Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sanskrit is a compound of sam, meaning together, good, well, or perfected, and krta, meaning made, formed, or work. Together the word describes something that has been well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, and sacred. The perfection the name refers to is tonal rather than semantic, according to the scholar Biderman.
The oldest surviving Sanskrit text is the Rigveda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating into the northwestern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European language family and its Vedic form is closely related to the Old Avestan language of Zoroastrianism.
Classical Sanskrit was codified by the grammarian Panini, who composed the Astadhyayi, the Eight-Chapter Grammar, around the 4th century BCE. The work contains approximately 4,000 grammatical rules and has been called one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world. It remained the most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century.
Sanskrit spread through monks, religious pilgrims, and merchants. The Buddhist pilgrim Faxian carried Indian Sanskrit texts to China by 402 CE and had translated them by 418 CE. Xuanzang carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in the 7th century. Between 300 and 1300 CE, Sanskrit sustained a cultural zone scholars call the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, covering all of South Asia and much of Southeast Asia.
Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit at structural levels beyond vocabulary, particularly in phonology. Indo-Aryan retroflex consonants have been attributed to Dravidian influence, and scholars including Ferenc Ruzca argue that all major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be traced to sustained Dravidian contact. The main period of this influence was concentrated between the late Vedic era and the crystallization of Classical Sanskrit.
Scholars disagree. Sheldon Pollock argues Sanskrit effectively died as a literary language after the 12th century, reduced to reinscription of earlier ideas. Jurgen Hanneder and Moriz Winternitz counter that Sanskrit was never a dead language and continues to be spoken, written, and read. Sanskrit is among the 22 official languages in India's constitutional Eighth Schedule, and in 2010 Uttarakhand made it a second official state language.