A sacred symbol of the earliest Indian civilization, Sanskrit is still relevant today. Agnieszka Rostkowska speaks with Sanskrit expert and translator Filip Ruciński.

Sanskrit is one of the world’s oldest languages—traces of it are found in Akkadian (the language of ancient Babylonia) and it served as a basis for Latin and Greek grammar. One cannot overestimate the impact it has had on world literature and philosophy. Although its accomplishments are already plenty, it lives on and even continues to develop.

Agnieszka Rostkowska: Sanskrit remains one of India’s twenty-three official languages, but can you really hear it spoken on the street?

Filip Ruciński: Despite general opinion in the West, Sanskrit is not a dead language, nor is it even vegetating. It still has a vital impact on Indian languages—in bureaucratic and academic terminology, both in the humanities and the hard sciences—because it has a great capacity for absorbing new concepts. Moreover, present-day Sanskrit even has loan words from English, which means it is used freely. In other words, it is alive. India still has Vedic schools where the students converse only in Sanskrit—and in literary Sanskrit at that. Monks in many monasteries do the same. One of them was my Sanskrit teacher. He took a vow that he would not speak a word in any other language for ten years. He kept his promise and was even able to converse in stores. There are still places in India where, striking up a conversation with someone on the street in Sanskrit, you can be certain they will understand you and respond in kind. One such example is Sringeri, one of the important Sanskrit centers in the state of Karnataka, in the south of the country. Yet this language is used not only by scholars, but ordinary people as well—in some homes parents still speak and raise their children in Sanskrit.

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