Spoken Sanskrit

[Maheswaran Nair]

Hello,

  In Malayalam, my native tongue, 60 to 70 percent words of the  
language of an educated Malayalee are Sanskrit. In many Indian  
languages the state of this affair will slightly change. Such people  
need not make Sanskrit their spoken language. There is hidden agenda  
behind popularising spoken Sanskrit. Hindu revivalists and  
communalists are popularising it. They have organizations for the  
same. At times of mass murders of people belonging to other religions  
there is need to distinguish them. "Interested parties" have plans to  
make Sanskrit the national language of India. A time may come when  
during purposely created communal riots, the question will be put  
"bhavaan samskrtam janaati kim?" Those who reply in the affirmative in  
Sanskrit will be spared and others will be butchered.
I am also fluent in Sanskrit and have evolved an easy  method for  
teaching Spoken Sanskrit, not the spoken Sanskrit popularised by the  
revivalists which is like "adya kati iddali bhakshitam?" "adya chayam  
piitam kim?".
Regards
K.Maheswaran Nair
Professor of Sanskrit
University of Kerala
India



Quoting George Hart <glhart at BERKELEY.EDU>:

> 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.