IMPORTANCE OF SANSKRIT

*Sindhu Podyal

Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages of the world. As a sect Indo- Aryan language its origination and development has a long history. In the narrow sense of the term, Sanskrit language refers to the classical Sanskrit developed by the Grammarians and religiously speaking, Sanskrit represents the language of Brahmanical tradition. In ancient India it is regarded as the "Dev Bhasha", “Devavani "or the language of the Gods. But broadly speaking it is the originator of the most of the languages of India. Throughout the ages, this language has been developed and in present world situation, it has become one of the most popular languages of the world.

Sanskrit is said to be one of the Complex languages of the world. We cannot ignore the fact that Indian Philosophy has been developed with the advent and development of ancient Sanskrit language and literatures. Almost every system of Indian philosophy as well as the religion has founded all its evidence throughout the history to Sanskrit literature. Sanskrit is said to be the primary language of some Eastern religions like, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Apart from it, influence of Sanskrit can be seen in some of the languages of the western region. One of the most important factors lies in the originality underlies in the structure of this language. So it is regarded as the mother of many Indian languages.

The Vedas are regarded as the soul of Indian Philosophy. The Vedic scriptures have been accepted as a revealed body of wisdom, cosmological information and codes of social and moral obligations. Heritage of Indian Philosophy has been enriched by the scriptures and literatures developed in time to time. The Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayana, Mashabharata, the latter day developed essays and epics are also enhanced the rich cultural heritage of India. All these epics are written in Sanskrit and there are some texts which are still under ambiguity for not being able to translate it to other languages. So it had been a notion that anyone attempting to understand Hinduism should have a working knowledge of Sanskrit. And in this respect it has been ideally claimed that all Hindu educational institutions and temples should teach Sanskrit, but in due course of time these ideas become faint with the rise of the colonialism and popularity of English. This in turn gradually affects the regional ethnic roots and westernization dominated the whole sphere.

Many thinkers in the past tried to preserve this rich content of Indian heritage. Not only in India but also in the Western countries, there are thinkers who felt the urge for Sanskrit in its usefulness. For instance, I would like to quote here William Jones views on Sanskrit who holds that, “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either: yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no historical studies could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists..." . Apart from this, with the advent of technology, in twentieth century use of Sanskrit as a meta-language has been developed. For its consistent structure, Sanskrit has become a very popular tool for the machine translation and all other useful natural language processing which is popularly known as the computational linguistics in recent times.

Viewing all its popularity in the west some hold the view that Sanskrit deserves its status of National language because it is the most ancient language of the nation, and more precisely because no one claim it as mother-tongue. But whatever is the case, without entering into such discussions we can claim that just like the mighty Ganga, which has its continuous flow Sanskrit also, is ever-flowing with its own history and dignity. This is our heritage and it is the duty of every individual to give regards to our own tradition which gives us our identity as culturally and historically rich Indian so that we can do justice to our precious motherly language ‘Sanskrrit’.