The word Sanskrit (Samskrta) means ‘composed’ or ‘synthesised’. It is a term for the language as formulated in the grammar books, contrasting it with its colloquial dialects, known as the Prakrits (prakrta), the ‘naturals’. It also distinguishes it from an older form, sometimes called Vedic, known from its use in the Veda, ‘the knowledge’: these are hymns to the gods which appear to go back to the earliest days of the language as spoken in India, in the last centuries of the second millennium BC., but which are still recited unchanged in Hindu rituals today. Most of the modern languages of northern and central India are descendants of Sanskrit, developed versions of the Prakrits, much as the Romance languages developed from forms of vulgar Latin. But outside the Indian subcontinent, Sanskrit was never taken up as a popular language; it remained purely a medium of learned communication and sacred expression, strongest where the dominant religion had come from India.

Although it is religious tradition which has proved the most reliable preserver of Sanskrit in many an avatara (‘decent’, or of a divine being from heaven), and despite the heavy association, in the West today, of the language with transcendental spiritualism, Sanskrit was never just liturgical language. ~ Page 175

We begin with an outline of how Sanskrit was spread across Asia.

A dialect of Indio-Iranian, it was first heard of in the North West Frontier area of Swat and the northern Punjab (not in Pakistan), spoken by people who have evidently come from farther north or west, and who like to call themselves ‘arya’ (later a common word for ‘gentleman’, and always the Buddhists’ favorite word for sheer nobility of spirit). Somehow their descendants, and even more their language, spread down over the vast Indo-Gangetic plain, as well as up into the southern reaches of the Himalaya mountains, so that by the beginning of the fifty century BC the language was spoken in an area extending as far west as Bihar, and as far south, perhaps, as the Narmada. Sabnskrit literature from the period, principally the epic poem Mahabharata and Ramayana is full of military exploits and conquests. ~ Page 176

But in another way this widespread embrace of Indian coulture is highly reminiscent of the enthusiasm for Americana that captured the whole world, and certainly the South East Asian region, in the second half of the twentieth century. In that advance too the primary motives were the growth of profits through trade, and a sense that the globally connected and laissez-faire culure that came with the foreigners was going to raise the standard of life of all who adopted it. As with the ancient advance of Indianisation, there has been little or no use of the military to reinforce the advance of Microsoft, Michael Jackson or Mickey Mouse. There has been little sense that the advance is planned or coordinated by political powers in the centre of innovation, whether in India then or in the USA today. And the linguistic effects are similar too: English, like Sanskrit, has advanced as a lingua franca for trade, international business and cultural promotion. ~ Page 179

In every sense of the word, then, Sanskrit is a luxuriant language, Sir William Jones, Chief Justice of India and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society, memorably described it in 1786: “The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.” ~ Page 185