Classical Sanskrit

01Panini of Shalatura

Panini was born at Shalatura near Takshashila and is usually placed around the 5th or 4th century BCE. His Ashtadhyayi, ‘eight chapters’, describes the whole language in nearly four thousand sutras, so compressed that the first one is three syllables long. Katyayana added varttikas to it and Patanjali wrote the Mahabhashya on both; the three are honoured together as the munitraya. No other ancient grammar describes a language as completely.

02On stone and on palm leaf

Ashoka wrote in Prakrit, but within two centuries kings were turning to Sanskrit. Short Sanskrit records at Ghosundi and Ayodhya were followed in 150 CE by the Shaka ruler Rudradaman’s long inscription at Junagadh, telling how the Sudarshana lake built under the Mauryas was repaired. Under the Guptas, Sanskrit became the language of courts across Bharat and beyond: inscriptions in it stand in Cambodia, Vietnam, Java and Borneo.

03Kavya, shastra, ganita

Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsha and Abhijnanashakuntalam, Bana’s Kadambari, Bhartrihari’s shatakas and Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda are in Sanskrit; so are Aryabhata’s Aryabhatiya, Brahmagupta’s mathematics, the Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas, and Amarasimha’s thesaurus, the Amarakosha. Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya and Madhvacharya argued in it. Scholars wrote in Sanskrit from Kashmir to Kerala and could read each other, so that a commentary written in Mithila could be answered by a pandit in Kanchipuram within a generation.

04Today

Sanskrit is in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and was declared a classical language in 2005. It is the second official language of Uttarakhand (2010) and Himachal Pradesh (2019). In the 2011 Census, 24,821 people returned it as their mother tongue, while many lakhs study it in schools, pathashalas and universities, and it is still the language of puja, samskaras and the shastras.

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