tical engagement with a long tradition as it was of European influences.

There were undoubtedly nationalist motives at the base of the revival. But what is astonishing is that that intellectual ethos firmly resisted reductionism in its treatment of complicated arguments. It acknowledged that these were texts to think with; they interrogated us as much as we interrogated them. But in Indian universities that culture was soon replaced by the most deadening reductionism. The minute you pronounced a text feudal or bourgeois you no longer had to read it, in any serious sense of the term reading. More than anything, the liberal arts were killed by reductionist votaries who had no space for the central aspiration of liberal arts: to produce more sophisticated and enlightened forms of self knowledge. Genuine knowledge of this kind that can be had only in a broad conversation, that includes not just the living, but the dead and imaginatively, perhaps, the yet to be born. The more serious threat to a broad humanities culture does not come from the market. It comes internally, when scholars no longer believe that the purpose of education is to distinguish the truly valuable from the merely fashionable, the purely instrumental from the genuinely elevating thought. Classicism was not about glorifying the past or scholastic pedantry, it was a fundamental resource to be deployed, reworked, deconstructed, and sometimes even lampooned in the process of a deeper understanding of the Self.

The astonishing diminution of the humanities and liberal arts has many sources. Reductionist leftists who dismissed genuine thought; narrow minded nationalists whose zeal for using tradition to beat others was matched only by their ignorance; Sanskrit Pundits who are the worst obstacles to understanding the richness of the resources on which they sit; a broad university culture that, at the undergraduate level, discouraged any serious engagement with genuinely deep and enduring questions; and pedagogical protocols that forgot how to connect a rich body of texts with emerging needs of social self-knowledge. Whether we can create a university culture that can reverse this trend is an open question. But the least we can do is acknowledge Shamashastry and his generation that gave us both a tradition and the means to transcend it.

... contd.