Samskrta Bharati

Saṃskṛta Bhāratī (Sanskrit: संस्कृतभारती, IPA: [sə̃skr̩təbʱɑːrətiː]) is a non-profit organisation working to revive Sanskrit. Sanskrit was a pan-Indian language in Vedic time but lost its place to spoken dialects in modern India. Samskrita Bharati has its headquarters in New Delhi, and US chapter headquarters in San Jose, California. The International centre, "Aksharam", is located in Bangalore, India, and houses a research wing, a library, Publication division and an audio-visual Language lab for teaching spoken Sanskrit. According to their own figures, repeated often in their promotional literature, by 1998, 2.9 million people had attended the conversation camps.

The basic mission of this organization is to democratize and popularize Sanskrit by encouraging the use of simple Sanskrit in everyday conversational contexts. More recently, the organization has started to focus on the maintenance of the “mother-tongue-ness” (मातृभाषात्वम्) of Sanskrit by means of Sanskrit households.

As its founder says, "Sanskrit is the best tool to remove the five types of social differences; linguistic, class, caste, sect and the north vs south division." A basic goal is to create a nation of Sanskrit speakers, (re)creating a national unity for India through common linguistic practice.

Another one of the main premises of the movement is to allow direct access to the vast storehouse of the Sanskrit textual tradition.

The organization's pedagogical philosophy is based on the thought that listening and speaking must precede reading and writing. Rejecting both Western-style grammatical instruction (or more recent innovations) and Indian traditions of Sanskrit instruction emphasizing systematic memorization, Samskrita Bharati instead has focused its energies on immersion through conversation. A common aphorism used in their literature is: “Speak in Samskrit, not about Samskrit.”

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