GoKawiilSanskrit’s public afterlife is much larger than the sum of those who claim it to be their native tongue. In the 2011 Census, only 24,821 Indians cited Sanskrit as their mother tongue, almost a statistical blip in a country of more than a billion. But the formal Sanskrit establishment is far from small. Central Sanskrit University alone lists 13 campuses, 260 affiliated institutions and 118 programmes. India promotes Sanskrit through three Central universities with grants for the promotion of Indian languages rising to `347.03 crore in 2025-26, and the Indian Knowledge Systems Division, set up under the Ministry of Education in 2020, now listing 91 centres, from IITs and Sanskrit universities to Ayurveda schools and cultural trusts. The new Sanskrit revival is at once a state project, an online market and, increasingly, a language trying to acquire users after having long possessed custodians.
When the Sanskrit Club at IIT Roorkee ran a free online spoken-Sanskrit course through 108 subhasitas—nuggets of wisdom—14,000 people registered, more than half of them in the 18-40 age band. For some who take up the language it is because of heritage, plain and warm; for others it is a Hindu-nationalist project. What is not in dispute is that it has gone from being seen as archaic to cool, and that it has shifted the fastest where the young already live: on their phones and in the unlikeliest classrooms.
The language has even taken to the streets at a run. At the Tata Mumbai Marathon in January, 21 runners from Samskrita Bharati—the four-decade-old movement whose standing offer is that you can learn to communicate in Sanskrit in 10 days—ran under the theme of 150 years of Vande Mataram, while volunteers called out slogans in Sanskrit to the passing thousands.
FOR GUBBI, WHAT began as a walk is now Kimbho Sanskrit Riders’ Club. The next one is scheduled for the second week of August. You ride a motorcycle from Bengaluru to a coffee estate in Kodagu and spend two nights speaking Sanskrit at the pitstops, during chai breaks, “while we eat, walk, ride, play games, sing”.
A small tribe of Sanskrit-speakers is tending the language the way you tend a fire you did not light, feeding it with what you have. Samashti Gubbi, called sanskritsparrow on Instagram, has perhaps the most daring approach. When she’s not rapping in Sanskrit, she curates Sunday mornings at Cubbon Park, in the centre of Bengaluru, where people gather to speak Sanskrit while they walk, play antakshari with subhasitas, count in the language and take a sun-kissed group photograph she inevitably tags suryachumbitam. She also runs a WhatsApp group with nearly a thousand members that goes by the name Kimbho— roughly meaning “what’s up”. The spoken-Sanskrit movement has, after all, always minted words for the world as it finds it— sanganakah for computer, duravani for telephone—and the new wave simply extends the mint to its own life, so that prajwalitam now does the work of lit.
According to Tripathi, the problem of Sanskrit being narrowed to religion is a colonial inheritance. British Orientalists, he argues, created an image of Sanskrit as the language of ritual and one religious community, ignoring its vast Buddhist, Jain, Carvaka, scientific, theatrical, poetic and philosophical corpus. He gives the example of AB Keith, who wrote on Sanskrit literature and drama in the early 20th century while, Tripathi says, modern Sanskrit periodicals were publishing nationalist and anti-colonial writing. Such writing, he argues, was left out of the story. He is equally critical of present-day state of enthusiasm for Sanskrit when it amounts only to glorifying the past.
In most modern Indian languages, the language of a century ago may already feel distant. But a serious student of Sanskrit can move from Kalidasa to a modern Sanskrit poet without the same rupture. Panini’s grammar, especially the Astadhyayi, allowed change without dismantling the structure of the language. This, he believes, explains the renewed global and Indian interest in Panini.
This, to Tripathi, is proof that Sanskrit has not frozen into antiquity. It has continued to borrow, absorb and remake itself. He gives the example of Harshdev Madhav, the Gujarati-Sanskrit poet who has written haiku, tanka and sijo in Sanskrit, bringing Japanese and Korean forms into the language.
The second revival, he says, is literary. Sanskrit is not merely being translated into Indian languages; Indian languages are also being translated into Sanskrit. New journals, children’s books, poems, essays, radio plays, ghazals and even Dalit poetry in Sanskrit are appearing. Younger writers, many of them between 20 and 40, are translating Dalit and tribal poetry from Hindi, Gujarati, Manipuri and other languages into Sanskrit. He names Rushiraj Jani and others among a generation of writers expanding the range of the language. There are, he says, around a hundred Sanskrit periodicals and magazines still in circulation, with a readership of their own.
There is, equally, a revival of interest in serious literary and philosophical works in Sanskrit, argues Radhavallabh Tripathi, poet, critic and one of India’s foremost Sanskrit scholars. “There is a renewed interest in modern Sanskrit writings,” he says, “and particularly in very serious writings, philosophical writings,” citing the example of Sachchidananda Mishra, member-secretary of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, who has written a Sanskrit work on Carvaka philosophy, treating its epistemology, ontology and logic as a serious intellectual system. Tripathi has just translated into Hindi the early 20th-century scholar Ramavatar Sharma, whose work attempted to propose a seventh philosophical system after the six classical Vedic systems.
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