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by selimthegrim 18 days ago
>According to Tripathi, the problem of Sanskrit being nar­rowed to religion is a colonial inheritance. British Orientalists, he argues, created an image of Sanskrit as the language of ritual and one religious community, ignoring its vast Buddhist, Jain, Carvaka, scientific, theatrical, poetic and philosophical corpus.

I don't understand how you can take what happened to AH Dani at BHU and say this with a straight face.

2 comments

Let's go a bit back and try to understand what happened with Buddhists of India. A whole religion exterminated from such a vast land.
Buddhism wasn’t exterminated due to violence like Zoroastrianism from Iran.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/18rdfjx/hist...

Really just a tribute to the syncretic capacity of Hinduism.
Not a lot got absorbed into Hinduism though. Look at the link for factors that contributed.

Jainism and Sikhism have survived and didn’t get absorbed into Hinduism.

You do know iamshs is Sikh, correct?
You might find my following earlier interaction with "selimthegrim" on this topic interesting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41526431
You brought citations and so did I. There is no reason for animus. And I was talking about what happened to Ahmad Hasan Dani this time.
> And I was talking about what happened to Ahmad Hasan Dani this time.

And I pointed out that you were again being dishonest with your selective quoting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930068

PS: As for our previous interactions which i pointed to, you did not provide citations but merely selective quoting which i had forcefully called out. People can read the chain of comments and judge for themselves.

I appreciate your comment and vouched for it, FWIW. And yes, I do remember hearing about Firoz Khan now that you mention it.
You need to stop playing the "woe betide me" muslim victimhood political card here on every possible occasion. It is tiresome, easily disproved, often irrelevant and adds no value whatsoever.

Anybody who knew of A.H.Dani from the 1940s would have known of Firoze Khan from 2019 and so there could be no reason to bring up the former unless of course one wanted to intentionally manufacture a controversy.

This thread should have been focused purely on the Sanskrit language in all its forms but instead you have tried to inject sectarian and political agenda into it.

From down south of India - the Proto Tamil language is the basis for modern Tamil, Malayalam and others. We still have Sanskrit being used by Temple priests. One of changes in the last decade is - Tamilnadu finally has temples with priests using Tamil for religious rituals. Sanskrit was gate kept by the priestly class. It’s not a colonial reframing.
Look forward to Tamil being used in mosques and the Adan being in Tamil instead of Arabic.
In Kerala most of mosque prayers are in Malayalam. I don’t know whether they do same in tamilnadu
That’s in utterly bad taste. Not sure what offended you. But there is no need to call in Muslims and mosques in this conversation.
Was your argument not about replacing non-local languages like Sanskrit and Arabic (used exclusively for liturgical purposes in Tamil Nadu) with local languages like Tamil? If not, it might be useful if you spelled your argument out.