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Sanskrit revival carries on in India
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IN a tiny flat in a rundown alley in New Delhi, Rakesh Kumar Misra is working against the odds to bring India’s ancient
Sanskrit language to the country’s millions.
The 4,000-year-old classical language was traditionally used by Brahmin intellectuals and Hindu priests. Rarely spoken
As a mother tongue in India, Sanskrit is often dismissed as a dead language.
But Misra is undeterred, spending up to 12 hours a day hunched over his computer, translating and writing articles for a
Weekly 16-page newspaper in the script.
“My aim is to take Sanskrit to the masses, to make it accessible to everyone,” Misra, who has a masters in Sanskrit
Studies and sees the language as indelibly linked to India’s heritage, said.
Hopes of a Sanskrit revival, long pushed by Hindu hardliners, have been rising since India’s Hindu nationalist Prime
Minister Narendra Modi stormed to power at last year’s general election.
Several ministers, although not Modi himself, took an oath of office in the revered language and a national “Sanskrit
Week” was later declared to promote its teaching in schools. The first Sanskrit movie made in more than two decades
(and only the third ever) was shown at a leading film festival in November in the tourism state of Goa.
Vinod Mankara, director of “Priyamanasam”, about a 17th century-poet from the southern state of Kerala, said he hoped
To secure government help to show the film overseas to “mesmerise foreigners” with the language.
“It’s been my desire from long back to propagate the beauty of the Sanskrit language,” he said.
But the focus on Sanskrit has sparked a debate about its role in India, which has 22 official languages.
Critics fear Hindu hardliners are promoting Sanskrit as a way of imposing Hindu superiority on the country’s religious
And linguistic minorities.
Education Minister Smriti Irani, responsible for promoting the language, denies the right-wing government has any hidden
Agenda and describes Sanskrit as the “Voice of India’s soul and wisdom.” But she faces an uphill battle popularizing
It in schools, where it is offered as an optional language, and where some believe it’s linked with India’s past not
Its future.
“There are a lot of languages on offer and it’s difficult to deliver it everywhere,” KC Tripathi, head of languages
At the National Council of Educational Research and Training, a government body that advises on school curriculums.
Only 14,100 people speak Sanskrit as their main language, according to the latest census figures, less than one percent
Of India’s 1.25 billion population.
Still used in Hindu prayers and chants in temples, Sanskrit is the root of many but not all Indian languages and
Descends from the Indo-Aryans.
It was used thousands of years ago by India’s intellectuals whose manuscripts covered everything from philosophy to
Astronomy and medicine, not unlike Latin or Greek in the West.
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