Professor Radhamadhab Dash is an outstanding scholar in Sanskrit. A specialist in Grammar, his scholarship extends to the wider fields of Vedic, Yogic and classical literatures, linguistics and techniques of language teaching as well as to the generalised areas of sociology, ethics, Indology and Indian culture. The present volume which bears the usual stamp of his wide interests is a collection of twenty-one well-chosen research papers presented by him on different occasions at various learned bodies and subsequently published in journals of repute. Theme-wise, they all pertain to important aspects of language, literature and culture fields that are correlated and overlapping. The serial arrangement of the papers under six specified sections spells out the thematic link that holds them together.
The opening section dealing with the Vedic and Sastric (Srauta and Smarta) tradition outlines worldly life (Lokayatra) lived under ideal conditions. While the theme for the foundation of this life is taken from Atharva Veda, (and rightly so, for Atharvanic religion relates to the life-style of the average people), the other themes of human values, competency acquisition along with capability development and character building discussed in the three other papers of this section are collected from Upanisadic narratives, Bhagavadgita and Patanjala Yogadarśana respectively. As seen by the Atharvanic seer, the nucleus of domestic life is Kama or desire including sexual love. Desire, though not substantial like dharma or ultimate like moksa, is vital among the purusartha-s, at least for wordly life. In fact, it is the sex-based man-woman nexus that accounts for the harmony and happiness of the family. The paper is of great relevance to modern society; for otherwise, the family tree with its root forgotten in quest of the fruit and flower is likely to wither and die.
With a view to highlighting the efficacy of worldly life, the author in the aforesaid Section, interprets the canonical texts of the Upanisad and the Gita from the pragmatic point of view. Rather than dwelling on the core theme of self-realisation, he turns to the tales in the Upanisad and inculcates the human values exemplified through them. He utilises the Gita as a holy text on man-making, emphasizing value-based guidance, selfless duty, mental poise and balanced distribution of wealth-virtues that contribute to human resource management. In the same vein he analyses Patanjali's Yoga-darsana with its two fundamental steps, yama (self-restraint) and niyama (fixed rules) constituting the background of modern education.
The only paper relating to classical Sanskrit poetry (included in Sec. II) is a stylistic analysis of Kalidasa's Rtusamhara. Stylistic principles applied to a poetic composition reveal the innovative elements employed in it vis-a-vis the literary traditioon of the country, the age and the author's genius concerned. It takes into consideration the phonic, lexical, syntactic and semantic deviations, if any and studies the stylistic devices like foregrounding, recurrence, convergence, etc. Dr Dash has made an intelligent study of the poetic style of Rtusamhara, an early composition of Kalidasa, illustrating how the attempted recurrence has often resulted in monotonous repetitions telling upon the artistic relish. His finding that it is a maiden venture of a great poet is stylistically substantiated.
The papers under sections III-V are on Sanskrit grammar studied from different angles. Section III contains paper on Systematics of Sanskrit Grammar. Systematics implies the study of the various components as they combine to form the system. Under this Section the author analyses the language elements and discusses the descriptive techniques adopted by the pre-Paninian, Paninian and the non-Paninian grammarians.
The interdisciplinary approach in the modern literary research is proved to be very useful in discovering and reassessing the essence of the ancient literary creations as in Sanskrit which has successful preserved the ancient heritage of our country. Therefore, my sustaining effort in research writing has always been to find out relevance of Sanskrit in the light of the related modern subjects such as History, Culture; Linguistics in its several branches such as Structural, Comparative, Historical Linguistics as well as Psycholinguistics. Socio-linguistics, Stylistics; Yogic Science and so on. Though all these re-search papers, once presented in seminars and conferences at different times during last twenty-three years, have been published in different journals of repute and some in special research volumes, those periodical and occasional publications hardly reach the scholars for their appreciation due to the obvious limitation of their circulation. Therefore, I thought it befitting to bring out a volume containing twenty-one chosen papers from among them with the title Aspects of Sanskrit Language, Literature and Culture as suited to the contentional orientation of all of them. The papers are classified un-der the following thematic sections though at times themes overlap among themselves. They are (I) Śrauta and Smärta Tradition, (II) Essay on Classical Poetry, (III) Systematics of Sanskrit Grammar, (IV) Language Components and their Socio-cultural Settings, (V) Systems of Sanskrit Grammar: Comparative Approach, and (VI) Essence of Sanskrit Expressions and Teaching Techniques of Sanskrit.
In the first section, some thoughts relating to role of desire in human life, teaching and practising moral value in individual as well as social life and the most talked subject in modern times like 'Hu- man Resource Development in Srimadbhagavadgitä are put to assessment, and all these topics pertain to Vedic, Yogic and Epic literatures respectively. The second section comprising the only paper on stylistic study of Kalidasa's maiden creation, the Riusamhära statistically evaluate the success of Kalidasa as a poet. The third section contains five papers depicting some aspects of the descriptive techniques mainly of trimuni-vyakaraņa and another non-Paninian system famous as Jumara-vyakarana. The fourth section is the biggest one and contains seven papers on language components and their socio-cultural settings. The message of all the papers in this section is that the Sanskrit was a spoken medium of the people of this country sometimes because all these idioms collected from the source of trimuni-grammar present testimony of lively Sanskrit usages which are meaningful and structurally viable only in spoken form of the language. Such expressions also speak out their regular status of being norms of usage in the society in certain thematic areas like education, family relation as parents and children, artistic sensibility of the people, agriculture and so on. The fifth section comprising two papers attempts to compare Paninian and non-Paninian Systems of Sanskrit grammar. In one of them, problems of preparing a concordance of Paninian and twelve other non-Paninian systems and possible solutions thereof have been suggested. And the other one attempts a case study of comparison of semantic vocabulary between Paninian and Jumara-system of grammar as a beginning step of the preparation of the said concordance. The sixth and the last section deals with some useful Sanskrit expressions collected from the source of Kasika.
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