Sanskrit may be ancient, but for Avinash Varna, it’s far from dead.
Varna, a graduate student who is pursuing a doctorate in electrical engineering, began studying the ancient Indian language when he was 12 and living in India. Two years later he was volunteering to write Sanskrit language exams for the Indian government.
Now Varna, 23, is helping to spread Sanskrit around the world as the language experiences an international revival.
As president of UMD Samskritam, Varna is overseeing the group’s promotion of spoken Sanskrit in the Washington metropolitan area. He also led the group in its launch of SpeakSanskrit.org, an online resource with the goal of filling the web’s void of guidance for Sanskrit students, he said.
“Although you experience difficulties as you start learning, once you learn the basics, it only grows more and more beautiful, like some pattern which appears more beautiful as you can see the intricate details,” Varna said.
Once a project of student organization Develop Empower and Synergize India, UMD Samskritam now works in conjunction with Samskrita-Bharati, one of the premier international organizations promoting spoken Sanskrit today.
Beginner Sanskrit speakers can visit SpeakSanskrit.org to hear and speak the language by first listening to audio files of Sanskrit stories, songs, and parts of a morning conversation. Varna says the best way to learn a language is like parents teach their children to hear and speak it before learning how to read and write it.
More than 250 members have posted on the website’s forum with comments about Sanskrit grammar and links to speeches in Sanskrit, and more than 1,100 members receive event information through its listserv, said Arun Sankar, a UMD Samskritam founding member and former vice-president.
“We thought we can do much more things, do much more than other sites were doing,” Sankar said.
As one of India’s oldest languages, Vedic Sanskrit served as the foundation for Hindi and most of the country’s other modern languages beginning in 1700 B.C. Two hundred years later, Classical Sanskrit was used less for conversation and more for religious and educational purposes, as shown in the ancient texts of the Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh faiths and in the epic poems Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Even still, the language was slowly dying, as its limitation to texts led it to be seen as archaic, according to Uma Saini, director of Johns Hopkins University’s Language Teaching Center.
However, this generation has a newfound appreciation for the language. Currently, 36 universities in North America offer Sanskrit studies courses, although this university does not.
“It is not just for one person,” Saini said. “It has become a universal language so that we [Sanskrit speakers] can become one family.”
Sanskrit has become the second most popular Indian language offered in U.S. colleges, according to a 2002 enrollment study by the Modern Language Association. From 1998 to 2002, total Sanskrit course enrollment increased by about 34 percent.
To spread the language throughout the D.C. area, UMD Samskritam now works in conjunction with Samskrita-Bharati to lead Sanskrit study groups and workshops.
This year the university group also set up a website and online registration for Samskrita-Bharati’s June Shraddhaa, a five-day language camp in Saylorsburg, Pa. Five of these camps have been held so far on the East Coast, said Giri Bharathan, Samskritam-Bharati volunteer and East Coast event coordinator.
“We are slowly building a new set of people who can converse, who will tell others, ‘Sanskrit is a language that can be used for day-to-day activities,’ like e-mails or conveying ideas to one another,” Bharathan said.
Contact reporter Christina Lee at newsdesk@dbk.umd.edu.
