In Vadodara, families converse in Sanskrit to keep the langu

In the Waghodia area, at Pankaj Patel’s house mornings begin with his two-and-a-half year old daughter Shruti reciting Sanskrit shlokas. The Patels, too, are committed to keeping Sanskrit alive. Patel and his wife Manisha keep Sanskrit alive at home just like the Nasikkars do: they speak Sanskrit at home. Three-and-a-half years after her marriage into the family, Manisha still makes mistakes, but is confident of mastering the nuancessoon.

Both the families have been conversing in Sanskrit for years and intend to keep doing so. Their zeal to spread and popularise Sanskrit got a boost when this year was declared the Year of Sanskrit.

While Nasikkar is member of Sanskrit Bharati, one of the many wings of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Patel has reservations about the right wing ideology of the organisation. But when it comes to their love for this ancient language, there is little that separates the two families. If Nasikkar is to be believed, at least 20 families in Vadodara converse fluently in Sanskrit at home and about 50 others in broken Sanskrit.

For members of Sanskrit Bharati and a few others like Patel, Sanskrit is the means of conversation, never mind if they are talking on the telephone, at market place, or while commuting by train. They all say that shorn of tedious grammar lessons and the fear associated with them, “Sanskrit bhasha sarla na tu kathina. (Sanskrit is neither easy nor difficult.” That Sanskrit is meant onlyfor Brahmins, that women and others castes should not learn the language, that the language is very difficult to learn these are misconceptions and have been proved wrong.

In fact, Sanskrit Bharati says there are at least three villages in the country where Sanskrit is the only means of conversation: from rickshawalas to grocers, and from fights at public taps to brawls at the bus stand, everybody sticks to Sanskrit.

Shweta Kaluskar, who is doing a Ph.D. in Sanskrit, speaks to her family members only in Sanskrit, though none of them responds the same way. They all love and understand the language, but regret they can’t converse in it. A co-coordinator of Sanskrit Bharati, Kaluskar says as many as 40,000 families have attended the “direct teaching method” (rather Sakshat Pathan Paddhati) classes that promise to teach the language in 10 days.

The course has its funny moments when students swap genders. “But is that not the case when one learns any new language?” asks Nasikkar, and cites an examplefrom his own family. One day, when he asked his son Bhargava, “Kutra gachhati?” (Where are you going?), the answer was, “I am not a dog”, for the boy mistook the word kutra for the Gujarati word for dog.

Members of the extended Sanskrit family say the language has brought a new excitement in their lives. Sanjay’s father Vamanrao was not fluent but he practiced it with his grand-children. These families also organise get-togethers (Parivar Milan) once a month and even organise picnics (or Paryatans) during which only Sanskrit is spoken.

Nasikkar says the key to learning lies in not being very rigid about grammar and in not trying to find Sanskrit words for objects such as facsimile machines that did not exist during the time that the language evolved.

However, Sanskrit Bharati has coinages such as sheetpeti for a refrigerator and doorvani for telephones. But it leaves families to make up their own words, or use words from other languages such as English, if necessary.