Spoken Sanskrit

[Rasik Vihari Joshi Tripathi]

Dear Hart,
Do you know that there are fourteen Sanskrit Vidyapeetha in India, and
six Sanskrit universities in Varanasi,Tirupati, Delhi,Jaipur etc.  where
sanskrit is the media of teaching and all Professors and students speak
Sanskrit. My mother toung was Sanskrit. My father Pandit Rampratap
Shastri was Professor and Head of the Departrment of Sanskrit at the
Nagpur university and I learnt Sanskrit with him as a  child and then at
Varanasi I studied upto Shastri degree. I took my first Ph.D. in India
and second at Sorbonne.I have  composed and published 15 Sanskrit Kavyas
I still speak Sanskrit fluently. My latest Sanskrit Kavya is Satyam
Universl Truth). I wonder if you have met any Professor or student of
these institutions? With best regards,
Rasik Vihari Joshi


-----Mensaje original-----
De: Indology [mailto:INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk] En nombre de George Hart
Enviado el: Lunes, 11 de Agosto de 2008 09:07 a.m.
Para: INDOLOGY at liverpool.ac.uk
Asunto: Re: Spoken Sanskrit


I myself once encountered someone from Karnataka who lived in the  
village where "Sanskrit" is spoken.  It was a dumbed-down language not  
much resembling (in my opinion) the eloquent tongue used by Kalidasa  
and Sankara -- or even the epics.  It dispenses with such frills as  
the dual and many verb forms.  I asked him if he had read Sanskrit  
literature -- poetry, darsana, whatever.  He seemed nonplussed by the  
question -- he spoke Sanskrit; why should he read Kalidasa?  I felt he  
was entirely ignorant of the intellectual grandeur and scope of the  
language and spoke it (or his version of it) merely to make a  
statement.  I would remark parenthetically that the use of Sanskrit in  
a Malayalam historical novel I once read -- including 3-line Sanskrit  
compounds -- was far more sophisticated than this "Sanskrit" speaker  
could have managed.  If he had studied the literature of Kannada --  
which I suspect was his real native language -- his Sanskrit would  
certainly have been much better.  George Hart

On Aug 11, 2008, at 12:47 AM, veeranarayana Pandurangi wrote:

> dear friends,
> welcome to such new studies.
> but is is difficult for a naiyayika to imagine ritual transformation
> of
> household in the context of modern sanskrit revivalism. Since I know
> personally many sanskrit families here, it is nothing but some kind of
> national revivalism.
> thanks
> veeranarayana
>
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 10:01 PM, Dominik Wujastyk
> <ucgadkw at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>> There's an interesting set of reflections on the topic here:
>>
>> Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
>> June 2008, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 24-45
>> Posted online on July 28, 2008.
>> (doi:10.1111/j.1548-1395.2008.00002.x)
>>
>> Licked by the Mother Tongue: Imagining Everyday Sanskrit at Home
>> and in the
>> World
>> by Adi Hastings
>>
>> Abstract:
>> This paper examines the ways in which Sanskrit revivalists in
>> contemporary
>> India imagine social contexts for the production and reproduction of
>> Sanskrit speech. In contrast to the received view of Sanskrit as  
>> being a
>> ritual language par excellence, opposed at every step to the  
>> domestic sphere
>> and everyday life, Sanskrit revivalists treat Sanskrit as a "mother  
>> tongue,"
>> figuring the home as the primary site for the creation of an  
>> "everyday
>> Sanskrit" world and the mother as the primary agent of this process  
>> of
>> Sanskritizing the domestic sphere. "Domesticating Sanskrit," the  
>> process of
>> bringing the elevated ritual language down into everyday life, at  
>> the very
>> same time "Sanskritizes the domestic," that is, ritually transforms  
>> or
>> elevates the home into a "Sanskrit home." Moving outward from the
>> Sanskritized domestic sphere, activists also imagine other contexts  
>> in which
>> one could use Sanskrit, which nonetheless conforms to a notion of a  
>> Sanskrit
>> interiority or domesticity.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dr Dominik Wujastyk
>> Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow
>> University College London
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Veeranarayana N.K. Pandurangi
> Head, Dept of Darshanas,
> Yoganandacharya Bhavan,
> Jagadguru Ramanandacharya Rajasthan Samskrita University, Madau, post
> Bhankrota, Jaipur, 302026.