network for Public Theology (GNPT)

Center for Public Theology

Ebo Lectures in Theology and Public Life

Center for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago

Lutheran World Federation, Open Access Public Theology Resources

University of Chicago Divinity School, Public Orthodoxy

Fordham University, Public Orthodoxy

Christianity Today, Public Theology Project

International Journal of Public Theology

Hoogen, Toine von den. 2019. Public Theology and Institutional Economics. Cambridge UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Kuyper, Abraham. 2022. On Charity and Justice. Bellingham WA: Lexham.

Peters, Ted. 2018. Public Theology: Its Pastoral, Apologetic, Scientific, Politial, and Prophetic Tasks. International Journal of Public Theology 12:2 153-177; https://brill.com/abstract/journals/ijpt/12/1/ijpt.12.issue-1.xml.

Read more:
Public Theology for the Common Good | Public Theology for the Common Good - Patheos

Sanskrit is the classical language of Indian and the liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It is also one of the 22 official languages of India. The name Sanskrit means "refined", "consecrated" and "sanctified". It has always been regarded as the 'high' language and used mainly for religious and scientific discourse.

Vedic Sanskrit, the pre-Classical form of the language and the liturgical language of the Vedic religion, is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family. The oldest known text in Sanskrit, the Rigveda, a collection of over a thousand Hindu hymns, composed during the 2nd millenium BC.

Today Sanskrit is used mainly in Hindu religious rituals as a ceremonial language for hymns and mantras. Efforts are also being made to revive Sanskrit as an everyday spoken language in the village of Mattur near Shimoga in Karnataka. A modern form of Sanskrit is one of the 17 official home languages in India.

There are about 24,800 people in India who speak Sanskrit as a first language, in particularly in Allahabad, Jaunpur, Kaushambi, and Pratagarh districts of Uttar Pradesh state, and also in Delhi and other cities. Another 5 million people in India use Sanskrit as a second language, and 3,000 people in Nepal do so as well.

Since the late 19th century, Sanskrit has been written mostly with the Devangar alphabet. However it has also been written with all the other alphabets of India, except Gurmukhi and Tamil, and with other alphabets such as Thai and Tibetan. The Bhaiksuki, Grantha, Sharda and Siddham alphabets are used only for Sanskrit.

Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has also been written with the Latin alphabet. The most commonly used system is the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), which was been the standard for academic work since 1912.

Note: there are about a thousand conjunct consonants, most of which combine two or three consonants. There are also some with four-consonant conjuncts and at least one well-known conjunct with five consonants. This is a selection of commonly-used conjuncts.

Translated into Sanskrit by Arvind Iyengar

Sarv mnav svatantr samutpann vartant api ca, gauravadr adhikradr ca samn va vartant. t sarv ctan-tarka-aktibhy susampann santi. Api ca, sarvpi bandhutva-bhvanay paraspara vyavaharantu.

Hear a recording of this text by Muralikrishnan Ramasamy

Sarv mnav janman svatantr vaiyaktikagaurava adhikra ca tuly va, sarv vivka tmask ca vartat, sarv paraspara bhrtbhvna vyavaharyu.

Hear a recording of this text by Shriramana Sharma

Some details provided by Shriramana Sharma and Krittathat Kaeofung

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Information about Sanskrit | Phrases | Numbers | Tower of Babel | Writing systems for Sanskrit: Devanagari, Bhaiksuki, Brahmi, Galik, Grantha, Gupta, Kadamba, Kharosthi, Nandinagari, Sharda, Siddham, Thai, Tibetan

Information about the Sanskrit languagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrithttps://www.ethnologue.com/language/sanhttps://www.worldhistory.org/Sanskrit/

Online Sanskrit lessonshttps://learnsanskrit.org/https://learnsanskritlanguage.com/https://learnsanskritonline.com/https://sgc.best/

Sanskrit phraseshttp://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sanskrit/Everyday_Phrases

Sanskrit dictionarieshttp://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/indologie/tamil/cap_search.htmlhttps://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/tamil/

Devanagari fonts and keyboardshttp://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Devanagari.htmlhttp://www.devanagarifonts.nethttp://www.sanskritweb.net/cakram/

Sanskrit Library - contains digitized Sanskrit texts and various tools to analyse themhttp://sanskritlibrary.org/

ALPHABETUM - a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient scripts, including classical & medieval Latin, ancient Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Messapic, Picene, Iberian, Celtiberian, Gothic, Runic, Old & Middle English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Old Nordic, Ogham, Kharosthi, Glagolitic, Old Cyrillic, Phoenician, Avestan, Ugaritic, Linear B, Anatolian scripts, Coptic, Cypriot, Brahmi, Old Persian cuneiform: http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

Awadhi, Assamese, Bagri, Bengali, Bhili, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Braj, Chakma, Chhattisgarhi, Chittagonian, Desiya, Dhatki, Dhivehi, Dhundari, Fiji Hindi, Gawar Bati, Gujarati, Hajong, Halbi, Haryanvi, Hindi, Kannauji, Khandeshi, Konkani, Kotia, Kumaoni, Kutchi, Lambadi, Marathi, Marwari, Mewari, Modi, Nimadi, Odia, Parkari Koli, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Rajbanshi, Rangpuri, Rohingya, Saraiki, Sarnmi Hindustani, Sindhi, Sinhala, Sourashtra, Sugali, Sylheti, Tanchangya, Urdu

Aka-Jeru, Angika, Athpare, Avestan, Awadhi, Balti, Bantawa, Belhare, Bhili, Bhumij, Bilaspuri, Bodo, Bhojpuri, Braj, Car, Chamling, Chhantyal, Chhattisgarhi, Chambeali, Danwar, Dhatki, Dhimal, Dhundari, Dogri, Doteli, Gaddi, Garhwali, Gondi, Gurung, Halbi, Haryanvi, Hindi, Ho, Jarawa, Jaunsari, Kannauji, Kham, Kangri, Kashmiri, Khaling, Khandeshi, Kharia, Khortha, Korku, Konkani, Kullui, Kumaoni, Kurmali, Kurukh, Kusunda, Lambadi, Limbu, Lhomi, Lhowa, Magahi, Magar, Mahasu Pahari, Maithili, Maldivian, Malto, Mandeali, Marathi, Marwari, Mewari, Mundari, Nancowry. Newar, Nepali, Nimadi, Onge, Pahari, Pali, Pangwali, Rajasthani, Rajbanshi, Rangpuri, Sadri, Sanskrit, Santali, Saraiki, Sirmauri, Sherpa, Shina, Sindhi, Sunwar, Sylheti, Tamang, Thakali, Thangmi, Wambule, Wancho, Yakkha, Yolmo

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Sanskrit alphabet, pronunciation and language - Omniglot

Translations from dictionary English - Sanskrit, definitions, grammar

In Glosbe you will find translations from English into Sanskrit comming from various sources. The translations are sorted from the most common to the less popular. We make every effort to ensure that each expression has definitions or information about the inflection.

Glosbe dictionaries are unique. In Glosbe you can check not only English or Sanskrit translations. We also offer usage examples showing dozens of translated sentences. You can see not only the translation of the phrase you are searching for, but also how it is translated depending on the context.

The translated sentences you will find in Glosbe come from parallel corpora (large databases with translated texts). Translation memory is like having the support of thousands of translators available in a fraction of a second.

Often the text alone is not enough. We also need to hear what the phrase or sentence sounds like. In Glosbe you will find not only translations from the English-Sanskrit dictionary, but also audio recordings and high-quality computer readers.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words. In addition to text translations, in Glosbe you will find pictures that present searched terms.

Do you need to translate a longer text? No problem, in Glosbe you will find a English - Sanskrit translator that will easily translate the article or file you are interested in.

Read the original post:

The English - Sanskrit dictionary | Glosbe

In 1846, a ship crashed into the sandbanks of River Hughli just as it was approaching the Calcutta harbour. On board the ship was a 21-year-old New Yorker in search of his runaway brother. The young man escaped with his life, only to be left stranded in Calcutta. Fortunately for him, he had a felicity with languages and a love for tracing the origins of common English words and phrases.

In this alien land, Fitzedward Hall fell into the company of English Orientalists and members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In no time, he was studying Sanskrit, Persian, Hindustani and Bengali. Within months, he was editing texts in Sanskrit and translating others into Hindustani. And years later, with the Vedanta treatises tmabodha and Tattvabodha, he became the first American to edit a Sanskrit text.

Fortuity turned what was intended to be a short layover into a residence of 16 years in India. During this time, Hall became a key figure among the Orientalists, a group engaged in serious study of eastern languages and culture. Like William Jones, James Prinsep, Horace Hyman Wilson and others, his abiding interest in, and interpretation of, old Indian texts helped kindle a greater interest in the western world for the Orient.

Hall was born on March 21, 1825, in Troy, an important commercial centre in upstate New York. His father Daniel Hall was a wealthy lawyer, while his mother Anjinette Finch came from a family with old colonial connections. Hall was the eldest son among six children. He studied engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York before enrolling in Harvard University, which, as the story goes, he left to look for a runaway brother.

In a later article, Hall recollected the unpleasant sea voyage to India: the terribly named Captain Coffin exhibited blundering seamanship and the weevilly biscuits he had to subsist on made the experience all the worse.

We learn about Halls life in India from three long essays he wrote for popular magazines, including the Lippincotts Quarterly and The Century, in the 1870s. In these he recounted his association with members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who he called Pandits. Not only were these men his teachers but also his companions in travel, hunting and fishing. Hall remained in Calcutta for three years, studying Sanskrit and Persian, and involving himself with the Asiatic Society of Bengals activities. His first teacher in Sanskrit was the scholar-reformer Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, who he encouraged to read Shakespeare.

In 1849, prompted by medical advice after prolonged illness, he left for the north. In a later essay titled Early Traveling Experiences of India (1875), he wrote of his journey by palanquin, accompanied by servants. He described the lawlessness in places not under East India Company control, the presence of Robin Hood-like brigands, the hospitality of a British indigo planter, and the shooting of birds, nilgais and the occasional tiger.

About Avadh under nawab rule, he wrote:

The taxes, exorbitant as apportioned at the court, were farmed by merciless wretches who made them more exorbitant still, and who collected them, for the most part, at the point of the sword. Open robbery, deadly brawls and private assassination had become matters of perpetual occurrence.

After a few months in Ghazipur, Hall moved 75 miles west, to Benares, where he was made a tutor at the Government Sanskrit College. Collaborating with Orientalists and pandits, he edited and translated texts from Sanskrit and English to Hindustani, and on occasion from Hindustani to English. With Vitthala Shastri, who had earned fame as a child prodigy, he worked on two texts related to the Sankyapravachana. In 1856, he edited Rajniti, A Collection of Hindu Apologues in the Braj Bhsh language, a work by Lallu Lal, a munshi who taught at Calcuttas Fort William College.

This was followed by a collaboration with Bapu Deva Shastri, on the Suryasiddanta, a 5th century work on astronomy. Other works Hall was associated with included the Dasa Rupa, a work on dramaturgy, and Subandhus play Vasavadatta. He also translated into English, Nilkanta Nihemiah Gorehs work in Hindustani, A Mirror of Hindu Philosophical Systems.

My Pandits were often my only companions, Hall wrote in The Century magazine in 1873. By reason of their imperturbable good nature and humor, their society was always welcome. From their countrymen in general they differed, principally, I repeat, merely as the select differ from the vulgar.

To be sure, there was resistance among some pandits towards translating old Sanskrit texts into Hindustani, the more common language in the north. But the teachers at the Benares Sanskrit College, led by James Ballantyne, persisted. With Ballantyne, Hall worked on translating Tarkasangraha, an old work of analytical reasoning, from Sanskrit to Hindi. He edited Ballantynes Hindi Grammar, as well as a Hindi reader intended as a general study text for students at the college. He also penned the foreword of a book on Benares by the dissenting clergyman Matthew Sherring.

A letter sent by him to the Manchester Guardian in 1850 described the explosion in Benares after a fleet of boats carrying gunpowder inadvertently caught fire. The death toll, Hall said, was in the thousands and included some scions of the Mughal family whose houses were by the riverside. Hall himself had a narrow escape, having left the area a few hours ago.

In 1853, he was made professor in Anglo-Sanskrit at the Government Sanskrit College. But the very next year, he moved to Ajmer, and two years later, in December 1856, to the Saugor and Nerbudda territories in the Central Provinces as Inspector of Schools. While touring the areas under his jurisdiction and filing reports, he did not abandon his love for languages: on his travels, he would collect old manuscripts and decipher old land grants and inscriptions he sometimes came by. In between, in 1854, he married Amelia Warde Shuldman, daughter of the late Lt Colonel Arthur Shuldman, in Delhis St James Church.

During the revolt of 1857, when violence broke out, Hall and some companions found themselves besieged in Saugor Fort. The siege was lifted after Sir Hugh Rose arrived with his armies (following the battle with Lakshmibai of Jhansi). As a skilled rifleman, Hall made sorties against the rebels and witnessed horrors and atrocities. The revolt was brutally suppressed, and Hall described how the successor of the Gond dynasty was blown up by a cannon.

In 1862, Hall and his family left for London, where he taught Sanskrit and Indian jurisprudence at Kings College and became the librarian at the India Office. He succeeded Max Mueller as an examiner for languages, including Hindi, Persian and Sanskrit, for candidates in the Imperial Civil Service. In 1868, he was awarded a Diploma in Civil Law by Oxford University.

The next year, Hall found himself embroiled in a disagreement with Orientalist and scholar Theodor Goldstcker. Writer Simon Winchester notes in his book, The Professor and the Madman (1998), that differences between linguists and philologists could be petty, for they were mercurial and prone to holding grudges. Hall was accused of being a foreign spy and a drunk. Aggrieved, he gave up all his positions and retreated to a near-reclusive life with his family in the village of Marlesford, 100 miles northeast of London.

While the cause of the rivalry is murky, it is possible that it was related to their differences about the interpretation of Sanskrit texts. Both considered themselves heirs of Orientalist Horace Hyman Wilson. Goldstcker, professor of Sanskrit at University College, had worked on Hunters Sanskrit dictionary. Hall, for his part, was engaged in editing Wilsons masterful rendition of the multi-volumed Vaishnava text of medieval times, the Vishnupurana.

From the 1880s, Hall was involved in the Oxford English Dictionary project, which won him gratitude and recognition. For nearly 20 years, he compiled records of words and their origins, answered queries, offered advice and remained the dictionarys staunchest ally despite never meeting James Augustus Murray, the projects primary editor. As Murray observed in the preface: we have to record the inestimable collaboration of Dr. Fitzedward Hall, whose voluntary labours have completed the literary and documentary history of numberless words, senses and idioms, and whose contributions are to be found on every page.

In Suffolk, Hall spent time on the Vishnupurana, a medieval Vaishnava text, and continued his research on English philology. His Recent Exemplifications of False Philology (1872) was critical of American scholar Richard Grant Whites Words and their Uses. His Modern English on contemporary grammar and usage appeared in 1873, and in On English Adjectives in -able, he expounded on the origins of popular suffixed words.

He earned a reputation for being abrasive, arguing trenchantly with critics across the Atlantic over the usage of words and their origin. In the late 1880s, he donated his rich collection of manuscripts to Harvard University, and in 1895, the university awarded him a doctorate. He died on February 1 in 1901.

Many old associates remembered him fondly. Edward Byles Cowell, the first professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge University, wrote: Hall was a little hasty in temper, but he was thoroughly kind at heart. I always admired his wide range of learning, though one could not help wishing that his language had been sometimes gentler in controversy.

This article is part of a series on notable Americans who visited India before mid-20th century. Read the rest of the series here.

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How a young New Yorker stranded in Calcutta became the first American editor of a Sanskrit text - Scroll.in

Sanskrit bashing is one of the visible manifestations of both the bandwagon fallacy and ultracrepidarianism. You have to forgive these villifiers, because it is evident that they do not know Sanskrit

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The hefty diatribes against the exquisite Sanskrit language, lodged mainly by privileged, elite members of the Western academy, of both Western and Indian origin, and by mainstream Western media and certain sections of the Indian media epitomise the bandwagon fallacy. India seems to be awash in self-loathing in a substantive wave of the aforementioned fallacy, coupled with a good measure of overt postcolonial cringing. Sanskrit bashing is one of the visible manifestations of both the bandwagon fallacy and ultracrepidarianism. You have to forgive these villifiers, because it is evident that they do not know Sanskrit. If they did, they would feel for the language in the way William Jones did: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either....

Sanskrit is the mother of languages currently spoken by about 900 million people in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. That is where it differs from Latin and Greek. If you did not have Sanskrit, you would not have these vibrant Indian languages. Current Bengali still draws on Sanskrit in order to enrich itself; current Telugu, even if technically a Dravidian language, is delightfully rich in Sanskrit words. India Ink, the retired New York Times blog (you have to be grateful for small mercies), valorised articles by postcolonial cringers who systematically ran down Sanskrit and India.

The writings of the Sanskrit disparagers mostly emanate from ultracrepidarianism. In an embarrassing piece on Sanskrit in The New York Times, the correspondent cited linguists she had spoken to, for making a raft of erroneous statements I am wondering who they were! No linguists worth their salt would make the ad hominem statements she attributed to them. Here is her description of a visit to a Sanskrit institution in New Delhi, Unattached electrical wires dangle down its facade, and one of its senior scholars, Ramakant Pandey, greeted a recent visitor in a fluorescent-lighted office under a slowly revolving ceiling fan, his mouth stained bright red with paan, as betel is known in Hindi.

Too bad for her there is only a fluorescent light, and a slow-moving ceiling fan: we are a developing nation, and if Mr Pandey is content not guzzling huge amounts of electricity, and destroying the planet with the unnecessary use of an air conditioner, or inhabiting a modest work environment, that is just fine. As for pan, to appreciate its sense of charvana (gustibus, or relish), you need to be possessed of a sensibility as fine as EM Forster's. The question you have to ask here is: How is the value and infinite richness of Sanskrit, the language, connected with a slow-moving ceiling fan or paan? That is an example of the non sequitur fallacy.

I recall the late Barbara Stoller Miller calling often on my parents in Bhubaneswar, Professor Bidhu Bhusan Das and Professor Prabhat Nalini Das, when she was working on her translation into English of the Gitagovinda. She was respectful in her attitude towards her subject that was an artefact of the times, before Sanskrit-bashing became chic. Millers junior colleague, Sheldon Pollock's claim that Sanskrit is dead is refuted by Dr Jrgen Hanneder, an authority on Sanskrit, from the University of Marburg: On a more public level, the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages, and the fact that it is spoken, written and read, will probably convince most people that it cannot be a dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollocks notion of the death of Sanskrit remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says, most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead.

Sanskrit is the liturgical language in thousands of temples across India. The Vedas and Upanishads are read and recited by priests and their students in hundreds of temples across India. That is testimony enough to its being alive, in a crucial way (sorry, Sheldon). Recitation and daily recitation at that imbues a language with a certain amount of prana. Prana is the antithesis of death. I recall an occasion when two colleagues from Yale University were dinner guests at my country home in Nova Scotia, Canada. After dinner, I recited and explained a couple of stanzas from the Upanishads to them. They were so enchanted with the sound and the meaning of those stanzas that they kept asking for more.

Nowadays, you encounter the hubris-rich rescuers of Sanskrit within the elite echelons of Western and Indian academia. From whom do they seek to rescue it? Ironically, they seek to rescue it from the impoverished priests in the thousands of temples in small towns and villages across India. The prevalent discourse on Sanskrit, in both the broadcast and print media, is mostly reductio ad Hitlerum.

Thankfully, an entire new perspective on Sanskrit is opening up, owing to Vikram Chandras book: Geek Sublime. Reviewing it in The New York Times, James Gleick writes, What no one told me was that generative grammar had been invented earlier in India 2,500 years earlier, in fact. ... Sometime around 500 B.C., the ancient scholar Panini analysed the Sanskrit language at a level of complexity that has never been matched since, for any language. His grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, comprises some 4,000 rules meant to generate all the possible sentences of Sanskrit from roots of sound and meaning phonemes and morpheme (italics mine). The rules include definitions; headings; operational rules, including replacement, affixation, augmentation and compounding; and metarules, which call other rules recursively. ... Paninis grammar of Sanskrit bears more than a family resemblance to a modern programming language. As Chandra says, the grammar is itself an algorithm, a machine that consumes phonemes and morphemes and produces words and sentences. This is not a coincidence. American syntactic theory, Chomsky channelling Panini, formed the soil in which the computer languages grew.

Enough said.

The writer is a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University since 1990, where she was appointed by its president, Dr Richard Cyert. She advises world leaders on public policy, communication and international affairs.

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Sanskrit, Ultracrepidarianism and the Bandwagon Fallacy - Firstpost

The present governments freely displayed unease with constitutional institutions is directly related to its inadequate understanding of the linguistic civilisation that India has been

The present governments freely displayed unease with constitutional institutions is directly related to its inadequate understanding of the linguistic civilisation that India has been

While deciding on the language question in India, the Constituent Assembly had clearly recognised that the unity of India could get adversely affected if the language policy got slanted towards the imposition of any single language over others. The creation of the Eighth Schedule, initially with 14 languages included in it, is testimony to the deep understanding that the Constituent Assembly had of the mutuality of language diversity and the Indian Republic. The number of languages included in the Eighth Schedule went up to 22, but its conceptual framework based on Indias federal structure had never been deliberately violated until recently.

The present regime, driven by the ideology of Hindi-Hindu-Rashtra, has been sending disturbing signals of its desire to impose a unilateral linguistic character on other linguistic populations in India. This desire pertains not just to the imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi speakers, but also to an unreasonable promotion of Sanskrit, which is pivotal to its brand of nationalism. The linguistic, cultural and education policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government have almost brought the architecture of the Constitution under question.

There is a widespread misconception about the place of Hindi in India's linguistic spectrum. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages. It is also the language with the highest number of speakers as per data from successive censuses. However, it is also true that Hindi is not the natural language of a majority of States and Union Territories in India, including Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Pondicherry in the south; Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat in the west; Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir in the northwest; Orissa and West Bengal in the east; Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya and Assam in the northeast. Hindi is believed to be the only or main language in States such as Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh but a closer look at their linguistic composition shows that they all have their own native regional languages and Hindi functions there as a shared pan-State language. Often, as Hindi becomes the second language for communication with people residing in these States or travelling through them, the impression about it being the primary language of these States gets reinforced. Yet, it is an impression not grounded in factual accuracy.

The 2011 Census which is still the latest had stated a total of 19,569 raw returns (read, non-doctored claims) of mother tongues. Of these, close to 17,000 were rejected outright, and another 1,474 were dumped because not enough scholarly corroboration for them existed. Only 1,369, almost 7% of the total claims, were admitted as classified mother tongues. Rather than placing them as languages, they were grouped under 121 headings. These 121 were declared as the languages of India. The data for Hindi were conspicuously bolstered shown at 52-plus crore by adding to its core figure of speakers the speakers of nearly 50 other languages. These included Bhojpuri, claimed by over five crore, many languages in Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Bihar, claimed by close to a total six crore persons. At the same time, 17 of the 22 scheduled languages were reported by the census as showing a downward trend in their rate of growth in comparison to the previous decade. The statistical management acquires a deep meaning when seen together with public statements by the BJPs top brass about the promotion of Hindi, the stringency with which Hindi is being pushed into the administrative functioning of Central/national organisations even in non-Hindi areas and the change of signage on highways, trains and public places.

The case of Sanskrit is somewhat different. While it does not have a large number of speakers to its credit at present, and indeed it did not have the necessary numbers in support for most of its long history, it happens to be the linguistic mother for Hindi. Besides, the sacred books of Hindus are in Sanskrit. Therefore, though it does not have the numbers, it enjoys an undisputed psychological preeminence for people who consider themselves as Hindus. These include people who speak Hindi as well as speakers of many other Indian languages. Thus the number of those who consider Sanskrit a sacred language is much higher than the number of Hindi speakers.

When preparations for the 2021 Census had started, one noticed a rather unusual open appeal spread through social media. It said that if your language has any words derived from Sanskrit in it, please mention Sanskrit as your second mother tongue. An emotional and communal argument was added to the appeal. It was, if people (Hindus, by implication) did not do so, government funding for foreign languages (by implication Persian and Urdu, a completely false premise) would be much higher than funding for Sanskrit. There is no need to say that there is no language, including among the Dravidian languages, that does not have word borrowings from Sanskrit. It is a practice of the Census to include even the second language claimed by people in the tally of the total number of speakers. The last Census showed some 24,000 Indians out of a total 121 crore claiming Sanskrit as their mother tongue.

Several untenable claims have been made in recent years by votaries of a Hindu Rashtra towards the need for revival of the Sanskrit language. When one claims that Sanskrit has all the knowledge in the world, as a thinking person with at least some knowledge of the worlds history of ideas and respect for knowledge wherever it has sprung up in the world, I feel uneasy accepting the claim. Any given language cannot be made relevant. Either it is, or it is not relevant. A language remains relevant if people conduct their labour, their commerce and their intellectual and social exchanges using it. A language in which people acquire knowledge and develop it further remains relevant. Yet, one needs no Census to know that the proportion of the population which can use Sanskrit competently is negligible in India.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sanghs idea of building a fanaticised Hindu Rashtra has no space for a multilingual nation. In its understanding of nationalism, a single, large majority is the primary constituent of the nation and all others, linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious minorities, are non-national or anti-national, convenient targets for mobilising the majority. The idea of a nation made of Hindus, with their sacred transactions in Sanskrit and practical transactions in Hindi, is by implication a stark dismissal of all other indigenous languages. This idea of nationalism has in the past castigated the English media and the forms of knowledge that came to India as a kind of historical calamity imposed on India, polluting the great traditions of knowledge produced in Sanskrit.

All of these assumptions fly in the face of the deep thought and wise reflections that have gone into the making of Indias Constitution. The present governments freely displayed unease with constitutional institutions has a direct relation to its inadequate understanding of the linguistic civilisation that India has been. Realism and ideology-driven politics probably make a pair of antonymous terms. When a myopic ideology gets the better of realism in policy matters, immense harm can result to culture and society and a nation starts going back to the past rather than progressing to the future.

G.N. Devy is Chair, Peoples Linguistic Survey of India

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Misreading the language spectrum - The Hindu