Sanskrit - Across Asia and Beyond

2022

Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages in the world has many joyful takers across the globe who wants to learn the language and the Sanskritic values associated with it. Sanskrit has been the language that has led to the birth many vernaculars and other regional languages. The treasure house of Sanskrit has been recognized by the world and many corporates, heads of various countries want to speak the language and instill its values in their places. The article explores how Sanskrit has re-emerged at the global level and distributing wealth as it did in Ancient India but in a revised way.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2006

A vast corpus of Sanskrit poetry (kāvya) was produced over the last thousand years; most of these works reveal a vital and organic relation to the crystallising regional traditions of the subcontinent and to emerging vernacular literatures. Thus we have, for example, the Sanskrit literatures of Kerala, of Bengal-Orissa, of Andhra, and so on. These works, often addressed primarily to local audiences, have remained largely unknown and mostly undervalued, despite their intrinsic merits and enormous importance for the cultural history of India. We explore the particular forms of complex expressivity, including rich temporal and spatial modalities, apparent in such poems, focusing in particular on Vedānta Deśika’s Haṃsasandeśa, a fourteenth-century messenger-poem modelled after Kālidāsa’s Meghasandeśa. We hypothesise a principle: as localisation increases, what is lost in geographical range is made up for by increasing depth. Sanskrit poetry thus comes to play a critical, highly original role in the elaboration of regional cultural identities and the articulation of innovative cultural thematics; a re-conceptualised ecology of Sanskrit genres, including entirely new forms keyed to local experience, eventually appears in each of the regions. In short, rumours of the death of Sanskrit after 1000 A.D. are greatly exaggerated.

Early Interactions between South and Southeast Asia, 2011

Sanskrit makes its first appearance in inscriptions in South Asia during the early centuries of the Common Era. It then gradually takes over and becomes the inscriptional language par excellence in the whole of the South Asian subcontinent and much of Southeast Asia. For almost a thousand years Sanskrit 'rules' in this enormous domain. Sheldon Pollock (1996, 2006) speaks for this reason of the 'Sanskrit cosmopolis', which he dates approximately between ce 300 and 1300. How do we explain the strange vicissitudes of the Sanskrit language? Was it a lingua franca for trade, international business and cultural promotion? Is the spread of Sanskrit into Southeast Asia to be explained by the same reasons that also explain its spread within the Indian subcontinent? Pollock, by using the expression 'Sanskrit cosmopolis', draws attention to the political dimension of the spread of Sanskrit. One defining feature of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, he states (1996: 197), 'is that Sanskrit became the premiere instrument of political expression in the polities that comprised it, those of most of South and much of Southeast Asia'. He rightly points out that Sanskrit was not a lingua franca: 1 Sanskrit's spread was effected by traditional intellectuals and religious professionals, often following in the train of scattered groups of traders and adventurers, and carrying with them disparate and decidedly uncanonized texts of a wide variety of competing religious orders, ® Saiva, Buddhist, Vai] s] nava, and others. [...] There is little to suggest [...] that Sanskrit was an everyday medium of communication in South let alone Southeast Asia, or that [it] ever functioned as a language-of-trade, a bridge-, link-, or koiné language or lingua franca (except among those traditional intellectuals) [...]

Indo Nordic Author's Collective, 2022

There was definitely a thriving sea-trade to South East Asia in the Gupta Age 1,500 years ago. Sages like Agastya and Kaundinya did travel to faraway lands like Malaysia and Cambodia. Chola kings travelled over the sea to Sri Lanka and Malaysia to expand their empire and to increase the wealth of the land through trade routes. Even today, in Odisha, and in the island of Bali, there are festivals related to the departure and arrival of ships, reminding us of ancient travel over sea. It is this sea travel that ensured epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata, the art of shadow puppetry and weaving, reached as far as Indonesia and Thailand. India has a long history of sea travel. The major epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, do not refer to sea travel (Ram builds a bridge to go to Lanka, and Ravana flies through the air in his Pushpak Viman), but the vrata-kathas of India like Satyanarayana Puja and the Topoye story of Odisha, and Sanskrit plays like Ratnavali by Harsha, refer to sea-travels and shipwrecks. We do know that sea-merchants travelled from India to Arabia in the West in Harappan times 5,000 years ago. There are Vedic verses that suggest (but not conclusively) awareness of the sea and sea-travel nearly 3000 years ago.

A slightly updated version of the text of my keynote lecture at the 7th International Indology Graduate Research Symposium (IIGRS) on the 15th October at Leiden University, commemorating 150 years of Sanskrit studies in the Netherlands

Indo Nordic Authors' Collective, 2022

Sanskrit Khmer featuring - 3 papers on SE Asian Journey of Sanskrit

Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies, 2021

This paper explores the historical study of the Sanskrit language and its related systems of writing in ancient and medieval East Asia. It is argued that the varied availability of teachers and manuals in different time periods and environments led to uneven studies of Sanskrit in different generations. In some cases, we can point to significant understanding of Sanskrit in the writings of some monks. Although some monks had direct access to Indian teachers, the majority of students never had this opportunity, and instead relied on resources in Chinese, which primarily included word lists, rather than grammars. There is evidence for the systematic study of Sanskrit grammar, but this was apparently limited in time and faced a number of challenges. The script of Siddhaṃ became widely studied as a sacred system of writing, but I argue that this did not necessitate the learning of Sanskrit grammar.