On Learning the Language of the Gods

I have had few words to write of late. I have been learning to speak Sanskrit, a language so magnificently rich and dense with meaning that anything I write looks impoverished and has me leaning on the Delete button constantly.

An extraordinarily patient neighbor recently began teaching a 10-day spoken Sanskrit class to a dozen students. Her class is part of a city-wide blitz by Sanskritam Bharati to popularize the language and blast the myth that it is boring and outdated. Apparently, 108 (an auspicious number, indeed) similar workshops are being hosted around Bangalore.

A lot of Western-educated Indians pooh-pooh Sanskrit as being too fuddy-duddy. Given that many Indians have a natural predilection for snobbery and being holier-than-thou, I thought Sanskrit would have great snob appeal. But it is not the Louis Vuitton of languages one would expect it to be.

Sanskrit and Hindi have a reputation for being difficult to get high exam scores in. Hence a lot of returning NRIs who give their children names such as Aishvarya and Agastya come back to steep their children in Indian culture but opt for French as Ash and Gus's second language in schools.

Hindi and Sanskrit at least open windows to Indian culture. But French…? It’s a language only important to ze French. I hate to think of legions of Indians shutting themselves off from the wealth of their linguistic heritage and laboring through years of French at school only so they can finally order butter-soaked food in Paris in an accent that still won’t get them the attention and respect of insufferable French waiters. As some of my French friends themselves would say with hands tossed to the heavens, “Pfffffffffffff!”

I’ve always been curious about Sanskrit. I love the sonorous rhythms of its shlokas, and the compound words that are composed of lots of words coalescing together. Each Sanskrit word is like a gem with many glinting facets of imagery. Like other Indo-European languages such as Latin, Sanskrit has root words through which other words are created when certain affixes are attached to them. Learn these endings and prefixes, and you’re a wordsmith! And Sanskrit isn’t finicky about word order in a sentence, so you can say “She writes a blog” and “Blog she writes” and be perfectly correct.

Having sipped a bit of the language of the gods, I can understand a teeny bit of the powerful poetry of its shlokas. Let me share an amazing shloka that hit me in the face this week:
Samudravasane devi, parvata-stana-mandale.
Vishnupatni namastubhyam,
Paada-sparsham kshamasva-me.

My translation:
O goddess, draped with oceans, and with mountains for breasts,
I bow to you, O wife of Vishnu. And pardon me for touching you with my feet.

This is a prayer to be said to the earth goddess as you wake up in the morning, before you set your petty feet on her glorious body.