One needs to be able to look back in order to envision the future, which is why we need Sanskrit. It represents the cultures of both the south and the north. The scholar Bh. Krishnamurti, the author of the masterly The Dravidian Languages, liked to remind that the Ṛig-Veda, the earliest Sanskrit text, has features that are characteristics of Dravidian languages.



The great Tamil Chola dynasty and its successors used Sanskrit to carry Indian culture to Southeast Asia, and the earliest evidence of this interaction on the island of Bali in 200 BCE or thereabouts. Sanskrit is still used in the liturgy in Japan, Korea, Thailand and China.

Sanskrit is also of interest because its literature goes back further than any other living language, and this literature has profoundly influenced the cultures of vast regions of Asia. The major texts of the Hindus, the Buddhists, and the Jains are in this language, and it has an enormous number of texts on science, philosophy, arts, and music, not all of which have yet been studied by modern scholars. In a previous column I presented evidence on how Sanskrit texts appear also to have influenced the Christian gospels.

Linguists are interested in Sanskrit because of its connections with other members of the Indo-European family, for it can help untangle the relationships between its far-flung members, such as Irish and Bengali, or Norwegian and Sinhalese, and also explain obscure elements of European culture.

For example, the Latin word for sacred is sacer which carries not only the meaning of being consecrated to gods but also that of ineradicable pollution, or simultaneously veneration and horror. The word sacrifice, which properly means to make sacred (sacrificium), also means to put to death.

To understand this word, let us consider its cognate in Sanskrit yaj- which is worship or praise and from yaj also comes yajña or sacrifice. There is an esoteric reason why praise and sacrifice go together. The ritual is to help the sacrificer leave behind the previous phase of life (there is a symbolic killing of that phase, and also of an animal in the āsuric form of the ritual) and praise for the rebirth into a new one. The sacrifice was performed in India as fire ritual where fire or Agni symbolized time; similarly the Greeks had the fire ritual of Hestia and the Romans that of Vesta.