Sanskrit gasping for a breath in a country where it was born and it has been an inextricable part of its perennial knowledge and philosophy for centuries is no good sign. We urgently need to restore it’s pristine glory
Ajay Bhardwaj
The relegation of Sanskrit to the cultural backyards of Bharat is, perhaps, one of the most telling signs of colonisation of Bharatiya mind. No other country in the world has meted out a similar treatment to its ancient language the kind of which Bharat has done to Sanskrit. The zeal with which people in Germany, France, Japan and even in Israel are proud if their
respective native languages could only be a wake-up call for Bharat. Given the present state one does wonder, at times, will Sanskrit meet the fate of it’s the then contemporaries, Greek and Latin? The latter two languages got decimated apparently because the civilisations that fostered them almost perished with the time.
Sanskrit, however,is still around, and it’s a consolation in many ways. There are pockets where the language survives in its last vestibules. Be it a far-flung village of Mattaur in Karnataka or Jhiri village in Madhya Pradesh. The smattering of Sanskrit in day-to-day communication is still alive in these villages. There are still over a two dozen daily newspapers and periodicals being brought out regularly, even if their readership is not flourishing. But there is a tenacity to keep the language afloat.
Sanskrit gasping for breath in a country where it has been an inextricable part of its perennial knowledge and philosophy for centuries is no good sign, though. This “dev basha” or the divine language has been a repository of the entire gamut of knowledge and philosophy that Bharat shared with the world. If anything, Sanskrit is the only unparalleled and outstanding contribution of Bharat to the world. Everything else, be it art or architecture, may find its comparison in other parts of the world. But not Sanskrit. It remains the most scientific articulation of sound ever done by the humanity. The language in which every syllable and “mantra” creates vibrations that take the speaker to a higher mental plane. It generates vibrations that make you connect with cosmic waves. It remains the most scientific language ever to have evolved on the earth and that is the gift of Bharat to the world which no other country can ever match.
No wonder when the world started looking for a speaking computer, the only language it could adopt was Sanskrit. There is no doubt that in the ancient times Sanskrit must have been a language of common man as well as that of those bracketed in higher classes. A lingua franca, so to say. Its evidence is found in about half a dozen villages where people of all classes and castes still communicate in Sanskrit, though not like scholars. In due course, the language seems to have become the
custodian of scholars exclusively.
That is why, for centuries, in spite of variant regional lingos, the flourishing thought was encapsulated in Sanskrit only. Be it Bengal, Kerala or Kashmir. The scholarly
pursuits always found expression in Sanskrit regardless of the local language people spoke. So Adi Shankaracharya in Kerala would write his commentaries and discourses in Sanskrit as much as Abhinavgupta would do it in Kashmir, in spite of the big time gap that separated them. If Bankim Chandra Chatterjee has to address Bharat he would write “Vande Mataram” in Sanskrit, a fact that RSS founder Dr Hedgewar also realised when he replaced the RSS prayer, which was initially in Hindi and Gujarati, with the one in Sanskrit. For Sanskrit unites the country, unites the thought and philosophy that obtained in all corners of the country.
Are we forgetting it all? As Lord Krishan says in Srimad Bhagavadgita :
?????????????? ?????????? ????????????????????? ??
sm?iti-bhran?h?d buddhi-n??ho buddhi-n??h?t pra?a?hyati
(when your memories tend to get vitiated, you inevitably meet destruction)
Looking back, it is clear that Sanskrit kept flourishing on the land till invasions started disrupting the society. If it was the language of more than one lakh Gurukuls on the land, it was also the court language. If Ban Bhatt was writing in it, so was King Harshavardhana doing at the same time in their creative works. After the timeless philosophy and knowledge had found expression in Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas, the creative writings, that form an invaluable part of the literary treasure of the ancient times, also found expression in Sanskrit through the pens of the likes of Jaideva, Kalhan, Kalidas, Ashwaghosh and Bhaas.
Veritably it was ????? ????????, ???????? ????? (Bharat is in Sanskrit, Sankrit is in Bharat). But it was blown into smithereens in the wake of violent invasions. The language and its scholars lost their moorings, and it marked a sudden cessation of flourishing Bharatiya thought and philosophy. Some random exceptions like Pt Jagannath, who was honoured by Shah Jahan as “Panditraja” for his much-acclaimed work, Ras Gangadhar, which is one of the most valued treatises in aesthetics, aside, not much growth of thought happened in Sanskrit.
The British later rendered a mortal blow by introducing an education system in which, in due course, English assumed a more significant role in the society and to talk about Sanskrit started inviting slander and banter.
Post-Independence there has been no effort whatsoever to revive the pristine glory of the language. Instead, it has been allowed to wither making rest of the world wonder why cannot Bharata preserve and nourish the language which has been a vital source of life and thought to it.
How shocking, if not shameful, it could be to browse through a news item which said “Will Germans be the eventual custodians of Sanskrit, its rich heritage and culture? If the demand for Sanskrit and Indology courses in Germany is any indication, that’s what the future looks like.
Unable to cope with the flood of applications from around the world, the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, had to start a summer school in
spoken Sanskrit in Switzerland, ?Italy and—believe it or not—India too, said Prof Dr Axel Michaels, head of classical Indology at the university.
In Germany, 14 of the top universities teach Sanskrit, classical and modern Indology compared to just four in the UK. The summer school spans a month in August every year and draws applications from across the globe. “So far, 254 students from 34 countries have participated in this course. Every year we have to reject many applications,” said Dr Michaels. Apart from Germany, the majority of
students come from the US, Italy, the UK and the rest of Europe, the news report read. Nothing alarming as such, but the kind of enthusiasm one sees among foreigners to learn Sanskrit and to rediscover the language, would make us marvel why cannot a similar zeal be seen in our country. The colonisation of mind, which has made us burn candles and cut cakes on birthdays, can only be undone if Sanskrit finds its long-lost space in the society.
What better example than that of Israel to show us the path. Israel came into existence in 1948 with a couple of lakhs Jews, scattered all over the world, finding their land, and the first decision that they took was that Hebrew, not English or whatever, would be their national language. The language, which had barely hundreds of sentences left in vogue, staged an unprecedented revival with the strength of the entire nation, and is thriving. Can Bharata take a leaf out of the Israel book? n
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