Its you BJP fanatic who is making fool out of himself. Read this to understand why i said it dead language
Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals and Buddhist practice in the forms of
hymns and
mantras. Spoken Sanskrit has been revived in some villages with traditional institutions, and there are attempts at further popularisation.
As a spoken language
In the 2001
census of India, 14,135 people reported Sanskrit as their
native language.
[1] Since the 1990s, movements to spread spoken Sanskrit have been increasing. Organisations like
Samskrita Bharati conduct Speak Sanskrit workshops to popularise the language.
Decline
There are a number of
sociolinguistic studies of spoken Sanskrit which strongly suggest that oral use of Sanskrit is limited, with its development having ceased sometime in the past.
[34] Pollock (2001) says
"most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead".[12] Pollock has further argued that, while Sanskrit continued to be used in literary cultures in India, Sanskrit was not used to express changing forms of subjectivity and sociality embodied and conceptualised in the modern age.[35] Instead, it was reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity in Sanskrit was restricted to hymns and verses.[36][37] He describes it in comparison with the "dead" language of Latin:[38]
Both died slowly, and earliest as a vehicle of literary expression, while much longer retaining significance for learned discourse with its
universalistclaims. Both were subject to periodic renewals or forced rebirths, sometimes in connection with a politics of translocal aspiration... At the same time... both came to be ever more exclusively associated with narrow forms of religion and priestcraft, despite centuries of a
secular aesthetic.
Hanneder (2002) and
Hatcher (2007) contest Pollock's characterisation, pointing out that modern works continue to be produced in Sanskrit:
On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be a dead language in the most common usage of the term. Pollock’s notion of the “death of Sanskrit” remains in this unclear realm between academia and public opinion when he says that “most observers would agree that, in some crucial way, Sanskrit is dead”
—
Hanneder (2002:294)
Hanneder (2009) argues that modern works in Sanskrit are either ignored or their "modernity" contested.
When the British imposed a Western-style education system in India in the nineteenth century, knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient literature continued to flourish as the study of Sanskrit changed from a more traditional style into a form of analytical and comparative scholarship mirroring that of Europe
