A timeless language

Science and technology may be able to do what the arts could not for Sanskrit

On December 24, a days-long event billed as the “world’s first Samskritam hackathon” kicked off online, organised by IIT-Roorkee along with Samskrit Promotion Foun­dation and Samskrita Bharati’s Canada and US chapters. TA-RG-ET Samskritam aims to combine technology and the Sanskrit language to develop web and mobile-based teaching aids (TA), recreational games (RG) and educational tools (ET). Nearly a thousand participants from various countries registered to take part, according to Harsh Thakkar, who heads Samskrita Bharati Canada.

For too long, Sanskrit has been dismissed as an exotic or fossilised language, fit only for religious ceremonies, even though ancient Indian scientific and mathematical treatises have been composed in the language. If Sanskrit withered during colonial rule, the neglect continued in independent India. Years of Sanskrit news bulletins on All India Radio, stories about a Karnataka village whose residents converse in the language, or a handful of feature films have failed to pull Sanskrit out of its quaint, niche status.

Now, science and technology may be able to do what the arts could not. Scientific institutions like the IITs are in the game — for instance, IIT Roorkee has a Sanskrit Club, which initiated the TARGET hackathon. Earlier this year, IIT Indore introduced a pioneering course to teach the original, Sanskrit versions of Indian texts in various fields like astronomy, metallurgy, medicine, plant science and mathematics. Hundreds of students, researchers and professionals from around the world signed up for the inaugural course on Bhaskaracharya’s mathematical treatise Lilavati, composed a thousand years ago. The head of IIT Indore, Professor Neelesh Kumar was quoted saying in news reports that the aim was to “reconnect people with this language, not just as a hobby, but as a necessity as it comes with a blend of technology”.

Earlier this month, the University of Toronto’s journal reported that Libbie Mills, teacher of an introductory course on Sanskrit, was surprised to find a number of her students were computer science majors. One of them, Paul Thomas, explained he had taken the course due to its connection to coding: “It’s a lot of syntax, which is the structure of programming itself. Classical Sanskrit is an engineered language.”

Many of Sanskrit’s modern votaries are from the information technology sector. When I interviewed Ravishankar Venkateshwaran, director of the first Sanskrit feature-length animation film Punyakoti, which debuted on Netflix this year, he told me he was introduced to the language during a workshop on Sanskrit at Infosys, his previous employer. “They said you can take this algorithm and apply it to create grammar for any other language — this is such a big, open source thinking! I thought if any other country had a language like this, they would celebrate it and how come I didn’t know for 40 years of my educated life that we were owners of such a rich thing?” Ravishankar told me.

Another high-profile advocate is Manjul Bhargava, the 2014 winner of the Fields Medal, popularly called the Nobel Prize for mathematics. During a visit to Chennai in 2016, I attended a couple of his lectures, where he described how mathematical insights in ancient India came from Sanskrit poets and musicians trying to work out the possible number of permutations in which to arrange their compositions. I also attended his Fields Medal Symposium lecture in Toronto, where he referred to what we all learn as the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, as the Virahanka-Fibonacci sequence, in a nod to the 6th century Indian poet-mathematician who detailed the sequence about six centuries before the Italian. In his talks, the Canadian-born Bhargava, who teaches at Princeton University as well as a few Indian universities, often refers to various scholars, including Hemachandra, Gopala and Pingala, whose mathematical discoveries are largely ignored, even in India.

When I met him in Toronto, Bhargava said, “Where do scientists in India learn their science? They tend to use western textbooks. So…they genuinely don’t know. Of course, a lot of sanskritists do know, a lot of poets and musicians do know, but they are not interacting with scientists regularly.”

The aim of organisations like Samskrita Bharati, which promotes the study of Sanskrit throughout India and abroad, is to bridge that gap and bring the language back into the mainstream. In Canada, Sanskrit is now taught in schools in major cities like Toronto, Mississauga and Brampton.

When I went to high school, I was fortunate enough to study Sanskrit for four years through Class 5-8. At my school in Salem, Tamil Nadu, it was a compulsory language, along with English, Tamil and Hindi. So fascinated was I with Sanskrit that I wanted to pursue it in college. But the lack of professional prospects deterred me then. The opportunities that didn’t exist in the 20th century are gradually emerging in the new millennium as people compute that this ancient language is timeless.

The writer is a Toronto-based journalist