Spoken Sanskrit

[veeranarayana Pandurangi]

dear friends,
it is too much imaginative to think that one day non sanskritists will be
butchered. you can ask a typical communal riotist for example whether he has
any distant knowledge of sanskrit or not.  No body of these riotors has sent
his son or dauthter to study the sanskrit, I am sure. But many of these
people make a big announcement on sanskrit, of course. but not the really
related with it.


on the contrary those spreading vilolence etc. have different mottos and the
people spreading sanskrit awareness are from really other backgrounds,
mostly from educational. even many people from other communities (christia
etc) are also involved in this kind of creating awareness, many I know from
kerala itself. The sanskrit education itself is for world peace and not for
violence. those doing this kind of propogation get nothing in return
(monitory or otherwise). they are working on the theme to cultural unitary
identity of india just for there interest and nothing else.

one more interesting fact is even sanskrit universities use the spoken
sanskrit program to educate their first year students (from other
background) in sanskrit in initial days. that makes them free to mingle with
sanskrit students easily and understand the classes.
veera
On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Maheswaran Nair
<swantam at asianetindia.com>wrote:

> 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.
>>>
>>


-- 
Veeranarayana N.K. Pandurangi
Head, Dept of Darshanas,
Yoganandacharya Bhavan,
Jagadguru Ramanandacharya Rajasthan Samskrita University, Madau, post
Bhankrota, Jaipur, 302026.