Jayatu Samskritam – Victory to the cause of Sanskrit!

Today I would like to talk about the language Sanskrit. Now before you tune out of this article, I assure you that you will be surprised and amazed by the end of the article. So please bear with me. Sanskrit is one of the oldest languages of the world. It is a well-known fact. But we have stopped using it in everyday life since centuries now. However there are still couple of villages in India where the medium of communication remains Sanskrit. Some of them are Mattur and Hosahalli in Karnataka, Jhiri, Bhaguwar and Mohad in Madhya Pradesh, Ganoda in Rajasthan and Sasana in Odisha. If we visit these places, we will find people communicating in Sanskrit in day-to-day life including literate and illiterate men, women and children. Despite the influence of easier languages today, these places have managed to keep the language Sanskrit alive. However, if we are still talking about this language, there must be something special about it. Sanskrit is essentially the driver of all the mathematics, science, medicine, astronomy, philosophy we know from our ancestors. This is common knowledge but do you know what made Sanskrit so special as compared to other languages? All our ancient texts could have been written in any one of the plenty languages spoken during that time. But Sanskrit was chosen. We are here to explore the reasons to that and also to know how Sanskrit will benefit our own capabilities and technology.

Sanskrit and Mathematics

Did you know that every piece of text written in our scriptures required an extensive knowledge of mathematics? Every scripture, including the most commonly known ones like Ramayana and Mahabharata have been written in the form of poetry, but this poetry is based on mathematics. Poetry in any language has meters, and Sanskrit has them too. However, their usage is done in a very specific manner to bring out the technical aspects of the text. In fact, all technical, scientific, mathematical as well as philosophical text was written in such verses, so that even a child could read and understand the most technical concepts. The reason Sanskrit made a cut for the transmission of knowledge is because during the Vedic period, efficient language was the key to experiential learning and oral transmission. Like I said before, Sanskrit was written using extensive mathematics to make it easy to learn and understand.

For example, Deivagya Surya Pandita wrote the RamaKrishna Viloma Kavyam in 14th Century. It is a collection of 40 poems, which when read from first letter to the last tells the story of Sri Rama, but when read in reverse letter by letter, it tells of story of Sri Krishna. If we pick up one line from this poem, it reads:

तं भूसुतामुक्तिमुदारहासं वन्दे यतो भव्यभवम् दयाश्रीः ।

When read in the forward direction it means “I pay my homage to Him who rescued Sita, whose laughter is captivating, whose incarnation is grand, and from whom mercy and splendor arise everywhere.”

But when read in the reverse direction, it is written as:

श्रीयादवं भव्यभतोयदेवं संहारदामुक्तिमुतासुभूतम् ॥

And it means “I bow before that Sri Krishna, the descendent of Yaadava family; who is a divinity of the sun as well as the moon; who destroyed Putana who only gave destruction; and who is the soul of all this universe.”

There is also the work of Acharya Pingala, who gave us the “Matrameru” using Sanskrit. This is a concept of a pyramid of stacked numbers that converges to the golden ratio. This is much like the Pascal’s triangle, except that Pascal was thousands of years late in discovering this concept. Unfortunately, we still credit this concept to Pascal.

The Sanskrit Effect – Increased Brain Capacity!

A scientist coined the term Sanskrit Effect based on an experiment he did with several people. Dr. James Hartzell, a neuroscientist, spent many years studying and translating Sanskrit. Over the years, he noticed that his verbal memory kept getting better. He was told of similar cognitive shifts by other Sanskrit translators. In order to explore this effect, he made a study involving Vedic Pandits who recite Vedic texts of 10000 to 40000 words orally. In this study, he analyzed the effect such intense oral training had on the structure of the brain using structural MRI. The Pandits who joined this study were matched for age, gender, handedness, eye-dominance and multilingualism. The results that he received were “remarkable” according to him. He found that “several regions of the brains of the Pandits were dramatically larger, with 10% more grey matter across both cerebral hemispheres than those of the controls”. In simple words, this means that the cognitive functions of their brains were significantly enhanced. Even the region of the brain associated with long and short term memory had more grey matter than controls. Although, the exact cellular studies of the grey matter is still underway, the preliminary results are promising themselves. If you are interested in reading more about this study, you can click here for a concise view of the study and here for the article. While this may be a general language effect, it still promotes the service of Sanskrit beyond just a language.

Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence

Sanskrit is proposed to be a contender for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The aim of NLP is to promote human-machine interaction in a natural language rather than a computer language like C, Java, Python etc. so that it is easier for humans to communicate with the computer. Several natural languages are explored for this purpose like Greek, Latin, Russian etc. Putting aside the struggles in implementing the concept of NLP itself, Sanskrit is a structured language and avoids ambiguity by doing away with the fact that the word order in a sentence will change the meaning.

There is a small debunking required here. There are so many articles and news sources claiming that NASA declared Sanskrit as the most suited language for computers. This claim stems from an article by a scientist from NASA, Rick Briggs, which explores Sanskrit as a language that could be used as a computer language due to its structure and unambiguous nature. Nowhere in the article it is claimed that Sanskrit is the best language. It is one of suited languages that can be studied in this respect. I feel that this claim does more disservice to the language than promotion.

I hear most people say that Sanskrit is a dead language and it is pointless to study it or learn it. This post is aimed at countering this opinion. In addition to fulfilling the basic requirement of communication, Sanskrit offers cognitive benefits, mathematical superiority, probable avenues in computing, and the ability to write, understand and interpret complex verses. The benefits far outweigh the drag that comes with learning a new language. Today is the World Sanskrit Day, or the Vishwasamskritadinam (विश्वसंस्कृतदिनम्). It is an annual event celebrated on the Poornima day of the Shraavana month in the Hindu calendar. And I wish to honor this day with this post aimed at promoting Sanskrit as more than just another language.

Sanskrit is not going anywhere anytime soon. And it makes me really happy to share a news that I read a while back that a new OTT platform is being launched that will premiere several feature films and programs in Sanskrit! I really hope this concept becomes a successful venture! Keep learning!

Cover image credits: Von OldakQuill – Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19201310

Stay inspired, Stay satisfied, Stay Priya-fied!