Samskrita Bharati

Mission and motivations

The basic mission of this organization is to democratize and popularize Sanskrit by encouraging the use of simple Sanskrit in everyday conversational contexts. More recently, the organization has started to focus on the maintenance of the “mother-tongue-ness” (मातृभाषात्वम्) of Sanskrit by means of Sanskrit households.

Motivation

As its founder says, "Sanskrit is the best tool to remove the five types of social differences; linguistic, class, caste, sect and the north vs south division." A basic goal is to create a nation of Sanskrit speakers, (re)creating a national unity for India through common linguistic practice.

Another one of the main premises of the movement is to allow direct access to the vast storehouse of the Sanskrit textual tradition.

Pedagogical principles

The organization's pedagogical philosophy is based on the thought that listening and speaking must precede reading and writing. Rejecting both Western-style grammatical instruction (or more recent innovations) and Indian traditions of Sanskrit instruction emphasizing systematic memorization, Samskrita Bharati instead has focused its energies on immersion through conversation. A common aphorism used in their literature is: “Speak in Samskrit, not about Samskrit.”

This follows a theory of linguistic practice which imagines a progression from the capacity for “general communication” (simple reference and predication), through the capacity for expressing thought or reasoning (logical argumentation), culminating in the capacity for the outward manifestation of emotions.

Simplification of Sanskrit

To provide a gentle introduction to Sanskrit, Samskrita Bharati has developed a simplified variant of the language, which while conforming to Panini's grammar, focuses on the use of very regular forms for conversational purposes at initial stages. As Dr Hastings observes:

the "simple" of simple Sanskrit points to the fact that it is designed to act as a bridge between the modern vernacular(s) a simple Sanskrit learner already knows and, ideally, acquisition of the fully-elaborated Classical Sanskrit grammar... "simple Sanskrit" is a variety of the language which has been subjected to what we could call distributional simplification. That is, almost all of the differences between simple Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit are differences in the distribution of forms rather than grammatical".

Work

Samskrita Bharati is primarily a volunteer-driven organization, with volunteers from all walks of life spending time educating people to speak Sanskrit. Their most popular offering is the 10-day capsule of two-hour classes designed to impart simple Sanskrit conversational skills.

Besides this, the organization conducts the following programs:

Effectiveness

Even as he acknowledges that "end of the ten days, the participants have a reasonable command of many basic features of (simple) Sanskrit and can formulate a wide variety of expressions.", Hastings notes:

While the Sanskrit conversation camps have garnered a great degree of public visibility for the Sanskrit revival movement, they have not generated as large and dedicated a following as Samskrita Bharati would hope. The organization has a host of follow-up activities for graduates of the introductory ten-day camps, but there is a substantial attrition rate after initial exposure in the camps.

Origin

Chamu Krishna Shastry, a Sanskrit scholar from Tirupati Sanskrit College along with five of his colleagues, after graduating in Sanskrit, came up with a methodology of teaching spoken Sanskrit through the "Speak Samskritam" course with ten day capsule classes of two hours duration. Within a short span of time, this methodology became a trend blazer in the field of teaching Sanskritam. This "Speak Samskritam" Movement took off in 1981 from Bangalore city, and later "Samskrita Bharati" - a national level organization - was established in New Delhi in 1995.