Tengo poco Sanskrit
I am a Tam-Brahm, which is short for Tamil Brahmin. My ancestors were Hindu priests. You can expect people from such families to have a smattering of Sanskrit, the language of liturgy.
My great-grandfather worked in a temple in Mylapore — not Kapaleswarar’s, but a smaller temple. There must’ve been some regular pay for this job, but it couldn’t have been much. This ancestor had migrated from the village to Madras. Though he did his old job in the new setting as well, his sons reaped the benefits of a secular education. Whatever prestige was associated with being a priest was fast eroding — he must’ve recognized that and took steps to move his sons away from priesthood. By the 1970s, temple rituals were done in the vernacular. Few had any practical reason to learn the language of the gods or to know it well enough to appreciate its nuances. Tam-Brahms managed to throw the baby with the bathwater.
My grandfather was not a priest. He lay no claims to scholarship in any language. But he knew the Sanskrit word for shit, amedhyam, and said it, on occassion, with feeling. This is the etymology of amedhyam : unfit for “medh” or sacrificial fire. In the Hindu tradition, there are these ritualized cycles of food, leftovers, and feces. You offer food to the gods first, naivedhyam. You accept leftovers from the deity as prasadam. Someone lower on the pecking order can accept your leftovers. What’s unacceptable to humans and god is amedhyam. It is discarded, offal, worthless and, by extension, shit. That is the one Sanskrit word my family has hung on to.
P.S. I went to New Orleans for graduate school, far-removed enough from the home of my ancestors, one would think. But one of my professors at the university happened to be from the same village as my great-grandfather. The renowned researcher in photochemistry had studied in the only school in that village which now has a blog. Thiruvidaimarudur Times — TDR Times It hasn’t been updated for a year. Have they run out of things to reminisce about?