In the early 2000s, when the Maoist insurgency was raging fullswing and the only channel of public communication available to the rebel leadership was the periodic faxes to news outlets, I had asked a journalist friend to pass me copies of the press releases as and when they came in. It was with bafflement that I started reading one such communiqué signed by Baburam Bhattarai, for, he had begun his long tirade with a Sanskrit shloka, which I could make no sense of.

It was not of the class of vasudaiva kutumbakam (the world is one single family), or tamasoma jyotirgamaya (lead us from darkness to light), or, even for those of us who grew up on a staple of Hindi films, the national motto of India, satyamev jayate (truth alone triumphs)—common enough phrases that most people reasonably educated in the Nepali language will have absorbed over the years. Granted that, as someone who escaped the mandatory three years of middle-school Sanskrit, my understanding of the language starts at less than beginner level. But when I read the press release, I was with Basanta Thapa and Mohan Mainali, two of the finest wordsmiths in Nepali

journalism. And I was surprised that they, too, expressed equal bafflement at what Bhattarai was trying to get at.

Ultimately, I did find someone who could provide me with a translation, and it was nothing earth-shattering. But I expect

readers will empathise with my instinctive

reaction at the time: What a bloody hypocrite! After years of railing against Sanskrit education and ensuring that Sanskrit

classes could no longer be held in areas of Maoist influence, Baburam Bhattarai had chosen to address the people of Nepal with something obscure in that same language.

Still the pundit

I was recently reminded of my befuddlement when I came across an article on the online portal, Setopati. My attention was caught by the headline which translates as ‘Baburam Sir, Please Do Not Tweet in Sanskrit!’. The writer, Shova Sharma, was taking exception to the fact that on the occasion of Janai Purnima, Bhattarai had tweeted the mantra chanted by the pundit as he goes about his business of protecting his patrons from harm: Yena baddho Bali raja daanavendro mahaabala, Tena twaamabhibadhnaami rakshe na achala na achala (I secure on you the raksha which was tied on Bali, the King of Demons. Therefore, Oh, Raksha! Never fail to protect this follower, do not ever fail). (All my life, I had thought this thing began ‘Daana baddhe Bali raja’. Thanks to Baburam Bhattarai and the research I had to do for this article, I not only know how wrong I had been all along but learnt

more Sanskrit than everything put together previously.)

Sharma recalls an episode that was played out in countless other schools around the country. It was the year 2000 and she was studying in grade seven in Baglung. A group of boys wearing green trousers and red

hats burst into the classroom and

declared that there would be no teaching of Sanskrit in the school thenceforth. The boys also collected their Sanskrit books

and began tearing them up. She writes:

‘I had never before felt such a love of

books as then.’

She thus pleads with Bhattarai: ‘Please never use Sanskrit shlokas to explain your politics; we find it difficult to understand it.’ This is from someone with a strong exposure to the Sanskrit culture. She says that her grandfather sometimes recites Sanskrit shlokas and that her uncle, who studied at Kathmandu’s premier institution of higher learning in Sanskrit, Valmiki Campus, sometimes switches to Sanskrit even in everyday conversation.

I learnt from the same article that Bhattarai had resorted to another Sanskrit shloka on Twitter after the new constitution had been promulgated last year: Sarvanashe samutpanne hi ardham tyajati pandita (In the face of complete ruin, the wise man

settles for half). A less-than-sympathetic

translation of that in political terms is: Better to have any constitution than no

constitution at all.

A little consideration, please

That Baburam Bhattarai loves the Sanskrit language is clear. As an individual, he has every right to be proud of his heritage and promote it as well. No quibble there. But he seems to forget that he embodies much more than a private citizen does, and playing a pundit of Sanskrit can end up sending a wrong message. And, I do not mean it only in a political sense given that through his new party as well as the one he used to be part of, he has been trying to appeal to a cross-section of Nepali society, and that was why the Maoists were against Sanskrit in the first place. For many of them this onslaught of shlokas is meaningless at best, and offensive at worst.

A couple of weeks ago, these pages reprinted the New York Times article, ‘Conquering the Freshman Fear of Failure’ by David L Kirp, a professor at University of California, Berkeley. Kirp writes how fresh entrants into college worry about whether they have the intelligence or social skills to succeed and that most susceptible to such doubts are from poor backgrounds, minority communities, and families which have never had anyone go to college.

He then describes a large experiment conducted in an unnamed institution of higher learning in the United States in which a group of first-year students were provided with accounts of their seniors’ experiences and how they navigated around their own misgivings. The second group was simply directed to research that showed that intelligence is not necessarily innate and that it can be moulded further with hard work. The effect of the experiment was a 15 percent total increase in the number of disadvantaged students completing a full year’s coursework. Experiments were conducted with mainly poor and minority

high school students and also with black students at a top university, and the results were the same.

One can be quite certain that students from such backgrounds also deal with their own demons in Nepal. And, when someone like Bhattarai normalises the spouting of shlokas to make it seem like a marker of erudition, it can certainly be a dampener to aspiring young students from all kinds of social backgrounds who are trying to break into the education market, and for whom Sanskrit is as alien as double Dutch. Having championed the marginalised and the downtrodden throughout the conflict years, and having played a major role, directly or otherwise, in the empowerment of thousands of young people, he carries the huge responsibility of fulfilling their aspirations as

well. ‘Board-first’ Bhattarai’s brilliance

has already gone down in history; there

is no need to prove it again and again,

and certainly not in a language few understand nowadays.