Sanskrit Language

By Mili Mahajan

The enchantments of our ethical roots are the ones which keeps us coherent and truly defines what a person really is. But one simply contaminates himself under the banner of blending into the new world. By calling it fusion in their words, people often leave their originality and start drifting from what they really are. The languages of our country also suffered the same ill-fate. As it comes to the traditional languages of our country , Sanskrit is the one which draws the most attention. Just limited to the old books , Sanskrit is the one of the languages which cannot be resurrected. The question is what caused the decay of the mother of all the languages. As in the early years of the history of India, Sanskrit occured to be the language of the elites and only the upper caste hindus that is Brahmins and the kshatriyas were the ones who were allowed to get sanskrit education. The greater number which were the alleged lower castes therefore resorted to some other simple linguism and thus , rather being cohesive in nature,sanskrit became the reason of division as it demarcated the upper castes from the lower castes. This was the building block of the decay of one of the greatest language. Later on, dating back to the mughals and the delhi sultanate who had their feets here were also a conducive factor in the decline of the language. The Muslim rule in India brought with it the languages like persian and urdu and as all the official works were done in this language, it became popular which lead to change in the dynamics of the language culture of our country. Then there were a large number of converts which mainly were from the accused lower strata of the society. The lower caste hindus started embracing other religions where were Islam and Christianity. This amalgamation of other religions had struck upon the linguistic strings of the society and the use of Sanskrit walled itself to just the privileged upper caste hindus. Then came the final blow. The Britishers entered into the scene and had cut down the strings of Sanskrit by using Hindi or English as their main languages.This was a brief historic tour of how slowly sanskrit had lost its magma.

However, while we were blaming the historical events and were "blending into the new society" , the rest of the world came into the fold of sanskrit's beauty . These days, while we are busy chasing the new class-defining factor , English , the foreign world is cleansing itself with our ethical language. While in the present scenario, we are enhancing ourselves with glossing up our English, there are countries like Germany and the United Kingdom which have seen students amassing to study Sanskrit. 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. Professor Dr. Axel Michaels, Head of Classical Indology at the University of Heidelberg, quoted that Linking Sanskrit with religion and a certain political ideology was “stupid” and “detrimental to the cause” of its rich heritage.“Even the core thoughts of Buddhism were in the Sanskrit language. To better understand the genesis of oriental philosophy, history, languages, sciences and culture, it’s essential to read the original Sanskrit texts as these are some of the earliest thoughts and discoveries,” he added. In the present picture, Germany acts as a storehouse of sanskrit scholars. The best ranked educational institutions like Oxford and Harvard have Germans as the best of their sanskrit scholars.

Apart from Germany , there are many other countries where people are in the grip of Sanskrit language. Nepal's 2011 census tells us that there are 1669 people who claim that there mother tongue is Sanskrit. The North American region and Sri Lanka also have many universities which offer the study of Sanskrit.

With the onslaught of English in India, the essence of ethnicity died and we got “modernized”. We become the culprits of the grim conditions of Sanskrit language. As we still keep on negating it's importance and its purity, we reduce it to a barely-breathing language which would soon find its end in the nation.

By Mili Mahajan