The Second Life of Sanskrit

A small tribe of Sanskrit-speakers is tending the language the way you tend a fire you did not light, feeding it with what you have. Samashti Gubbi, called sanskritsparrow on Instagram, has perhaps the most daring approach. When she’s not rapping in Sanskrit, she curates Sunday mornings at Cubbon Park, in the centre of Bengaluru, where people gather to speak Sanskrit while they walk, play antakshari with subhasitas, count in the language and take a sun-kissed group photograph she inevitably tags suryachumbitam. She also runs a WhatsApp group with nearly a thousand members that goes by the name Kimbho— roughly meaning “what’s up”. The spoken-Sanskrit movement has, after all, always minted words for the world as it finds it— sanganakah for computer, duravani for telephone—and the new wave simply extends the mint to its own life, so that prajwalitam now does the work of lit.FOR GUBBI, WHAT began as a walk is now Kimbho Sanskrit Riders’ Club. The next one is scheduled for the second week of August. You ride a motorcycle from Bengaluru to a coffee estate in Kodagu and spend two nights speaking Sanskrit at the pitstops, during chai breaks, “while we eat, walk, ride, play games, sing”.The language has even taken to the streets at a run. At the Tata Mumbai Marathon in January, 21 runners from Samskrita Bharati—the four-decade-old movement whose standing offer is that you can learn to communicate in Sanskrit in 10 days—ran under the theme of 150 years of Vande Mataram, while volunteers called out slogans in Sanskrit to the passing thousands.When the Sanskrit Club at IIT Roorkee ran a free online spoken-Sanskrit course through 108 subhasitas—nuggets of wisdom—14,000 people registered, more than half of them in the 18-40 age band. For some who take up the language it is because of heritage, plain and warm; for others it is a Hindu-nationalist project.

What is not in dispute is that it has gone from being seen as archaic to cool, and that it has shifted the fastest where the young already live: on their phones and in the unlikeliest classrooms.Sanskrit’s public afterlife is much larger than the sum of those who claim it to be their native tongue. In the 2011 Census, only 24,821 Indians cited Sanskrit as their mother tongue, almost a statistical blip in a country of more than a billion. But the formal Sanskrit establishment is far from small. Central Sanskrit University alone lists 13 campuses, 260 affiliated institutions and 118 programmes. India promotes Sanskrit through three Central universities with grants for the promotion of Indian languages rising to `347.03 crore in 2025-26, and the Indian Knowledge Systems Division, set up under the Ministry of Education in 2020, now listing 91 centres, from IITs and Sanskrit universities to Ayurveda schools and cultural trusts. The new Sanskrit revival is at once a state project, an online market and, increasingly, a language trying to acquire users after having long possessed custodians.Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Mann Ki Baat programme Language is the carrier of values and traditions of any civilisation. Some young people are now fulfilling their duty towards Sanskrit as well. Culture and social media have lent the language ‘a new life-breath’,” says Narendra Modi, Prime MinisterThere is, equally, a revival of interest in serious literary and philosophical works in Sanskrit, argues Radhavallabh Tripathi, poet, critic and one of India’s foremost Sanskrit scholars. “There is a renewed interest in modern Sanskrit writings,” he says, “and particularly in very serious writings, philosophical writings,” citing the example of Sachchidananda Mishra, member-secretary of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, who has written a Sanskrit work on Carvaka philosophy, treating its epistemology, ontology and logic as a serious intellectual system. Tripathi has just translated into Hindi the early 20th-century scholar Ramavatar Sharma, whose work attempted to propose a seventh philosophical system after the six classical Vedic systems.The second revival, he says, is literary. Sanskrit is not merely being translated into Indian languages; Indian languages are also being translated into Sanskrit.

New journals, children’s books, poems, essays, radio plays, ghazals and even Dalit poetry in Sanskrit are appearing. Younger writers, many of them between 20 and 40, are translating Dalit and tribal poetry from Hindi, Gujarati, Manipuri and other languages into Sanskrit. He names Rushiraj Jani and others among a generation of writers expanding the range of the language. There are, he says, around a hundred Sanskrit periodicals and magazines still in circulation, with a readership of their own.This, to Tripathi, is proof that Sanskrit has not frozen into antiquity. It has continued to borrow, absorb and remake itself. He gives the example of Harshdev Madhav, the Gujarati-Sanskrit poet who has written haiku, tanka and sijo in Sanskrit, bringing Japanese and Korean forms into the language.In most modern Indian languages, the language of a century ago may already feel distant. But a serious student of Sanskrit can move from Kalidasa to a modern Sanskrit poet without the same rupture. Panini’s grammar, especially the Astadhyayi, allowed change without dismantling the structure of the language. This, he believes, explains the renewed global and Indian interest in Panini.According to Tripathi, the problem of Sanskrit being narrowed to religion is a colonial inheritance. British Orientalists, he argues, created an image of Sanskrit as the language of ritual and one religious community, ignoring its vast Buddhist, Jain, Carvaka, scientific, theatrical, poetic and philosophical corpus. He gives the example of AB Keith, who wrote on Sanskrit literature and drama in the early 20th century while, Tripathi says, modern Sanskrit periodicals were publishing nationalist and anti-colonial writing. Such writing, he argues, was left out of the story. He is equally critical of present-day state of enthusiasm for Sanskrit when it amounts only to glorifying the past.Sanskrit is also finding a new life inside computers. In the machine-learning world, texts like the Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Puranas are being turned into datasetsThere is a useful parallel in the recent fortunes of Greek and Latin. In the West, the classical languages have acquired new fandoms through translation, publishing, pedagogy and the internet.

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, published in 2011 and awarded the Orange Prize in 2012, found takers nearly a decade later through BookTok. By 2022, reports put its sales at more than two million copies. Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, published in 2017, was the first complete English translation of the poem by a woman, and her Iliad followed in 2023, turning Homeric translation into an unusually public literary argument about fidelity, violence and slavery. The trend has continued into the present. Penguin Classics’ 2025 volume The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse brought Sappho, Horace, Catullus and their world into a large new anthology, while Laura Spinney’s Proto traced the prehistory of the Indo-European family to which Sanskrit, Greek and Latin all belong.What has changed, then, is that while Greek and Latin have not suddenly become mass languages again, the old chain of custody—school, university, commentary, translation—has been joined by platforms, apps, recommendation engines and computational tools. A language need not be widely spoken to become newly visible, newly teachable and newly desired.On October 26 last year, in the 127th instalment of Mann Ki Baat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi devoted a passage to Sanskrit’s afterlife on the phone. Sanskrit, he told the nation, had been “a language of communication” before the centuries of servitude and the neglect that outlasted Independence, and now the young were giving it back. He named them one by one, a strange roll-call for a head of government: Yash Salunke, whose short videos splice the language into Gen Z comedy; the anonymous humourist behind the Instagram channel Sanskrit Chhatroham; Gubbi, who “presents her Sanskrit songs in myriad ways”; Bhavesh Bhimnathani, who explains shlokas; and the sisters Kamala and Jahnavi. “

Language is the carrier of the values and traditions of any civilisation,” Modi said. “Some young people are now fulfilling their duty towards Sanskrit as well.” Culture and social media, he concluded, had lent the language “a new life-breath”.Harshdev Madhav, a Sahitya Akademi Award winning poet and writer, says Sanskrit may even be more popular the world over than many other Indian languages. “My Sanskrit works have been translated into 22 languages across the world but my Gujarati poems haven’t travelled much.” Thanks to modernising forces like Madhav, Sanskrit is adapting to the times, tackling subjects like corruption, modern history and feminism in ever-new literary forms. Madhav has just published science fiction in Sanskrit, adding to his impressive corpus of 180 books, including books on tantra, children’s literature, poetry, novels and stories. Hundreds of research papers have been written about his work. “We are reviving our language with new words and even new poetics,” he says, reciting an ironic couplet he wrote on Rajghat. “In the 20th century, 200 mahakavyas or epics were written in Sanskrit. In the past 20 years alone, there have been at least 400 major literary works in Sanskrit. No one has the patience to read epics anymore. And Sanskrit can produce amazing short literature. It’s a pity that only a very small part of contemporary literature finds its way into curricula.” That’s changing. One of his poems made it into the UGC curriculum and the Andhra Pradesh middle school curriculum includes some of his stories.AS Prasad, of the Centre for Sanskrit Learning at IIT Bombay, says the centre began a spoken- Sanskrit outreach programme in Powai in 2022 with the ambition of Sahasramukhesu samskratam— Sanskrit in a thousand mouths. Prasad says there are now more than 1,500 people in Powai learning the language “not from a grammar-first approach but through spoken communication”. “We are building an ecosystem of Sanskrit speakers,” he says.