The Beauty of Sanskrit Language and Texts – the book

As part of the AtoZ series challenge in April 2021 I had written a series of posts about specific compositions in Sanskrit and the unique features of the Language. All these posts are now part of my latest E-book: The Beauty of Sanskrit Language and Texts.

For a long time I had been planning to write a book to introduce the beautiful world of Sanskrit and Sanskrit texts which is not part of our curriculum except for a few who opt for it. Forget about westerners, generations of Indians, since the advent of British system of education in India, never got the opportunity as part of their formal education to gain even the basic knowledge about the vast and the intricate knowledge system of ancient India.

Needless to say, 99% of the ancient wisdom of India are available in Sanskrit texts, because it was the language of the intellectuals of India prior to the Moghul invasion. Even Buddhist and Jaina scholars,  who preferred pali or prakrut, learnt Sanskrit and wrote many books in Sanskrit.

Whenever we think of Sanskrit literature it is the religious ones that usually come to our mind. It happens because we are more familiar with the religious ones. The religious ones are more widely discussed upon and commented upon. But there are a large number of non-religious texts in Sanskrit which are known only in limited circles and rarely do these make it to the popular discourse.

Of course many are aware about popular texts like Ramayana, or Mahabharata. But there are hundreds of surviving texts about which I find that the awareness is dismal. Sometimes even if a person has heard about the text, her idea about the text is very strange. I hope this book to be helpful in not only creating awareness about many hidden gems but also in dispelling the myths associated with some popular texts.

These articles were originally written for the AtoZ challenge, which means one wrote twenty six posts corresponding to the twenty six letters of the English alphabet.  So it becomes really difficult to represent the vast number of Sanskrit texts in addition to giving glimpses of the specialties of the languages within the twenty six articles. So I worked out a kind of algorithm at the outset to decide which book or topic to represent which alphabet so to give the reader glimpses into each genre of text in twenty four articles, two being reserved to devote exclusively to the Sanskrit language.  By the way, as the reader progresses through the book, she will learn more about this algorithm and the algorithm of the Sanskrit Language which has a kind of scientific structure to it.

At present the book is part of Blogchatter’s E-book Carnival and is available for free download.