Written Into Being: Colonial Language Epistemologies and the Graphocentric Straitjacket

In contemporary English, the meaning of education has become largely synonymous with literacy. This is evident in expressions like ‘well-read’, insinuating that someone who is intelligent or well-educated must have read widely. By extension, such a person is necessarily highly literate. In Classical Sanskrit, however, the term equivalent to English ‘well-read’ is bahuśruta, literally “well-heard” (Rocher, 1994, p. 12). Innate in the Sanskrit term is the notion that an intelligent or well-educated person has imbibed much of their knowledge through the oral mode, with the written form of language playing only a subsidiary role. This notion is echoed in Sanskrit proverbs of the following kind, which remain popular even today.