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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome back to the Indian Religions podcast here on the new books network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Boulthron.
More importantly, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Antonia Ruble. She is a skilled Sanskritist and also a highly skilled teacher. She is affiliated with the University of Oxford and LMU Munich.
And she also does a great deal of art, work at Yogic Studies. She is the author of the Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit. And any minute now, her subsequent publication, her reader in Sanskrit, will be released. All of those links will be in the podcast.
Antonia, welcome back to the podcast. Hello, Raj. Thank you for having me back. Yeah, we, this is how we engage.
I think all of our conversations have been recorded for posterity at this point. I think so, too, yes. So I met Antonia a couple of years ago in that I came across her textbook. And it was abundantly clear to me.
People is kind of what I do is abundantly clear to me that whoever wrote this book knows how to teach. So I end up contacting her. We talk about her original book. And it kind of felt like we were long lost, carmixed, something or other.
And now fast forward a couple of years. I have an online school and there is this contingent of my students, we're also Antonio students. And to the point where I now have to be mindful of one scheduled tutorial because I don't want to miss out on Antonio's glasses. So, clearly mysterious other ways of online education, that's for sure.
Tell us about, before we talk before we wax politically about the future of online education. Let's dive into this reader of yours. Tell us about this project. How did it come about?
What niches it filling? Maybe even talk about the structure of it. Yeah, sure. So like my introductory textbooks, the reader is basically a product of what I need or what I ideally need, ideally want my own Sanskrit teaching.
So that's how the textbook came about. I just found out that the books that I had available weren't ideal for the cohort of students that I was teaching back at Cornell. And similarly now I felt that whenever I had intermediate students, the kinds of resources that you would need to start reading Sanskrit with a reasonable amount of fluency just really weren't out there. Because, you know, when you've covered sort of all the regular Sanskrit grammar, once you've got a little bit of a basic vocab, so once you've done an introductory Sanskrit course, you're still at a point where if you want to read actual Sanskrit texts, which are all height literary and polished and so on, you need to look up huge numbers of things.
So there's forms that you would recognize, there's many words that you won't know. And even if you do look up in the dictionary, any word in Sanskrit can mean loads of things. And so if you have to look up that much, it just is not a lot of fun. You know, you're not reading, you're just sort of slogging your way through text.
And so what I did was basically I selected a number of texts from a variety of Sanskrit genres, and then basically created two kinds of notes, grammar notes and vocabulary code notes. And the book is laid out in such a way that you've got the text at the top, and then at the bottom you've got all the relevant vocabulary notes and all the relevant grammar notes, so you will still be looking up a lot, but looking up simply means looking to the bottom of the page and looking back up. And so I've been using, not the reader, which is now a bit, but I've been using texts in this format with students in a variety of settings in a variety of countries, and I have the impression that this is the way to go, that they find this useful, and that it's a much more enjoyable way of improving your Sanskrit fluency than just, you know, sort of fighting your way through a text without such help. Well, it's kind of perfect to do with that way isn't it, where you're responding to a need that you know exists, you know, like writing the book you wish you had, whether it's its reader or the original textbook.
And really, just through the great find that the feedback I get from students at the school who happen to be students at the University of your studies is that they're such, which is obviously laborious. Yes. It's obviously immense and intense, but they all seem to really enjoy and resonate with the methods. I'm not surprised, but it's nice to have some actual data to corroborate your intuition every once in a while.
Indeed, indeed. And especially because so much teaching is online these days, you know, not just my studies, but also my unique teaching, and so it's so nice when you get feedback of this kind, which normally you would get if you have students sitting in front of you who are not looking completely be fuddled or completely unhappy. And if I zoom by those little thumbnails, you just can't tell if everybody in the room is happy or not. Yeah, it is.
Yes, it has its own challenges teaching online. There are pros and cons for sure. So tell us a bit about which texts you draw from for the reader. Basically, two things were important for me.
I wanted the texts to be in Sanskrit that is reasonably straightforward, and I wanted the texts to be just interesting in their own right. And so sometimes these are excerpts from larger texts. Sometimes they are self-contained stories, for example, from the from the Vedisha. But whatever I did, I wanted these to be things that if you look at them, if you read them and you go from the beginning to the end, you feel that they're some closure.
And so I have stories from the into Vedisha, which is basically a connection of fables. And when we say fables, we sort of think, oh, this is for children, this is sort of simple, this is overly simplified or something like that. And the Vedisha claims to be aimed at children, but some of those stories are really quite, quite, quite psychologically intricate. So they may be accessible for children, but they're definitely also very interesting for adults.
And one story I actually put in there because that exact thing happened to me when I was in Delhi at one point. So some of these stories also have personal links for me. So there's the Vipra Madisha, then the Vipra Madhajarita, which is also a sort of narrative tale, which has an overarching framework. And then within that framework, you have lots of shorter stories, and I picked a couple of those.
Again, because they're reasonably easy to read, and also they're just fun in themselves. Then the next chapter is, except from the Ramayana, and I basically tried to, it's an absolute embarrassing to Vrich's, the Avi Ramayana. It's just such a wonderful story. There's just so much that you could have gone for.
And I really, really had to cut down which stories I then did include in the end. And I just wanted to make sure that I had a little bit of everything. So there's some narrative adventure passages, there's philosophical passages, there's some of the really beautiful descriptions of nature that we get. So descriptions of the rainy season.
And I tried to pick passages where basically you don't have the, in Western terminology, the dead white male being the protagonist, but the passages where you can see just how intelligent and wonderful and flesh-down characters that women are. Or just basically, also the monkeys, of course, are great actors and those texts. And I sort of tried to listen to voices that maybe you wouldn't get in your standard, you know, one hour retelling of this story. Then I've got two chapters on, again, texts that you could call narrative, and these are basically both retellings of the mystical Bratka-tha.
Bratka-tha simply means the long story. So it doesn't really sell itself very well. But it's a story that we don't actually have, and probably it never existed, probably it was always meant to be something something mythical. But we've got various retellings of this story in a variety of languages, and there's two versions that we have at least partly in Sanskrit, the Kataasar-e-Zadara, or Ocean of Rivers of Stories, and the Bratka-tha Shlokasangraha, or literally the verse summary of the Bratka-tha, another very, does what it says on the tin, title for this work.
And both of these have an overarching storyline within which we have lots of little stories, some thoroughly philosophical, for example, a discussion about basically what's better Buddhism or Hinduism, to very, very simple stories of girls being turned into my sense. And the other way around. And so just from very meaningful to just beautifully entertaining, so that's two chapters. And then the last chapter is Subashigas, which is basically short poems or short excerpts from Lumba texts that are basically proverbs, wise sayings, just little knuckles that you can access fairly easily because they're just two lines long or sometimes they're four lines long.
So whenever you would like to read a little bit of Sanskrit but you don't have a lot of time, you just read a Subashigas. Well, that's what they were made for, not the wisdom, the grammar. Subashigas were designed for bite-sized grammatical exercises for sure. Grammatical bots also making them interesting, making them interesting by having interesting content ones.
Yes, one would hope so. There's some lovely, lovely Subashigas. So there is an array of interesting and accessible vignettes, perhaps it's my bias, but I quite love that you rely on narrative. That seems evident throughout that these are narrative vignettes.
So if one were to perhaps be studying Sanskrit, and one were to enter an intermediate level, would you say that's the point at which one would make use of this reader? Yes, so basically, you know, Sanskrit is taught differently in different environments, in different countries, different academic systems. And so it completely depends on the teacher, if you're studying with a teacher, or the student, you know, because there's lots of people who teach themselves these days. You can use it depending on what introductory textbook you use.
If that doesn't have a lot of original Sanskrit, you can absolutely use the reader in your first year, in your introductory Sanskrit classes, and just use that to supplement whatever other exercises you've got. Or alternatively, you can turn to the reader after you're done with your introductory studies. So for example, if you were to use my book, I tried to make sure to introduce as a lot, sorry, as much original Sanskrit in it as possible, as early on as possible. So there's plenty of readings in that book.
And so if you're done with my book, probably you're going to go on to the reader once you're done with the book. But there's other books that are much more focused on just the grammar, just the essentials to get you through those as quickly as possible. And if you're working with a book like that, then maybe you'd like to just take a few stories from the reader to, you know, just mix things up a little. Yes, in addition to the stories you offer translations and the full vocabulary in the book.
Yeah, absolutely. So, well, I've got the main part is the readings. Then I've got an introduction, which is basically a mini summary of language points, of syntax points, of grammar points, that I felt I was missing when I was starting, when I was just setting out reading Sanskrit literature. So these are things that you find fairly commonly in Sanskrit, but they would not necessarily have been covered in an introductory course.
So that's just to get you going. I say a little bit about how to build up your vocabulary, so about word formation, prefixes, suffixes, compounding, so that's the introduction. And then the appendices are a complete set of these texts in transliteration, so that the book itself is in Nagari. And it's a lovely font that I found.
It's called Teerode of Nagari. It's the font that used to be used for the Worthy Library. And now Google has supported it and sent out the font is either has just come out for sort of open, open, open, use license, or is about to come out. So I'm using this really nice font in the book, but I know that for some people reading Nagari fluently is still not something they're comfortable with.
And so I've got the transliterated texts in the back complete, and I've got translations in the back also complete just so that people can check their progress. And also what I'm actually working on right now is I'm making complete vocab lists for each story, because what I've got at the bottom of the page is basically the vocab where I'm fairly sure you're not going to know it because it's a little rarer. But I don't know what preparation people come to the book with. And so for each story, I'm just making a list of all the vocab, starting from Jut and Parathi and all the basics to all the words that I've really, really, quite rare.
And that's going to be made available as a PDF on the publishers website. And so basically you can just print that out, you can have it next to you together with the book. And then you've got theoretically all the grammar that you need and all the vocab that you need on just right on your table in front of you. And you can read without having to, you know, leave back and forth in various other research grammars or reference works or websites and so on.
What a concept user-friendly Sanskrit study. This is innovation that is finest. And I think now is the time for it, because for the longest time, at least sort of in English-making circles, the people who've learned Sanskrit would be the ones who enrolled at universities. And the universities that offered Sanskrit were usually sort of the more academically minded elite ones.
And I remember I was talking to a student at Oxford who, you know, where basically they do Sanskrit in two terms, so like in about six months. And she was then saying, well, you know, this is Oxford. So obviously, what they asked me to learn, I learned. Would they want me to study?
I studied and I memorized. And I just thought that not all people can do that. And I also feel like no one should have to do it. Indeed, indeed.
There's obviously there are a number of mindsets and biases regarding Sanskrit and the learning of Sanskrit. But this is really, you know, I've commented on this before. I think that's why I sort of, you know, I sensed it a mile away. This really is all jokes aside, a major innovation in the logical settings.
Like that's abundantly clear from the outside. For me, I may be also in a similar nation, similarly a bit ahead of a curve that the academy will be following before too long. But this strikes me, the work that you're doing is not just a reader, and it's not just an intro Sanskrit textbook or a reader. It's reshaping pedagogy of Sanskrit study in particular in the online milieu.
I mean, that's how it looks to me. Does this make sense to you? That's at least what my aim, my goal is. Because as I said, you know, we've long gone beyond the traditional models of Sanskrit just being taught at universities.
There's so many people who are interested in it who are not full-time students, who are not 19, 20 or 21 or something like that. And so to be able to teach Sanskrit to students like that, and especially in these sort of online milieu is uncla- Oh, but you know, these are worldwide enclaves. That's the great thing. I was just offering them- There's not a lot of different enclaves here.
Yes, they're worldwide. It's this very weird thing because, you know, you've got lots of people who, you know, probably wherever they are, not surrounded by other Sanskrit enthusiasts. But it might make- What I love so much about my classes is that, you know, they just, they would really benefit from the earth being flat, because you always have this problem that if you teach, it will be for someone who will be in the middle of the night. Because you know, they will be coming from Asia, from Australia, they will be coming from Hawaii, from the Americas, from Europe.
Somewhere is- it is going to be night, so someone will not be able to participate. And I would never have foreseen that that could be an issue, that, you know, the fact that Singapore and Munich, where I am, are several hours apart, but not enough hours apart. That would ever be something that I'm taking into account in timing my teaching. Yeah, it's really phenomenal to witness and partake in the change happening.
I've said this is that power a couple times. Maybe it's, it's, it's, maybe he's starting to agree, but what he's doing is the future of a subset of the academy. And what you're doing is the future of some sort of studies at the academy and beyond. You know, one of the things I've been very excited about for a long time is continuing study education.
Yes. And I got a job at the University of Toronto, I think in 2010, it's about 2017-2018. And this notion of people who show up and want to learn, don't care, you know, they're not interested in a degree. Most of them are beyond pleasing mommy and daddy.
That's much more of them. I should say all, yeah. And they want to learn. They want to learn.
They're coming to the School of Indian Wisdom. They want to learn. And all things Indic are rooted in some way, shape, performance, Sanskrit. You know, so it seems.
And at least the voices that have been preserved have been preserved in Sanskrit for the most part. In generatives. There are, of course, you know, fairly old and very old texts in Derrida languages here from the south. But even those texts would have some Sanskrit influence because Sanskrit just was the sort of language used across the subcontinent for such a long time.
Yes. And so, I mean, there's this folks at the school who they might be there for spiritual reasons or philosophical reasons or they want in history. They need to learn Sanskrit. They want to learn Sanskrit.
They mostly don't have the intention of mastering Sanskrit or being fluent in Sanskrit, but even one to three years of Sanskrit. So in which is their understanding of texts, of concepts, of a mindset that's so different from the modern Western mindset. So it's really cool to see. But in addition to the reader, there's a number of tools.
There are a number of pedagogical aids that you have been involved in. One of them is a series of flashcards from that mistaken. Yeah. I have been using both brainscape and to some extent, Quizlet, which are two flashcard programs for quite a while because I'm the kind of person who, if I need to memorize something and I do it from a page, I can just never do it.
I will remember exactly where a word stands. It's on the right hand page, somewhere down the middle. What does it mean that I won't remember? And so I have always needed flashcards for my own learning and I still have lots and lots of lavender Greek vocab flashcards at my parents home somewhere.
And so at some point I realized that these cards exist in digital format and so I can make them for my students. They can still make them for themselves, but if they don't want to do that, I can make them for them. And so I had flashcards for basically all the memorizable materials. So now forms verb forms, some be vocab for my textbook.
And then I continued with that for the reader because basically when you're at the intermediate stage, there's two things that you need to do. One is read a lot and the other is work on your vocab. And so I went to, I think this is part of the Sanskrit dictionary.com website. They have a word frequency function on their website.
You can basically say, give me the 1000 most frequent words in the following genres or in the following centuries or in all of Sanskrit literature. And I then just selected the genres that an intermediate student is most likely to come across, that are presented, that are included in my reader, made lists of around 1000 words and then ordered them a little bit and put them into around, I think, 20 flashcards sets. So it's around 40 to 50 words per set. And the full list for that learning vocab is also included in the back of my reader.
I forgot to mention that earlier. And so basically you can then in small chunks work on your vocabulary knowledge. And the reason why I did this with brainscape is basically there's two reasons. One is that I can make these available for free so students don't need to pay a cent or a penny depending on where you are.
And also they have this great system where basically you are presented with a card which would be a Sanskrit word, you flip over the card which then gives you the English translation of the word. And then you can say on a scale of one through five, how well did you know this word? And if you say you knew it really well, then you're not going to be given that card again for a fair while. Whereas if you say, oh, I really completely forgot about that, I didn't know that one at all.
But then you will get this card again much much more quickly. And so it's an intelligent system that helps you work through new material, new knowledge. Without you having to do very much, you basically just sort of flip through the cards. And I found it to be quite productive.
And they've got apps, you know, for both Quizlet and Brainscape, you've got apps so you can do it on your phone, you can do it on your computer wherever you like. I feel like I want to enroll in In Show or Intermediate, so I'm still learning about all of these pedagogical tools. What you should do is come to the dot, which is the dot Charlie Aleta, a listen talk, which is the big Asianist conference in Germany, where I'm actually organizing a panel together with a friend of mine on Sanskrit pedagogy, sorry, not on language pedagogy, so because you know, Sanskrit and lots of other languages that you need in order to access the cultures that you're trying to study. And if that all goes through, then basically the talks that I want to give is going to be about, let's identify the elements of, you know, regular classes that we need for good, productive, enjoyable learning.
Let's look at how we can best reproduce these for an online environment. Let's look at what products are available, you know, what services are available, what services are still needed, you know, into the developer community, where there's no future markets. And then, you know, give people basically an overview of if you would like to offer your language, especially, you know, for smaller language, if you would like to offer that online, basically, here's one tried and tested recipe of how you can do that, you know, which ingredients do you need to bake a tasty online teaching cake. And I would just have to hope that that panel, you know, will be accepted.
Whether the panel is accepted or not through this podcast, that concept of your publisher paper at a journal or a blog or... Yes. It's clear, like, so pedagogy is kind of where I live, did a piece for the AR Web magazine, I think in 2018 about storytelling and the power of storytelling for English studies, pedagogy. And then, for some strange reason, I found myself teaching online in about 2017, and so online pedagogy, whether at the OCHS or school, or, you know, I do courses every now and then for your studies or about philosophy, just how do you teach online, how do you teach very intimate transformative subjects online.
And that's basically your niche with Sanskrit, how do you teach language effectively online. Yes. And so that would be a brilliant thing to attend. I still think it'd be fun to use those flashcards, whether in other words or not.
I'll see what I can do about that. In addition to the flashcards that are in accompaniment, a side dish, right then on the top of your reader, your delicious reader, you also have, you've produced some interesting posters and sensory posters. Why don't you tell us about those? Yes.
Well, once again, you know, this is going to sound like a broken record, but once again, these were things I thought I would really like to have something like this available, and so I created it. So basically, these posters are, again, reference works, reference posters. There's one that just is for very beginning students, so that gives you an overview of the different library and of, you know, difficult contract consonants and so on. But then the main posters are an overview of all nominal and pre-nominal declension in Sanskrit, an overview of all internal, so all external and all the relevant or frequent internal, so all the sound changes that occur when words or parts of words meet, and that Sanskrit reflects in writing.
And which is something that makes reading Sanskrit fairly difficult because one in the same word can have a variety of forms depending on what word follows. And so there's the Sanskrit, sorry, the Sunday poster, and then I've got an overview of the Sanskrit verb poster. So, thematic verbs, asymatic verbs, perfect, salty form of future, what are aarists, and so on and so on. And these posters basically were died as I had them, I had them printed, and I put them up above my desk.
And I just found that it helped me so much that if I was quite sure, you know, what on earth is this form? I could just look up and find the answer. I didn't have to, you know, leave through any books or anything like that. And so, yeah, once again, I'm definitely a bit of a fishery of these now.
Where were you in 2005? When I started studying Sanskrit, I'm so excited about what you're doing. And I'm like, damn, it would have been nice to have these things. It's great.
So, there's the reader that you have produced. It's published by Brill. It'll be out any minute now. For those of you in the timeless time in podcast land, it'll be out.
It will be out or came out November, November 2021. And along with the reader, there are these, all of the silly posted in the podcast notes, there are flashcards to support your learning. There's a poster where at a glance you can take a look at various declensions to get a sense of, you know, what form is it stripping you up? And I should say the posters unfortunately aren't free because, you know, the flashcards are electronic products.
I can just make those available to anyone. But the posters, you know, I couldn't give those out to people for free because I'm paying for them. And I found that the simplest way of making them available to people was with the help of Seth Powell, of Yogic Studies fame. I then put them on the in the Yogic Studies shop.
And so you can get them from there. I think they've already proven quite popular. Well worth it. For the cost of lunch, you can get a poster that'll change your sense of trajectory.
I'm sure people will be okay with that. You know, I'll put all of those links in the podcast notes for the flashcards, for the posters, for the reader, and also for the introduction textbook you've written, which we've talked about on the podcast before. We had one podcast in, I believe 2019 when the podcast was fairly young, I guess, or at least my involvement therein was fairly new. And it was about the reader.
And then we had a conversation in 2020, I think at the dawn of pandemonium of the rest of the rest of the game. When the rain started falling and the oars and oars, we started to think about building an arc, you know, in early 2020. And really what I wanted to do was put your Yogic Studies sensory courses on people's radar. Because that's how folks outside of a degree program can obviously study with you through your two course through your studies.
And now that we're having this sort of third installment, about a year and a half later, of our timeless conversation recorded for posterity, that's kind of merged us together and think more like what's going on. I mean, we're doing something. I don't feel lost anymore. There's other people in the clearing with a machete.
You know, something's happening. Obviously, something's happening. I'd love your take. What's going on with this whole on that education thing?
What are you doing? What's going on here? My take given that I have three jobs and all three jobs are online. So I've been thinking about, you know, probably we get here a fair bit and my take as well.
We are we are profiting from things that overall are absolutely horrible, which first of all is this is a lot of pandemic that we are still surrounded by. And so now the now people who before would not have tried out online teaching were forced to try it out and then realize, oh, hang on, this can actually be really good. You know, you can do it horribly, but you can do in-person teaching horribly, but you can actually do online teaching via computer. You can do that really well.
And so that's on the teacher side and on the student side, you all of a sudden had students who realized that there were all these offerings out there and they tried them, you know, maybe just sort of dip their toe in with one. And then saw that, well, actually, you know, these are fun. And because online communication is so easily possible and has become so very cheap, you can have a study group and can have study buddies that are geographically close to you, or maybe not, you know, maybe they're in different time zones, but you just happen to all be awake at the same time. So you can have not just teaching and instruction, but you can have actual community online.
And the other thing that is almost equally terrible is I think the developments in formal academia, because of course, I don't know whether it's across the world, but in the countries where I have toured, where I've been involved in university systems, it is more and more about turning universities into businesses. And so if a subject gives you a straight path to a job, to a profession that lets you make lots of money, then your subject is safe. But if it's a subject that is there to basically show you, you know, about the beauty of life, about the beauty of human existence, about intellectual understanding, what it means to be human. Yes, exactly.
So these aspects of us that employers cannot make use of without actually, I would say, I'm very crucial for all of us. You know, these subjects are just cut left, right and center. And the US does this better than Germany does, but in Germany, I've encountered so many people who basically say, you know, you should study subject X, if you want to become an academic in subject X, and who then say, oh, you know, we had this student, but they only stayed with us for two semesters, and then they did something else. And that is seen as a bad thing.
And I feel that we, aye, you know, if I've got a student who does two semesters of Sanskrit and then they do it, you know, go into journalism or something. Perfect. You have got something that someone who knows about Sanskrit who might actually be able to then write about it in a way that appeals to a large part of the public. And when we have university departments being closed, which is happening in Germany, so Sanskrit is getting smaller and smaller among other subjects, then very often, if, you know, all our students are actually within our subject, so they're within the halls of academia, then we do not have advocates in the public who would say, oh, I have wonderful memories of doing my undergrad studying Sanskrit, but now I do this completely unrelated thing, maybe I'm in politics, maybe I'm in publishing, maybe I'm in, I don't know what, let me speak up for these people whose existence is now threatened.
We've only got Sanskritists who speak up for us. And while there are a number of people who do speak up, I think the situation would be a lot better if the people, you know, if the public was aware of what not just Sanskrit basic, all the humanities, all the art subjects would traitors, they've got to offer. It's, yeah, it's taking me a couple of years to really, to, to, to, to be comfortably conscious of something that I suspected and kind of caught with self here and there, but there is a, clearly a dire issue with humanities education. And yet it is humanities education, which will save our planet and our species in so many ways.
In combination with technical and subject, yeah. Of course, not instead of, but in addition to, and it's the humanities education that prepares the person to engage in the technology in a meaningful way, to engage, to make, okay, so you're a scientist, at some point there'll be ethical decisions to make, particularly if you're a biologist. Yeah. For example, and so it's that it's that person formation, it's being a human first, learning what it means to be human, learning what the rise and fall of empires, learning about arts and culture across the globe, learning about comparative mythology, learning about ancient Greek basket weaving, whatever works.
Learning about what to do when you're unhappily in love. You know, if you've never read any literature, then you might feel, and I think many, many teenagers do feel that, that they're completely alone with this feeling and that they're the first never to encounter this. Or what, what happens when you've lost your job, or when you've got, you know, some, some person that you have to deal with, you know, some colleague you've got to deal with, but they're really, really difficult. If you don't have access to culture, then you may feel that, you know, either you're alone and be that you need to, you know, probably invent the wheel, reinvent the wheel.
And this is one of the wonderful things about basically all arts and humanities objects. You get to know these cultures that are far, far away, it's based on time, and in so many other ways, in so many other dimensions, but they're human. And you just link, you connect to them, you feel kinship. Yes, you can, the, the sentience from these cultural artifacts are narrative as palpable, as palpable to anybody with, you know, that, who can perceive it.
So, so there's obviously an issue happening at the academy. I mean, I know that from personal experience, I know that, I mean, this really bizarre but delightful position of being a self-employed productive scholar, well connected and heard of. Like, I, I still don't understand. I feel like it's a walking contradiction, frankly.
But at the same time, I mean, imagine all the folks who might have been hardworking and brilliant scholars who came out with the PhD in religious studies who've gone, who knows where, because the jobs weren't available. And, you know, this, this path of somehow entrepreneuring or supporting yourself or, or, or teaching online to the public, you know, it wasn't quite as present as, as it is now. And so, you know, I really and truly feel that on education has, I felt this even before the pandemic, that it has a huge role to play in the future of the humanities at the academy and beyond. And I also think that it's a very important thing to do with the pandemic without question.
Yeah. And, and, and, and what, what has just become blatantly clear is that, you know, the interest for all of these things has not, has not weakened. I would say it has strengthened. There are so many people who are interested in learning the things, learning about the things that, that we can offer.
And it's just that, you know, they wouldn't do those at university because sometimes it's parental pressure, you know, become a lawyer, not a poet. That's, you know, is all this time. And then often you also have this thing that at many universities, the people who are hired often are the best researchers. And that makes complete sense because, you know, universities are sort of the safe spaces for research that you do for the sake, not of money, but for the sake of, of learning and knowing and understanding.
But those are not necessarily the best teachers. And so sometimes students will be turned off for these, these things and then, you know, take the safe option of economics or something like that instead. Because the teachers aren't really prepared for having to engage, having to awaken someone's interest in the first place. Basically, they are great if you already know that this is exactly what you want to do, but it may not be great if you're sort of just, as I say, dipping your toe in.
And I'm not quite sure, you know, what all of this study of, I don't know, the Near East or India or East Asia or whatever other cultures you're interested in, what that is all about. And many, you know, there's brilliant teachers who are regularly employed as professors at, you know, respected universities. But I have the impression from seeing, you know, the kinds of teaching offerings that exist in, in Altaq, in alternative academia. I don't know whether that's a term yet, so I'm going to just use it as a filter.
It is now excellent. So in Altaq, you very often then have people whose main interest actually is the teaching. And that of course is a huge strength for people who do this, you know, take these courses to enrich their lives because they're just interested in them, not because they want to dedicate their lives to topic X, but because their lives will just be more, more, more lively with these, with this kind of knowledge or understanding in them. Well said, you have another side dish on your, on your tally of offerings that's rather attractive.
How rather meta we're on an Indian religions podcast about to talk about another one. Yes, exactly. You are now, you're now a podcast host. You're not just podcast guest anymore.
Oh yes. What podcast you host, what's all about? So it's called the Sanskrit Studies podcast. And I called it that because basically, so have to take a step back there.
I had for a long time had this idea of creating a bit of an overview of all how many things that you can do with Sanskrit. You know, you've got people who are interested in it from linguistic under view for literature, for philosophy, for, for faith or spiritual reasons, because they're interested in history. Because they didn't solve anthropology or sociology and so on, and so on and so on and so on. And so it's such a huge field that, even if you're in the field you may not necessarily know what your, you know, other colleagues are doing.
So for example I know far too little about, say, you know, medieval Indian history or something like that. So I would just like to know more about, what does one do if one studies, X, X and who might be interested possibly in studying Sanskrit, Indology, South Asian Studies, if they had only known that existed and what it was all about. And so I wanted to combine basically these two aspects, help us get to know our colleagues and help others, potentially students or everybody else who's interested, get to know the field a little better. And originally my idea was that I wanted to ask people to basically write a mini chapter on why would they do, what aspect of Sanskrit they are working on is the business.
Why that is great, why that's interesting, why you, dear reader, might also want to do that. And then I thought, well, but you know, we all have so many things that we have to write. So probably it would take a very long time to get a book like this going into the chapters and everything. And then I thought, well, maybe it would be good to host a series of talks where we then invite people from different parts of Sanskrit studies to just talk about what they do, maybe record this, maybe go to YouTube, but basically invite students, invite people who are interested to these talks.
And I was basically told, well, no, that's not academic enough. But then I mentioned this idea to Seth Powell, who not only runs the other studies, but also he also has a study of the arts. I love it, I love that, turn in the story. And his reaction was like, oh, that's fantastic.
I think that's a great idea, you know, this will have a great audience. And here's the technical set of that you need. And you know, he gave me so much support and so much help with this. And basically, you know, this is how the Sanskrit study podcast was born, which is at this point, as much Seth's making and Seth's brainchild as it is mine.
And so this is how this week it went from being a book to being a podcast where I'm doing exactly what I'd originally wanted to do. But in a way that I couldn't originally have envisaged because we've got, you know, there's two episodes out so far. You know, we've had almost 2000 downloads. So, you know, I'm not surprised.
I'm not surprised that you have more downloads. A scholar has more downloads speaking about what, how do you Sanskrit on their podcast than they would begin to have sales for a book they've produced. For example, yeah, it's incredible. I mean, I love so many aspects of that story.
I can't tell you where to begin. My synapses are firing. First of all, it's something that I would listen to. And frankly, I'm in the really bizarre position of spending creating a bunch of online content, but not consuming very much.
Because between the research and the coaching and the content creation and the teaching, I'm going to screen all day. So in my downtime, it's sort of a no-screen zone. I'm always borrowing Netflix, of course. Come now.
We have to make an assertion for Netflix. I have said too much. Anyhow, it's something I've listened to for obvious reasons. It's interesting to hear from scholars.
But once it's further than when I do on this podcast, except maybe with conversations with you, and a couple others, is you learn about the lives of the people. They're journeys. Yes. They're motivations.
They're drives. They're opportunities. So let me tell you this interesting story where I, as a PhD student, I think it was 15, actually. I went to the World's Sensored Conference in Thailand, Bengal.
And it being the World's Sensored Conference, essentially met pretty much every one of the West been having to study the put on as an epic sub-meta and a number of scholars. And there was one in particular, a number of them that I clicked with. But I ended up working with one of them. His name was Macama's Taylor.
And we ended up, a couple years later, co-editing the volume of the conference proceedings between these put on as. And then after the UBC, the University of Columbia World Sensored Conference in 2018, again, we co-edited this thing. We just have this synergy. We've met in person, I think, twice.
And yet we have this instant work report. It's really interesting. So I say to him, hey, it's really long overdue to have a collection of some sort of narrative. Like, put on as, put on as two point, oh, it's been close to 30 years.
It's about time. I want to rope you in because then we'll have at least some academic standing. People know me as an academic. I don't have institution.
And we want to use the annual press because it's open access. But I'll do all of them on the work. The back and forth work, obviously. He's done more than his research share of the writing.
But all of the roping in of people who surprisingly also, yes. So I'm working with MacKamis Taylor on this project. Then I decided to have him on this podcast to talk about the vision of prana. I think about it like five days later.
I'm like, Sanskrit studies podcast? MacKamis Taylor? Yes. I was going on my walk.
I hit play. All of a sudden I'm listening to MacKamis Taylor who's in my inbox day in and day out. But learning things that I never would have learned, even collaborating with an man. You know, who would know that he took a vow and had a full moon to learn something.
I mean, this is an origin story that matches any Marvel superhero. How Indian of him. He was thinking about under the point of my son's foot. And so he did.
And so once again, I'm hugely profiting from these things. I put them out for other people to enjoy, but I also enjoy them greatly. I talk to people and I can just sit there and ask them questions for a full hour, which normally in sort of regular circumstances, if you said next to someone, for example, like dinner or something like that. And with the podcast, it's the exact same thing as with all my other stuff, my other materials.
I put them out there because I hope people enjoy them. But I just enjoy them myself so hugely. You get a chance to sit together, sit down to someone and ask them questions for a full hour. If you were seated next to them, say, at dinner, that might be considered slightly impolite if you just went, and then what did you do?
Oh, and could you tell me more about this? And then, oh, how did that come to be? Oh, you know, so and so as well. And so it would just be impolite.
But in this format, I'm allowed to be noisy, noisy, noisy. And people enjoy the product. And that is just wonderful. Yeah, they're coming in.
I've done a couple of podcasts where I've interviewed people five or six or so. So they're coming. They're coming. I think I've literally interviewed over $100 at this point.
So they're coming in. They're coming in. And interview is OK, I'm going to be speaking. So it can be because they know you're much more vulnerable than if you're setting than you are, say, at dinner or when you make an excuse, or whatever.
Dodge the question. You know, folks, that's a space. The reputation and the safety that they feel, like coming into a situation where they know they won't be interrogated. They won't be made to look foolish.
This is a situation where we're trying to cast out. We're making them look bad in some way. The interview will only make it only support what they're trying to do or what they're trying to present. So it's great.
I think it's fantastic. I thought it was great to see you hosting and hosting a Sanskrit Studies podcast. I mean, how incredibly nerdy and niche, but needed. Look.
It isn't it weird that because we're so electronically connected across the globe, even though this is very niche, it's a sizable niche. But this is exactly right. I mean, this is exactly right. I mean, I'm starting off with the School of Indian Wisdom.
And for me, it's never been about cold traffic. Maybe at some point, it will be. Or Facebook ads or any of that stuff. For me, it's sort of organic.
People who might have heard a podcast or a talk. And they're like, you know what? I want to hear more from that guy. I want to hear more about that topic.
It's organic and connected. And it's like, OK, so I'm doing this never-a-treat course. And I'm like, how on earth do 20 people want to give me cash to hear about the day be who are as passionate about this as I am, whether it's 20 or 200 or 2,000, whatever it is, that opening up to what's beyond your vicinity, I could easily find, in some time, 100 people who are extremely passionate about these topics. That might be a little bit of a challenge, even in a mecca like Toronto.
So it really becomes the situation where it's so niche. But then there's this thriving following of something so niche because it's open to anyone with internet, really. Yeah. And so given that you mentioned the purpose.
So he and I just recently offered a one week intensive course, just reading Sanskrit, reading the opening passage of Kalidasa Mikaduta, which is really, really good. It's an extremely challenging text. And so we wanted it to be available for people in as many time zones as possible. And so for Australians, it was, I think, 9am, or something like that.
But for Europeans, for a year was 1am, for people who came as midnight, for Americans, it was a sort of straightforward, easier time. But we had all these people who night after night, morning after morning, tuned in, and wanted to work on their Sanskrit wanted to read this text. And I think we had about 50 people signed up, of which more than 30 turned up every single class. And it was just so much fun.
And without the internet, this wouldn't be possible. And that course was completely for free. We did it just really just because we had fun doing it. But that's why for profit or sort of non-free online courses are also flourishing, because all of a sudden, we who are living in our little niches, our little enclaves all across the world can come and combine our niches into one beautiful big online classroom, where you all for some share all these interests with other people.
It's just like it used to be that if you grew up in a little village, and then at some point, you had the chance to move to a bigger city. All of a sudden, you will find all these, this variety of human life, and you would find people who are not to be, you know, kin to you by blood, but by interest by spirit. And we have this times a thousand thanks to online teaching. Look, listen, without the internet, how would we exhaust our cameras with people across the globe?
It's a major accelerator and facilitator, karmic exhaustion. It's great. It's great. Who else have you thus far interviewed on the Sanskrit Studies podcast?
So the two episodes that are out already are first of all my grandma's Taylor and then Doug Mavyastik. And I have also already interviewed Dominic Wiyastik and also Michael Vidsall from Harvard. And just with those four interviews, it was absolutely wonderful to see the variety of ways. I tried to make it about Sanskrit, but I always make it about the person.
So how did you come to Sanskrit? How did you first get interested in this? And to see just how many people are now full-time Sanskritists? We did not start out doing Sanskrit University.
This came through some roundabout fortuitous way. Someone said, oh, Sanskrit, this or Sanskrit, and all of a sudden they found themselves drawn to it. Just how many different different parts there are into it? Also, the different academic journeys of, well, you know, you want to do Sanskrit, but how do you do it?
How do you find funding? How do you find an institution? How do you find a certain environment that supports you? And how that differs over the continents and over different times.
And actually, just today, I was talking to John Rockington from the UK, so obviously of University of Edinburgh fame, and he's now back in Oxford. And it was just really fascinating listening to him what being a student at Oxford was like quite a long time ago, almost 60 years ago. And then what it was like moving to the University of Edinburgh, building up a Sanskrit program there that went beyond just the basic language requirements, and to see what sort of things really change over time, and what things actually are quite similar. So whenever we say, oh, there's this pressure to increase student numbers, he was mentioning that, well, actually, the reason why he was called upon to create a program that went beyond Sanskrit language was so as to increase student numbers.
And one of the bits that he told me that I thought was absolutely wonderful was that when the Beatles became popular, of course, it's not necessarily by Sanskrit language, but Indian culture, all of a sudden, blew up in popularity. And this is another red thread that runs through the life of Sanskrit. So many people seem to think, oh, this is their language, and this is what's the skill, subject, and why on earth would you study Sanskrit, or Sanskrit, as many people call it, or Sanskrit, the writing of the sand. Why on earth would you do that?
But there's so many different parts of everyday life and of pop culture that then lead people to an interest in some part of Indian culture. And if for some, it remains a fairly broad, and you could put a negative, negatively superficial interest. But for many, this one kind of thing that caught their attention then is the beginning of a path that leads them all the way down to taking on several years. There's some three classes, studying various literature, and so on and so on.
And just today, actually, I was talking to John Brockington, who, from most of his life, worked at the University of Edinburgh, and now is back at Oxford. And it was absolutely wonderful hearing from him about what a place like Oxford was like almost basically 60 years ago, how university life was organized back then, how, when he came to Edinburgh, his job actually was to, well, to build up a Oxford program that went beyond language studies in order to increase student numbers. So I always find it fascinating to see what sorts of things change, like availability of funding and so on, and availability of jobs. But the fact that even back then, there was a push to raise student numbers.
That's interesting. That's helpful to know. That allows us to see what strategies they use back then, what strategies can we maybe take over, and just adapt a little bit for the sorts of things that we have to do today. And one of the things that he told me about that I thought was particularly wonderful was the fact that when the Beatles became popular, all of a sudden, of course, that taught you about India, not necessarily about Sanskrit, but about, you know, broader Indian culture, exploded in size.
And that is such a typical thing to happen, because even though we consider Sanskrit to be this very, well, niche thing, exactly as you nine have been saying, and this thing that there's really no point in studying it well enough that you want to do it, there still are so many different ways into an interest in India, in very broad strokes, in South Asia, in the various cultures, in the various religions and the philosophies, in the languages, and so on. And it's little things that catch people's interest, such as the Beatles or various other bits, various other elements of modern day, broad culture. And some people then enter the field of Sanskrit, and the interest remains fairly broad. And other people, you know, sort of 15 years down the road find themselves having done lots of language courses, having learned about all the literary traditions, and philosophical traditions, and so on and so on.
And I've always find it nice when I see that certain things that I maybe consider fairly modern, but only because, you know, my experience of them is modern only, when I then see that those things have already a fair amount of history, because when certain things continue, when certain things repeat themselves, that means we can learn from the past, and that means that maybe things that we see nowadays are, well, that we see now as negative, you know, we're always forced to increase student numbers. Well, that was actually something that people in the olden days already had to do, and look at the fabulous work that they still produced, the fabulous research that they did, and these are times that we consider the good old times, to some extent. And even then, people were under certain pressures that we are now under. And so for all these reasons, you have to have interest in Sanskrit, interest in individual biographies, in the interest in not just scholarly, but also human biographies, I'm just having a ball with these interviews.
And next week, I am actually going to talk to Mary Brockington. It just so worked out that I was talking to John Brockington first. Fantastic. We'll definitely include the link for the podcast.
So what's your thing else you wanted to touch on today? Sanskrit is fantastic. Everybody should learn Sanskrit, but beyond that, no. It was a pleasure speaking with you today.
Thank you for returning to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. For those of you listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Antonia Rupo on her fantastic new Sanskrit reader.
Check it out, Brill coming out any minute now. Link is in the podcast notes. Along with the reader, you can check out her flashcards, her Sanskrit posters, and the fantastic new Sanskrit Studies podcast. Until next time, stay safe, stay sane, keep well, and keep studying Sanskrit.
Take care.