Course abstract

A good foundation in Sanskrit can serve as a master key for anyone interested in accessing the extensive primary sources related to various subjects of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) which have been globally recognised as a vast repository of profound knowledge and wisdom and that the National Education Policy (NEP) is proposing to introduce into the education curricula in the near future. The first part of this course titled ‘Introduction to Basic Spoken Sanskrit’ was offered in August 2018, which generated sufficient interest in the students, many of whom, requested for a follow up class. The second level, ‘Intermediate Level of Spoken Sanskrit’ launched in August 2019 created a demand for the next level which led to the designing of this ‘Advanced Level of Spoken Sanskrit’ Course. The objective of this course is to give students a deeper understanding and appreciation of Sanskrit as a living language by providing them with its different semantic and syntactic tools. It also aims to offer them a taste of the rich literary legacy that it enshrines so that they feel enthused enough to delve further into its treasures with a greater sense of confidence and independence. This course will be relevant for students across various disciplines who have an intermediate knowledge of Sanskrit because it offers the scope of potentially enhancing their language acquisition skills by providing them with a linguistic framework that can facilitate the learning of several related and new languages. In addition to this, the practice of speaking Sanskrit which is famous for its precise grammatical structure could prove to be a helpful tool in systematizing the thinking process itself and improving expression which in turn could have innumerable other rippling beneficial effects.