Does anyone speak sanskrit

Sanskrit, which its proponents argue is the cultural marker of India, was never spoken all over the country and was never even the language of the masses in a particular region. The uses of Sanskrit, like the study of the Vedas, was restricted to the upper castes and banned to the working classes. To speak Sanskrit, a Shudra had no choice but hope to be lucky enough to be reborn into another varna.

Sanskrit was used as a tool to demarcate people, rather than simply as a language — Sanskrit denoted the caste of its speaker. The language, then, can best be remembered as a marker of the caste system rather than the glory of India. Previously wielded by high society as an exclusive asset, the government is now promoting it as a pan-Indian motif. Such treatment of Sanskrit is not only deceptive and superfluous, but also done at the cost of neglecting other Indian classical languages, like Tamil for instance, which are highly secular in their literature and widely spoken by the masses till date.

Though the imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi speaking Indians has been happening since independence, the current government has taken on the effort with a new energy, so much so that even government schemes are named in Hindi — Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, Swachh Bharat, Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana, Atal Pension Yojana and so on.

The government seems to prefer naming its schemes in this senseless manner as if they are meant only for Hindi-speaking Indians. The non-Hindi speaking Indian, alienated by these names, is compelled to pronounce these Hindi words without knowing their meanings or implications. Sanskrit evokes past glories and dominance for those who still hold the varnashram days as an ideal. The revival of Sanskrit and Hindi by a right-wing government is nothing but an attempt to evoke this past glory, when Sanskrit was an easy way to subjugate non-Hindi-speaking Indians as second class citizens.

Sanskritisation leads to nothing but saffronisation, which in turn tries take the country back to pre-modern days. Sanskrit is actually not very difficult to learn, though the general understanding is that it is a difficult language. It is a very phonetic, inflected, scientific language and if you learn the basic grammar and follow the rules of the language, you can learn it easily. Vedic Sanskrit The hymns preserved in the Rigveda were preserved by oral tradition alone over several centuries before the introduction of writing, the oldest aryan language among them predating the introduction of Brahmi by as much as a millennium.

By studying Sanskrit, other languages can be learnt more easily; this being the language all others borrow from fractionally. They learn to speak well, starting from Sanskrit, the mother language of all languages. Apart from the fun, learning Sanskrit can also help you understand the etymology of a lot of words in Indian and non-Indian languages. It is difficult to say whether Mirza Ghalib was a Sanskritist. But one can be certain that he had a better understanding of the Sanskrit culture and ethos than those in the Sanskrit department of the Banaras Hindu University who were protesting the appointment of Firoze Khan to the faculty.

It consists of couplets, like the rosary of the Hindus. These couplets conjure Banaras silhouetted against the Ganga along with the beautiful arrays of the idol-worshippers, Brahmins and Hindu temples. Ghalib was on his way to Kolkata in and had halted in Banaras for four months. Opinion Gyanendra Pandey writes: Indians once displayed pride in multilingualism.

Return of an instrumental English signals a new phase. Since ancient times, Sanskrit has been an important language in India. It contains great wisdom and knowledge. Iranians and Arabs in the ancient and medieval period and Europeans in modern times showed an interest in its classical texts and translated them.

They did not disgrace Sanskrit by doing so. On the contrary, they internationalised it — something pandits failed to do.