90-year-old scholar is all praise for Sanskrit

Naina Mishra

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 28

“What people call the weakness of Sanskrit is, in fact, its only strength. Sanskrit does not belong to any religion or caste, but to the entire India. It runs through every spoken language, even foreign languages. There is a large percentage of Sanskrit words in Southeast Asia. There is a big corpus of Sanskrit words from Myanmar to Indonesia. Names of villages there are also in the Sanskrit language,” said 90-year-old highly decorated Sanskrit scholar Satya Vrat Shastri, who graced the annual global alumni meet at the PU today.

Shastri was escorted by his son Sharat Chandra to the alumni meet. He has received 108 honours and awards in several countries.

He said, “Sanskrit could have been the national language of India and there was a proposal when the Constitution was framed. Certain leaders didn’t appreciate it. Now, we get to see that Hindi is being opposed.”

On the fading legacy of Sanskrit, he said: “We need to make people aware of the treasure of Sanskrit. People link it with the Vedas, religion and Upanishads, but there have been texts on science and aeronautics in Sanskrit. There are seven texts I listed when I was the chairman of the Sanskrit Commission. All of these are still untouched and no one even edited these to find out what these contain.” Shastri is a writer, grammarian and poet. He did his BA (Hons) and MA in Sanskrit from the PU and a PhD from the BHU.

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