Sanskrit for chatting than chanting

[Article first posted on Auroville's Intranet on 19th August 2019, adapted for this blogsite.]

Regional languages of India have so many words related to Sanskrit that if a secular story is narrated in Sanskrit people with basic education from most parts of India might figure out its general outline and even lines of humor and wisdom here and there. Outside the Indian subcontinent, European, Arabic and African languages too are known to have words similar or near similar to Sanskrit words. Unlike the widely used English and French languages which spread to many parts of the world in the recent centuries through colonisation, and therefore still resisted by lovers of native languages in the colonised countries, Sanskrit touched corners of the world through culture and trade and faces no such resistance. (An exception may be the southern State of India where people have been misled into believing in the 'Aryan-Dravidian' theory invented by British colonialists to assume for the latter an illusory past 'Aryan' greatness and divide and rule the subject people by co-opting a section of them, the uppermost castes, as descendants of 'Aryans'. Sanskrit is seen as the 'Aryan' language used for Hindu rituals and no greater role is imagined for it in the future. That Arya was a term indicating a cultural trait among the people and never meant a separate race since the Vedic times was the view of Sri Aurobindo and similar views are held by many scholars.)  

The greatest creations in philosophy, spirituality, poetry, drama, and statecraft of India have been made in Sanskrit but unfortunately, it remained a language of the elites in ancient times. The difficulty for common people to learn the language is cited as one of the reasons for the limited reach of Sanskrit. However, there are a few villages in India today where everyone speaks Sanskrit indicating that it cannot be such an impossible language as it is made out by some. The people of the Indian subcontinent developed many languages regionally drawing in varying degrees from the Sanskrit vocabulary. The Mother with her seer vision proclaimed Sanskrit as the ideal link language for modern India and advised a simple Sanskrit to be taught to every Indian child. 

The Sanskrit ought to be the national language of India.

Blessings          19 April 1971   -  The Mother (CWTM, Vol 13, Pg 375)

I attended a few Sanskrit classes, in my native village in Kerala State in my twenties and some years ago in Chennai and Auroville. It was a day-long class at Bharat Nivas, Auroville a few weeks ago. Two of the teachers of the above courses I attended were accomplished Sanskrit scholars and one of them used very modern teaching aids but I felt their methodology was conventional and tried to teach the Sanskrit of the Pandits.  

People chanting Sanskrit shlokas

In this regard, I find the Sanskrit education by Samskrita Bharati far ahead and more in tune with the Mother's vision. When volunteers of the organisation came to the outreach Institute where I was teaching some years ago and proposed to conduct a 10-day Spoken Sanskrit class free of cost I got it organised for interested students. Even though all the students of the Institute were from the bio-region undergoing technician courses, to my pleasant surprise, they were keen to attend the course. The teachers taught them Sanskrit names of everyday use and how to form sentences. By the end of the course I could see that something in the Sanskrit language had put the students in touch with an inner region of peace and harmony and whatever misconception they had of the language must have changed. Years later I personally attended another spoken Sanskrit course by Samskrita Bharati held in Chennai and it was even better.   

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Youth chatting in Bengaluru

About Samskrita Bharati, excerpted from Wikipedia:

The basic mission of this organization is to democratize and popularize Sanskrit by encouraging the use of simple Sanskrit in everyday conversational contexts.[2] 

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The organization's pedagogical philosophy is based on the idea that listening and speaking must precede reading and writing.[2] Rejecting both Western-style grammatical instruction (or more recent innovations) and Indian traditions of Sanskrit instruction emphasizing systematic memorization, Samskrita Bharati instead has focused its energies on immersion through conversation.[1] A common aphorism used in their literature is: "Speak in Samskrit, not about Samskrit." [4]

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Samskrita Bharati is primarily a volunteer-driven organization, with volunteers from all walks of life spending time educating people to speak Sanskrit. Their most popular offering is the 10-day capsule of two-hour classes designed to impart simple Sanskrit conversational skills.[2]

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Website for Samskrita Bharati Classes