Sanskrit

• 1. Introduction

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  Sanskrit carries a claim that almost no other language on earth can make: it was designed to be perfect. Not merely useful, not simply elegant, but deliberately refined by generations of ancient Indian thinkers into what they believed was the closest a human tongue could get to the sound of creation itself. Sound, in their view, was not a tool. It pervaded all creation. It was another representation of the world itself.

  This documentary is about Sanskrit, a language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, whose oldest recorded form appears in a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE. Those hymns are so archaic that scholars can use them to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, the lost ancestor of languages as distant from each other as English, Latin, Greek, and Persian.

  Sanskrit became the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and a vehicle for key Buddhist and Jain texts. It spread across South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia, carrying ideas about medicine, mathematics, statecraft, and the nature of language itself. It shaped the vocabularies of dozens of living languages still spoken by hundreds of millions of people.

  And yet scholars today debate whether Sanskrit is dead. How does a language that appears in India's constitutional list of official languages, that continues to be chanted in temples and taught in schools, come to be described as a corpse? The answer runs through a millennium of political upheaval, a grammar so precise it was called one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world, and a community of scholars who never stopped arguing about what the language was for.

• 2. The Quest for Perfect Sound

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  In Sanskrit, the name of the language is itself a mission statement. The word Samskrta is a compound of sam, meaning together, good, well, perfected, and krta, meaning made, formed, work. It describes something that has been well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred.

  What made Sanskrit unusual among the ancient world's languages was that its refinement was concentrated not on meaning but on sound. According to the scholar Biderman, the perfection referenced in the language's own name is tonal rather than semantic. The ancient Indian sages who shaped Sanskrit were primarily listening to it, shaping the alphabet, the structure of words, and an exacting grammar into what they described as a collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold.

  From the late Vedic period onwards, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted what scholars Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus describe as an exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical, and religious literature in India. Sound was not merely a medium of communication. It was visualized as pervading all creation. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound.

  This phonocentric worldview had practical consequences. Because sound itself was sacred, exact phonetic expression and its preservation were part of the historic tradition. The Rigveda, the oldest surviving Sanskrit text, was transmitted orally for many centuries by methods of memorization of exceptional complexity, rigor, and fidelity. It survived as a single text without variant readings, which is why its archaic syntax and morphology remain so legible to modern linguists studying the deep history of Indo-European speech.

  The sages who preserved this tradition were not simply memorizing. They were, in their own understanding, maintaining the integrity of creation itself.

• 3. Vedic Roots and Ancient Kin

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  The hymns of the Rigveda were composed by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan, across northern Pakistan, and into northwestern India, at a time modern scholars date to roughly 1500-1200 BCE. As those tribes moved, the language they carried absorbed names of newly encountered plants and animals from the preexisting languages of the subcontinent. The ancient Dravidian languages also influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax in ways scholars are still tracing.

  The most archaic layer of Sanskrit, the Vedic variety found in the Rigveda, is strikingly similar to the earliest texts of two other ancient language families. Its hymns resemble the Gathas of Old Avestan, the sacred language of Zoroastrianism, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in Greek. According to scholars Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, the Vedic Sanskrit literature clearly inherited from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times the social structures: the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, and some of the poetic metres.

  The resemblances are not coincidental. Colonial era scholars who knew Latin and Greek were struck by the vocabulary and grammar of Sanskrit. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European by Mallory and Adams illustrates the relationship with cognate forms: Sanskrit matar for mother, pitar for father, bhratar for brother, svasar for sister, matching their Latin, Greek, and Old English equivalents down to the root. The correspondences suggest a common ancestor now called Proto-Indo-European.

  Yet Vedic Sanskrit was not isolated. A carved rock treaty between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni peoples, found in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey, contains early forms of Vedic Sanskrit in the names of Mitanni princes and in technical terms related to horse training. The treaty also invokes the gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya, names found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. Sanskrit's reach, even in its most archaic form, was already wider than the subcontinent.

• 4. Panini and the Grammar of Eternity

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  Around the 4th century BCE, a grammarian named Panini composed the Astadhyayi, literally the Eight-Chapter Grammar, and in doing so produced what scholars Benjamin Fortson and others have called one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world. It was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest to have survived complete, and it is the culmination of a long grammatical tradition.

  Panini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of Sanskrit before him: Apisali, Kasyapa, Gargya, Galava, Cakravarmana, Bharadvaja, Sakatyana, Sakalya, Senaka, and Sphotayana. He knew there was a living conversation about language that had been going on for generations. What he produced, according to Renou and Filliozat, was a classic that defines the linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language.

  The Astadhyayi contains around 4,000 grammatical rules. Panini employed a technical metalanguage with its own syntax, morphology, and lexicon, organized around a series of meta-rules, some explicit and some deducible. Despite differences from modern linguistics, his analysis was the most advanced in the world until the twentieth century. He also included in section 3.2 references to the words lipi, meaning script, and lipikara, meaning scribe, suggesting he knew of a writing system even as the grammar was likely composed or transmitted orally.

  The Classical Sanskrit that Panini formalized was, in Renou's description, not an impoverished language but a controlled and restrained one from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded. It also included what Panini called optional rules, beyond the earlier Vedic bahulam framework, to preserve liberty and creativity. Individual writers separated by geography or time could express facts and views in their own way. The result was a language capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature, as Renou put it. Panini's treatise made Sanskrit the preeminent language of Indian learning and literature for two millennia.

• 5. A Language That Travelled

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  Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the Buddhist pilgrim Faxian, who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. A later pilgrim, Xuanzang, learned Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in the 7th century, where he established a major centre of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. These were not diplomatic exchanges. They were a movement of ideas, philosophical and medical and mathematical, traveling through a language.

  Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions have since been found across an enormous geography: Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, Tibet, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Korea, and Japan. Between 300 and 1300 CE, the language sustained what the scholar Sheldon Pollock calls a Sanskrit Cosmopolis, a cultural zone that included all of South Asia and much of Southeast Asia.

  What made Sanskrit so effective as a vehicle of transmission was its precision. According to Lamotte, Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was an ideal instrument for presenting ideas. As knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. It was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas.

  In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama has noted, Sanskrit has been called legjar lhai-ka, meaning the elegant language of the gods. It was the means of transmitting the profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy to Tibet. One of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna, writing around 200 CE, used Classical Sanskrit for his texts.

  At home, the language connected scholars from distant parts of the subcontinent. Madhav Deshpande, a professor of Sanskrit linguistics, notes that Sanskrit connected those from Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, from different fields, across centuries. The Benares Sanskrit College, founded in 1791 during East India Company rule, is the oldest Sanskrit college still in existence.

• 6. Dravidian Underneath

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  Reinohl, a scholar whose work appears in the source literature on Sanskrit's structural evolution, points out that the relationship between Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages was not a one-way borrowing. The Dravidian languages borrowed Sanskrit vocabulary extensively, but they also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, particularly in phonology, where the Indo-Aryan retroflex consonants have been attributed to Dravidian influence.

  Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with a phonetic structure similar to Tamil. Hock and others, citing George Hart, go further, arguing that Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques not from each other directly, but from a common source.

  The evidence for this deeper structural overlap appears in a symmetry that holds for Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages but not for languages outside both families. A sentence in Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting the vocabulary word-for-word without modifying word order. The same operation does not work when rendering Persian or English into a non-Indo-Aryan language. The grammatical architecture is shared.

  Shulman notes that Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms shaped the usage of Sanskrit nonfinite verbs. That specific influence is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, including a large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once recognized, can be found throughout classical and postclassical Sanskrit.

  The main window of this Dravidian influence on Sanskrit was concentrated between the late Vedic period and the crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. Because the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the southern subcontinent at that point, the influence suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India, particularly in the central Gangetic plain, who were instrumental in shaping the language from within its own territory.

• 7. Decline, Debate, and Persistence

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  The decline of Sanskrit as a living literary language began in the 13th century. Sheldon Pollock characterizes this as a long-term cultural, social, and political change coinciding with Islamic invasions of South Asia and the expansion of Muslim rule through Sultanates and later the Mughal Empire. With the fall of Kashmir around the 13th century, a premier centre of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared. Pollock connects this to the fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir and to the Mongol invasion of 1320.

  The dissemination of Sanskrit literature from the northwestern regions of the subcontinent stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell, Sanskrit fell with them, though not uniformly. There were exceptions: the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar provided brief periods of imperial support. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire reversed the trend by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting a socio-linguistic identity. After colonial rule began, Sanskrit re-emerged in Bengal but in the form of, as Pollock puts it, a ghostly existence.

  Pollock argues that after the 12th century, Sanskrit literary works were reduced to reinscription and restatements of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with the previous 1,500 years when great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination marked Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit.

  Jurgen Hanneder disagrees. He finds Pollock's arguments elegant but often arbitrary, and points out that a decline in creative literature constitutes negative evidence rather than positive proof that the language died. The Sanskrit language scholar Moriz Winternitz states that Sanskrit was never a dead language, while Brian Hatcher argues there is ample proof that Sanskrit was alive in the narrow confines of surviving Hindu kingdoms between the 13th and 18th centuries.

  In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit as their mother tongue, though these numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language rather than first-language use. Today, Sanskrit is among the 22 official languages listed in the Eighth Schedule to India's Constitution. Uttarakhand made it a second official state language in 2010, and Himachal Pradesh followed in 2019.