There is a word in Sanskrit used commonly—punarjanma—which means rebirth. It signifies transmigration of a soul across lifetimes, with every incarnation bearing the karmic residue of everything that came before. It is, perhaps, the most useful lens through which to understand what is happening to Sanskrit itself right now. It is a return, not resurrection. The language of the gods was never quite dead; it stayed woven into the cultural and intellectual fabric of the country. Sanskrit has witnessed a quiet yet steady resurgence in recent years. Once perceived largely as a classical or liturgical language, it is now increasingly being approached as a living intellectual tradition—one that offers access not just to scriptures, but to philosophy, linguistics, literature, mathematics, and even environmental thought embedded in ancient texts. Across India and among diaspora communities, new learners are discovering Sanskrit through yoga philosophy, chanting, digital courses, and conversational programmes, giving the language a renewed contemporary relevance. Take Shruti Jain, all of 33 years, who speaks about The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali the way other women her age might describe discovering a therapist who finally gets it. Until recently, she worked in communications, writing press releases, creating brand decks, all using the professional grammar of persuasion. Today she teaches yoga in Chennai and is 22 months deep into a Sanskrit diploma programme that has reoriented, by her own account, the entire architecture of her inner life.
“My perception of the world has changed quite a bit. It reflects in the way I am present in situations; with people, and myself, as my understanding of the self has gotten better. Understanding the symptoms of the mind in Sanskrit has helped me notice when the mind is playing tricks, and that helps me separate from a situation and look at it from a different perspective. It helps me set healthy boundaries, protecting me and my peace,” she explains. Jain is talking, specifically, about the vrttis—the fluctuations of consciousness that Patañjali catalogued in the second century CE. Yogas citta-vrtti-nirodha, he wrote—“Yoga is the cessation of the mind’s turbulence.”
What drew Jain in first, though, was not grammar but sound. About a year before going for the diploma, she began listening to bhajans and Sanskrit chants during her morning routine. “I started memorising some of these chants and have found that just their plain recitation brings me immense calmness and eases my nerves. I feel mentally and emotionally charged in my body, and I feel good about myself. There is great power even in the recitation of the Sanskrit words,” she adds. This is not, as it happens, superstition. Scholars of phonosemantics have argued for decades that Sanskrit’s phonological structure, its precise articulation of vowels, and consonants, mapped onto the human oral cavity with extraordinary intentionality by the ancient grammarian Panini, produces measurable physiological effects. The ancients simply called it nada—primordial sound, the vibratory substrate of consciousness itself.
Across the country, institutions and volunteer-driven organisations have been reporting an uptick in interest in Sanskrit learning, particularly among working professionals and retirees who see it as a way to reconnect with India’s intellectual heritage. Short-term conversational courses, online lectures, podcasts, and Sanskrit learning apps have made the language more accessible. Social media communities now regularly share daily Sanskrit vocabulary, spoken Sanskrit challenges, and simplified grammar lessons to help learners engage with the language outside traditional academic settings. Kiran Motani, a 62-year-old biomedical engineer based in Chikoowadi, Borivali (West), Mumbai, began learning Sanskrit in 2017 at a 10-day conversational Sanskrit camp organised by Samskrita Bharati, an institution that is working towards popularising Sanskrit. The camp ran for two hours every day, and around 100 people participated. “During this time, I learned basic Sanskrit vocabulary and sentence formation. After the camp, I continued attending regular classes and correspondence courses offered by Samskrita Bharati. Gradually, I became comfortable conversing in Sanskrit. Over time, with consistent practice and by reading the Sanskrit magazine Sambhashana Sandesha (more on that later), my confidence improved. I also learned through YouTube lectures and eventually began teaching Sanskrit online through Zoom and Google Meet. In 2022, I enrolled in a three-year Advaita Vedanta programme at CSU, equivalent to a BA degree.”
Learning the language has helped Motani to understand India’s ancient texts and philosophies deeply. “Sanskrit is an extremely logical language, and its grammar is often compared to mathematical formulas, which makes it structured and precise. Another unique aspect of Sanskrit is that it is written exactly as it is spoken, with no silent letters or regional dialect differences,” he adds. He now teaches Sanskrit to children from different parts of the world every Sunday, which he does through songs, games, and stories in Sanskrit, making the learning process fun and interactive. The response, he says, has been extremely encouraging.
As it happens, certain researchers at IIT Madras are now suggesting the resurgence of interest and practice is not an accident at all. Prof. Deepak Paramashivan’s office at IIT Madras does not look like a place where ancient and future collide, but it is. He teaches Indian logic from the Tarka Sangraha, a 17th-century text of the Nyaya school; he teaches advanced Sanskrit literature, and also teaches Sanskrit for yoga practitioners. He will soon introduce a course in computational linguistics rooted entirely in the Paninian grammatical tradition. His BTech students have already built a Retrieval-Augmented Generation model—the architecture currently powering much of modern artificial intelligence’s ability to reason from documents—to help students query classical texts and receive structured explanations drawn from traditional commentaries. Under the leadership of the institute’s director, Prof. V Kamakoti, IIT Madras has also begun establishing Indian Knowledge Systems corridors across departments on campus. These curated exhibits present the scientific and technological insights embedded in ancient Sanskrit texts, highlighting India’s long-standing contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, architecture, and engineering.
The institution is collaborating with Madras Sanskrit College on a project to develop a Sanskrit-based large language model. “Sanskrit is an etymological language, and many words in other languages have their origin in it,” explains Dr Vinayak Namannavar, head of manuscriptology at Karnataka Sanskrit University in Bengaluru, where students can pursue doctorates in disciplines ranging from Nyaya-Vaisesika—the ancient school that combined logic and metaphysics into a system so rigorous it anticipated some features of analytic philosophy—to Alamkara, the classical theory of poetic ornamentation, which produced one of the world’s most sophisticated bodies of literary criticism. “All ancient texts are contained in Sanskrit,” he gestures at towers of volumes on his desk with the satisfaction of a man who has never wanted to be anywhere else.
In Mattur, a village in Karnataka’s Shimoga district, the morning begins the way mornings have begun for a very long time: with Sanskrit. Residents greet each other in it, transact in it, argue and joke and scold their children in it. Mattur is one of more than 15 villages across India—from Madhya Pradesh to Assam, from Rajasthan to Himachal Pradesh—where Sanskrit circulates not as a subject of study but as a lived idiom. Sachin Kathale, sub-editor of Sambhasana Sandesa Patrika, the monthly magazine published by Samskrita Bharati with over 1,25,000 readers and the distinction of being the world’s only Sanskrit audio magazine, describes the organisation’s Balakendra programme for children with visible pride. More than 2,000 children across India now speak Sanskrit as their mother tongue. The organisation’s intensive workshops—Sambhasana Shibir, 10 days, two hours daily—send even complete beginners home speaking. The correspondence course is offered in 11 languages. The digital library runs to 230 titles.
In Mysuru, Jayalakshmi Sampath Kumar arrives at her desk every morning to produce what may be, in the annals of world journalism, the most stubbornly improbable publication still in existence: Sudharma, a daily newspaper written entirely in Sanskrit, which has appeared without interruption since 1970 of which she is the editor. Her father-in-law, Kalale Nadadur Varadaraja Iyengar, founded it. Her husband continued it until his death in 2021. She continues it still. Dharma—the word embedded in the paper’s name—is typically translated as “righteousness” or “duty”, though neither English word quite captures its depth. It implies the law of one’s own nature, the specific obligation that arises from who and what one is. That Jayalakshmi Sampath Kumar continues to publish a Sanskrit daily, alone, every single day, in a world of algorithmically optimised attention capture—this is svadharma enacted in the most literal possible sense. At least 20,000 people read it daily. The Sunday edition travels through WhatsApp groups of thousands. The e-paper, launched in 2009, has readers across continents—many of them, the editor notes, members of the diaspora who reach for Sanskrit the way exiles reach for their mother’s cooking: as the most direct route back to something essential about themselves. “There is also a large community of retired people who are looking at learning the language,” says the Padmashri awardee. Every July 15, Sudharma brings out an anniversary special issue. Over the years, the newspaper has also developed distinctive traditions of its own. She says, “From 1997 we had a calendar printed on the back page of the newspaper. In 2008, we included all festivals across the country as well as marked important dates related to freedom fighters. The Sunday paper is a special issue which focuses only on specific articles, and we don’t have any news-related stories that day. We publish unusual stories from the epics—Ramayana and Mahabharata, the reason why festivals are celebrated, small stories for children, and the like,” she adds.
Anand Thirtha, head priest at Kalyani Raghavendra Ashrama, Bengaluru, and Sanskrit teacher, has studied the language for 13 years in Poorna Prajna Vidyapeeta, under HH Sri Sri Vishwesha Theertha Swamiji. Currently he takes online classes for religious shlokas and is also in the process of writing a book with 108 shlokas. “What makes Sanskrit unlike any other is that there are several easy ways to understand regular subjects. For example, some knowledge that is in Sanskrit books teaches students simple formulae that simplify complex mathematical problems.”
Together, these individual journeys point to something larger: a renewed curiosity about India’s classical knowledge systems. For many learners today, Sanskrit is no longer merely a subject in school textbooks but a gateway into philosophy, spirituality, linguistics, and history. In classrooms, temples, yoga studios, and increasingly on Zoom screens across continents, the language is finding new voices—and new listeners. For those who wish to go beyond curiosity and undertake a deeper study, formal courses in Sanskrit are available across the country. At Karnataka Samskrit University (KSU) in Bengaluru, the expansive, tree-lined campus offers an entire academic ecosystem devoted to the language. Students can pursue Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, advanced research programmes such as DLitt, PhD, and MPhil, as well as Directorate and Bridge courses designed to help learners from different academic backgrounds find their footing. Established with the objective of preserving India’s intellectual inheritance preserved in ancient manuscripts, scriptures, epics, Puranas, and the Vedas, the university today hosts hundreds of students committed to studying and transmitting this body of knowledge. Dr Vinayak Namannavar, HOD of the Department of Manuscriptology at KSU, explains the depth of what is at stake. “All ancient texts are contained in the Sanskrit language.”
What, finally, is Sanskrit’s claim on us now? Why should a language codified before the Common Era matter in an age of machine learning and social media and the relentless, headlong compression of human attention? Says Namannavar, “Interestingly, Sanskrit is an etymological language, and many words in other languages have their origin in and historical development from this language.” In his office, piles of thick research books are spread across the desk. He gestures toward them with evident satisfaction. “A lady with a science background came here to do her MA. Now she has submitted her thesis for her PhD in the Sharada script (the main Sanskrit script). When I see such people, it feels like the biggest award for me. While students come for research and to learn, many others come to seek knowledge here.”
Several organisations are working to make Sanskrit part of everyday speech. Among the most influential is Samskrita Bharati, a non-profit founded in 1981. Today it has chapters across India and in 27 countries abroad, and visitors to its offices often find staff conversing entirely in Sanskrit. One of its most popular initiatives is Sambhashana Shibir, which focuses entirely on conversational Sanskrit. The format is designed so that even complete beginners can begin speaking the language by the end of the course. The philosopher and grammarian Bhartrhari, writing in the fifth century CE, proposed a concept that contemporary cognitive scientists find curiously resonant: Sabda-Brahman, the idea that language is not merely a tool for expressing thought but is, in fact, the substance of thought itself. The word—vak—is not secondary to consciousness. It is constitutive of it. The shape of a language is, in this view, the shape of the mind that thinks in it. And Sanskrit, with its precise taxonomies of inner experience—it has dozens of words for different qualities of attention, of knowing, of desire, of time—offers a vocabulary for aspects of consciousness that other languages leave nameless and therefore, in some sense, unreachable.
This is what Shruti Jain is discovering in Chennai on her yoga mat. What Kiran Motani found in his Mumbai apartment during lockdown. What the students at IIT Madras are uncovering as they teach machines to parse a grammar designed, millennia ago, to describe the structure of the knowable universe. Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram—the true, the auspicious, the beautiful—was how the ancient aesthetic tradition described the convergence of philosophy, ethics, and art. It is a formulation old enough to have preceded Christianity and Islam both. And yet here it is, in the 21st century, still doing work. The questions it was built to ask—“Who am I?” “What is real?” “What does it mean to know?”—have not gone anywhere. And increasingly, improbably, magnificently, a new generation of voices is asking them again in a language the gods spoke and is being understood by mortals of Gen Z and beyond.
Leaves of Knowledge
Opened in August 2025 at Karnataka Samskrit University in Bengaluru, the Sanskrit Museum stands as the state’s only institution devoted entirely to the language’s textual heritage. Conceived as a compact yet immersive archive, it brings together manuscripts, writing materials, and preservation technologies that trace the long journey of Sanskrit scholarship across centuries.
The museum showcases palm-leaf manuscripts gathered from monasteries, from private collections, and from individual donors. Each manuscript rests carefully wrapped in red cloth—a traditional practice rooted in practicality, since the colour and fabric help repel insects naturally.
Surekha Kamath, guest faculty associated with the museum, explains the regional variations in manuscript traditions. “As South India has more palm trees, all these manuscripts were written on palm leaves. In North India, as there are more birch trees, the writing happens on birch bark or birch leaves.”
Several vitrines display the tools once used by scribes—styluses, inks, and early writing implements that shaped centuries of intellectual production. The preservation methods themselves tell another story of care and ingenuity. Palm-leaf manuscripts are treated with citronella oil, applied gently on each folio to protect them from bookworms and silverfish.
Along one wall, a series of sketches introduces visitors to the Sanskrit alphabet. Each letter is paired with its associated deity, accompanied by a corresponding shloka and illustration, weaving together script, spirituality, and symbolism. The display transforms the alphabet into a gallery of sacred associations, revealing the philosophical depth embedded within the language’s very structure.
Another section features rare handmade paper dating back more than two centuries. Delicate floral patterns still glow on the surface, preserved through the use of natural vegetable dyes that have endured the passage of time without fading.
Among the most intriguing exhibits is a demonstration of Wafer Fiche technology—a US-patented preservation method used to archive the Sarvamoola Grantha, the 37 foundational Sanskrit works composed by the 13th-century saint-philosopher Sri Madhvacharya. “This was done using microphotography technology, and they have been stored in silicon wafers and are both water- and fireproof,” adds Kamath. Airy, carefully arranged, and rich with detail, the museum offers visitors an intimate encounter with the material culture of Sanskrit learning. Through palm leaves, bark manuscripts, traditional tools, and modern preservation techniques, it reveals how centuries of scholarship have been protected, transmitted, and reinterpreted across generations.