“The Second Life of Sanskrit”, Open the magazine, July 10, 2026
“THE SOUND IS OLDER THAN THE MEANING. BEFORE YOU can begin to understand a verse of the Bhagavatam, it is a shape in the air—long syllable, short syllable, an ancient metre. It has passed from mouth to mouth for as long as anyone has recited it. Prathosh AP, a 37-year-old assistant professor of machine learning at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, decided to pass it through a machine, some 18,000 verses of it, chanted as a pandit would, in a voice that would never tire. During his ongoing semester break, Prathosh created and published a tool he called Vagdhenu, which can render any Sanskrit verse as parayana, the recitation that a pandit would give. “The response has been pleasant. I’ve got two million page hits worldwide. I didn’t expect this.” The model has been downloaded 1,500 times from the repository where he posted it. “People are not just using it for chanting,” he says, “but also for brushing up on conversational Sanskrit”. He is now trying to build a feedback system. “Imagine if you could chant a shloka to the tool and it could help you correct your mistakes.” Prathosh set out to preserve traditional chanting and has ended up, more or less by accident, building a tutor.
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.
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……..”
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