Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani's written reply in the Lok Sabha recently on teaching Sanskrit in the Indian Institutes of Technology has come in for criticism, with the Aam Aadmi Party asking her to choose between Java and Sanskrit, and so on. This is another case where the kernel of good intention (supporting serious scholarship on Sanskrit) has been lost in an ill-designed formulation. The state of Sanskrit scholarship in the country in proportion to how important Sanskrit is to our intellectual heritage is truly abysmal. While there are of course, individually, a few good scholars, there is very little by way of sustained intellectual achievement that would meet international standards. Unfortunately, people get to be defensive around scholarship in the culture and the humanities no one will dispute that very little Nobel-quality physics is done in India, but anything to do with culture immediately has as its reflex an outpouring of claims as to India's special spiritual genius. No serious scholarship can know in advance what it seeks to achieve. If we already knew how great Sanskrit's achievement was, what would be the need to simply confirm it? Serious scholarship will be able to discover both Sanskrit's achievements and its blind spots. Beyond greatness, even the fact of pigeonholing Sanskrit to science and engineering is baffling science in India, like anywhere in the world till the rise of the modern West was never the centre of research or scholarly endeavour. Sanskrit, as an intellectual idiom, would not be able to disentangle "scientific" texts entirely from metaphysical, philosophical, literary or ethical traditions. One is fundamentally missing the point in looking for scattered scientific information, or thinking that one can simply excise the non-scientific parts from the scientific parts of a text. One risks misunderstanding both science and "non-science". when,