Sanskrit echoes around the world
The rise of India's economy has brought an eagerness to learn the ancient 'language of the gods' – and a great-great aunt to English.
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"To dispel the notion that the language was nonliving and difficult to learn," Mr. Shastry says in a phone interview, "we decided to teach basic spoken Sanskrit in 10 days and to teach through Sanskrit only."
An eager network of volunteers experimented with this new method, teaching groups in villages, cities, and abroad through Indian expatriates. "We now hold classes even in prisons," Shastry says.
When the movement began, there was no money for printed flyers to advertise the classes, so publicity was strictly via word-of-mouth. Volunteers performed sidewalk skits about social themes using Sanskrit to draw the attention of passersby.
"[People] saw that Sanskrit need not be confined to rituals and prayer," says Pallamraju Duggirala, a part-time
Samskrita Bharati volunteer (and full-time space physicist) who has been teaching the free classes at MIT since September 2003.
In 25 years, an estimated 7 million people have attended spoken Sanskrit classes offered by Samskrita Bharati in India and abroad, says Shastry. There are 250 full-time volunteers and 5,000 part-time teachers in the United States and India, and their numbers are growing.
Samskrita Bharati has chapters in 26 of India's 28 states. There are also groups in such places as San Jose, Calif.; Seattle; Pittsburgh; Buffalo, N.Y.; Dallas; San Diego; and Chicago. Requests are coming in from other US cities as well.
Like Latin and Greek, Sanskrit eventually became only the language of scholars as dialects spread in medieval times, notes David Shulman of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in an e-mail interview. When the British Raj began in 1757, English slowly replaced Sanskrit.
Yoga practitioners in the US are seeking out the authentic Sanskrit names of various poses such as "downward dog" or "spinal twist" and the philosophy behind the practice as spelled out in the Yoga Sutras – the original treatise on the subject written in Sanskrit thousands of years ago.
Science-history buffs see old works in Sanskrit as treasure troves of ancient knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, and metallurgy. When Copernicus announced that the sun was the center of the universe in 1543, it was a defining moment for Western science. In Samskrita Bharati's recently released "Pride of India" – a compilation that offers a glimpse into India's scientific heritage – Sanskrit scholars point to calculations from AD 499 that indicate astronomer Aryabhatta's underlying concept of a sun-centered planetary model.
"This knowledge tradition is what we hope to revive through the spread of Sanskrit," says Shastry.
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You speak a little Sanskrit
Linguistically, Sanskrit belongs to the ancient Indo-European family – a "sister" of Old Greek, German (Gothic) and Latin – and is thus one of the ancestors of English. More like a great-great-aunt, perhaps. This helps to explain the coincidence of words that sound and mean the same in Sanskrit and English, such as bratha and brother, says Michael Witzel, Wales professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University.
Hundreds of pure Sanskrit words became permanent fixtures in English through cultural interactions between the East with the West since the Middle Ages, he adds.
Some of the pure Sanskrit words in English you know include: avatar, karma, guru, juggernaut, pundit, mantra, and nirvana.
