Sanskrit
Sanskrit is not simply an old language that Hindu texts happen to be written in. It was engineered — through the systematic grammatical work of Pāṇini and the phonological tradition of the Śikṣā — to be a maximally precise instrument for encoding philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic knowledge, with a morphological richness that allows distinctions unavailable in most other languages. The displacement of Sanskrit by colonial languages was therefore not neutral: it was the replacement of a knowledge-encoding system with one that lacked the vocabulary for the concepts it was displacing, making those concepts systematically untranslatable and therefore invisible to subsequent generations educated in English. Bodha’s engagement with Sanskrit is not about revival as cultural nostalgia but about the recognition that certain ideas — dharma, karma, ṛta, śakti, moksha — cannot be adequately thought in a language that does not have them, and that recovering the capacity to think in Sanskrit is part of the deeper project of decolonization.
Wiki Pages
- [[language-and-art]] — Language and Art
- [[decolonization]] — Decolonization
Source Files
Research Projects
Thinkers
Blog Articles
Associated Books
- A Practical Sanskrit Introductory (C Wikner)
a-practical-sanskrit-introductory— Beginner-oriented introduction to Sanskrit language and basic grammar. - Sanskrit Grammar (WD Whitney)
sanskrit-grammar— Reference-style overview of Sanskrit grammar, inflection, and syntax. - Amarakośaḥ Devanāgarī (Amarasiṃha)
amarakosha-devanagari— Devanagari text of the Amarakosha for direct study of the classical Sanskrit lexicon. - Amarakosha English Translation (NG Sardesai)
amarakosha-english-translation— English translation of the Amarakosha, the classical Sanskrit lexicon arranged by semantic groupings. - The Knowledge Structure in the Amarakosha (Sivaja S. Nair)
the-knowledge-structure-in-the-amarakosha— Study of how the Amarakosha encodes categories, semantic relations, and systems of knowledge. - Vākyapadīya (Bhartṛhari)
vakyapadiya— Foundational work of Bhartrhari on language, meaning, cognition, and the philosophy of linguistic unity. - A Scheme for Knowledge Representation in Samskritam (P. Ramanujan)
a-scheme-for-knowledge-representation-in-samskritam— Paper exploring Sanskrit-based formal knowledge representation and semantic structuring. - Introduction to Sanskrit Shabdamitra (Kulkarni, Joshi et al)
introduction-to-sanskrit-shabdamitra— Introductory Sanskrit learning aid focused on vocabulary, forms, and basic usage.
Related Concepts
- Indian Knowledge Systems — Sanskrit is the primary carrier of Indian knowledge systems — most of the tradition is inaccessible without it
- Decolonization — Decolonizing the mind begins with language — the displacement of Sanskrit by FATE languages is the wound
- Itihasa — Itihāsa is a Sanskrit category: the concept itself, and the texts it names, are inseparable from the language