Was the Kaaba in Mecca once a Shivling? Unfortunately, the history behind this is far more prosaic. The founding language of the family from which Sanskrit is from is called Proto-Indo-European. These steppe people, representing what is called the Andronovo culture, first appear just before BC.
From this Central Asian homeland diverged a group of people who had now stopped speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian and were now conversing in the earliest forms of Sanskrit. Some of these people moved west towards what is now Syria and some east towards the region of the Punjab in India.
David Anthony writes that the people who moved west were possibly employed as mercenary charioteers by the Hurrian kings of Syria. These charioteers spoke the same language and recited the same hymns that would later on be complied into the Rig Veda by their comrades who had ventured east. These Rigvedic Sanskrit speakers usurped the throne of their employers and founded the Mitanni kingdom.
While they gained a kingdom, the Mitanni soon lost their culture, adopting the local Hurrian language and religion. However, royal names, some technical words related to chariotry and of course the gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas stayed on. The group that went east and later on composed the Rig Veda , we know, had better luck in preserving their culture. The language and religion they bought to the subcontinent took root. So much so that 3, years later, modern Indians would celebrate the language of these ancient pastoral nomads all the way out in Bangkok city.
India's new government focus on Sanskrit has sparked a fresh debate over the role language plays in the lives of the country's religious and linguistic minorities. Inside a brightly lit classroom at Delhi's Laxman Public school, a group of students sing a Sanskrit hymn. Across the corridor, in another classroom, a group of grade eight students are being taught Vedic Mathematics, which dates back to a time in ancient India when Sanskrit was the main language used by scholars.
It is all part of Sanskrit week - a celebration of the classical language across hundreds of schools mandated by India's new federal right-wing government. Why not in India? Sanskrit is a language which belongs to the Indo-Aryan group and is the root of many, but not all Indian languages.
It's one of the official languages in only one Indian state, Uttarakhand in the north, which is dotted with historical Hindu temple towns. According to the last census, 14, people described Sanskrit as their primary language, with almost no speakers in the country's north-east, Orissa, Jammu and Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and even Gujarat.
In schools, it is only offered as an optional language, with most students preferring to choose more relevant languages, including French, German and even Mandarin, which are seen as more appropriate in a globalised world.
It is also often taught very badly. Like many Indians, I studied Sanskrit in high school. Hindu Puranas, a genre of Indian literature that includes myths and legends, fall into the period of Classical Sanskrit.
Drama as a distinct genre of Sanskrit literature emerged in the final centuries BCE, influenced partly by Vedic mythology. Famous Sanskrit dramatists include Shudraka, Bhasa, Asvaghosa, and Kalidasa; their numerous plays are still available, although little is known about the authors themselves. Works of Sanskrit literature, such as the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali, which are still consulted by practitioners of yoga today, and the Upanishads , a series of sacred Hindu treatises, were translated into Arabic and Persian.
Sanskrit fairy tales and fables were characterized by ethical reflections and proverbial philosophy, with a particular style making its way into Persian and Arabic literature and exerting influence over such famed tales as One Thousand and One Nights , better known in English as Arabian Nights.
Poetry was also a key feature of this period of the language. Kalidasa was the foremost Classical Sanskrit poet, with a simple but beautiful style, while later poetry shifted toward more intricate techniques including stanzas that read the same backwards and forwards, words that could be split to produce different meanings, and sophisticated metaphors.
Sanskrit is vital to Indian culture because of its extensive use in religious literature, primarily in Hinduism, and because most modern Indian languages have been directly derived from, or strongly influenced by, Sanskrit. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment in ancient India, and it was taught mainly to members of the higher castes social groups based on birth and employment status. In the medieval era, Sanskrit continued to be spoken and written, particularly by Brahmins the name for Hindu priests of the highest caste for scholarly communication.
Today, Sanskrit is still used on the Indian Subcontinent. More than 3, Sanskrit works have been composed since India became independent in , while more than 90 weekly, biweekly, and quarterly publications are published in Sanskrit.
Sudharma , a daily newspaper written in Sanskrit, has been published in India since
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