Sanskrit Rises Anew
Deep inside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a recent Wednesday evening, a dozen students gathered to speak an arcane ancient tongue. “It is time for exams, and I play every day,” says one. “Perhaps you should study, too,” counters another. The others laugh.
No, this isn’t Latin 101. This is Sanskrit, a classical language often called the Indian equivalent of ancient Greek or Latin.
Most people think of Sanskrit as frozen in chants or dusty manuscripts. But here it is being spoken—casually, playfully, even jokingly. It’s like discovering Latin being used to discuss cafeteria food. The class at MIT wasn’t just about language; it was about reclaiming vitality.
Today, spoken Sanskrit is enjoying a quiet revival—both in India and among Indian expatriates in the United States. There’s even evidence of Sanskrit surfacing in American popular culture, as more and more people roll out yoga mats at the local gym and greet one another with “Namaste.”
Soon, the conversation at the MIT class turns to summer plans. Most attendees are graduate students. Lavanya Marla, pursuing a PhD in transportation engineering, says the informal setting is a welcome break from science. “Plus, the homework is easy,” she adds, compared to the regular problem sets she works on.
Among the other participants are a French postdoctoral physicist (who joined out of curiosity and stayed), an eleventh-grader from Lexington High School, and a self-described “old Yankee” from Salem, Massachusetts, who has taught himself Sanskrit script.
Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago have long offered Sanskrit courses to undergraduates. But demand is growing beyond academic settings. A decade-long economic boom has brought Indians a measure of prosperity—and with it, renewed pride in the nation’s past. Much of the Sanskrit revival stems from the efforts of Samskrita Bharati, a volunteer-based organization headquartered in New Delhi. Its mission: to bring this pan-Indian language back to the mainstream and lay the groundwork for a cultural renaissance.
“There were many reasons for the decline of Sanskrit,” says Chamu Krishna Shastry, who founded Samskrita Bharati in 1981, “but one of the foremost was the unimaginative way it was taught since [British] colonial times.” Later, in a newly democratic India, the language—associated with upper-caste Brahmin priests—held little appeal for the masses. The current movement aims to teach the “language of the gods” to anyone who wishes to learn.
In India today, Sanskrit is mostly known as the written language of religion and metaphysics. Hindus—who make up 80 percent of the population—typically know some Sanskrit prayers by heart. Those who marry by the ceremonial sacred fire recite their vows in Sanskrit. Traces of the ancient language can be found in nearly all of the 15 modern Indian languages. (Some pure Sanskrit words have also made their way into English.)
“To dispel the notion that the language was nonliving and difficult to learn,” Shastry says, “we decided to teach basic spoken Sanskrit in 10 days—and to teach through Sanskrit only.”
An eager network of volunteers experimented with this method, teaching groups in villages, cities, and abroad through Indian expatriates.
“We now hold classes even in prisons,” Shastry adds.
When the movement began, there was no money for printed flyers, so publicity relied strictly on word-of-mouth. Volunteers performed sidewalk skits on 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 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, Shastry says. 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 places like San Jose, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Dallas, San Diego, and Chicago. Requests are coming in from other U.S. cities as well.
Like Latin and Greek, Sanskrit eventually became the language of scholars as dialects spread in medieval times, notes David Shulman of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When the British Raj began in 1757, English slowly replaced Sanskrit.
Yoga practitioners in the U.S. are now seeking out the authentic Sanskrit names of poses—such as “downward dog” or “spinal twist”—and the philosophy behind the practice, as spelled out in the Yoga Sutras, the original treatise written in Sanskrit thousands of years ago. Science-history buffs see old works in Sanskrit as treasure troves of ancient knowledge in astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, and metallurgy.
When Copernicus announced that the sun was the center of the universe in 1543, it marked a defining moment for Western science. In Samskrita Bharati’s recently released Pride of India—a compilation offering a glimpse into India’s scientific heritage—Sanskrit scholars point to calculations from A.D. 499 that suggest 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, Gothic German, and Latin—and is thus one of the ancestors of English. More like a great-great-aunt, perhaps. This helps 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. Sanskrit words became permanent fixtures in English through cultural interactions between East and West since the Middle Ages, he adds.
Some of the Sanskrit words in English you already know include: avatar, karma, guru, juggernaut, pundit, mantra, and nirvana.Read the entire story here.pdf.
Also, an article about my Sanskrit teacher at MIT — we didn’t really know he was a space physicist who had traveled to the North & South Poles.
A Hidden Double Life
As students we thought we were learning from a volunteer language enthusiast. But our instructor was a researcher who probes the upper atmosphere, measuring the shimmering lights that dance across polar skies (solar particles + Earth’s magnetic field + atmospheric atoms = aurora). His research took him to the literal ends of the earth but evening every week, he came to a classroom in Cambridge and patiently guided beginners like me through declensions and verbs of Sanskrit.That juxtaposition—cosmic physics by day, Sanskrit by night—gave the class its quiet magic. It wasn’t just about grammar; it was about seeing how knowledge traditions, ancient and modern, could coexist in one person. For Duggirala, Sanskrit wasn’t a relic. He taught it as spoken, playful, alive. In his class, students joked in Sanskrit, gossiped in Sanskrit and talked about internships and vacation plans in Sanskrit. The MIT classroom became a space where Sanskrit shed its solemn associations and reemerged as a language of everyday life.
This approach echoed the mission of Samskrita Bharati, the volunteer movement he was part of. Founded in 1981, the organization set out to revive Sanskrit by teaching it conversationally, in villages, cities, prisons, and diaspora communities. Duggirala’s MIT class was one node in that global network, but it was a node that hints at possibilities. of ancient languages spoken in modern halls, of scientists doubling as storytellers, of old knowledge traditions finding new life in unexpected places.
In the end, the MIT Sanskrit class wasn’t just about language — the man leading it had traveled to the geographic poles of the earth, studied the aurora, and still found time to teach an ancient tongue. It was about realizing that vitality can be reclaimed—in science, in culture, and in the words we speak.
