Sanskrit in Relations to Hinduism

Since the dawn of the Vedic era, Vedic thought has been expressed through the medium of the Sanskrit language. New ideas and thoughts prospered inside the developing culture, and so did the Sanskrit language. These ideas took shape and emerged through Sanskrit text and Sanskrit word, creating what would be later known as the religion of Hinduism. The language and the religion became inseparable, relying on one another to create the modern day Hindu culture. However, as the millennia passed and the Sanskrit language faded into the folds of history, many languages emerged and took its place in India. The Sanskrit foundation of Hinduism is vital to the future of the Hindu culture, and its transmutation to fit other languages in order to sustain the Hindu faith has caused some loss of the true original culture. However, as the time progresses, and the Hindu faith makes its way into the west, the concern of the Hindu people is stirred, because the foundation has to transmute once more to be greeted by the minds of Westerners.

All the religious and spiritual teaching of Hinduism were written and spoken in Sanskrit, thus stressing the closeness of the religion and the language to each other. For thousands of years, the hymns of the Rig Veda were sung and chanted by the followers of Hinduism. However, the vast majority of the Hindu people do not know the Sanskrit language, and they mostly depend on translations of the text to understand the spiritual context of the hymns. Professor Dean Brown explains that every single word in Sanskrit has up to six different meanings, and he suggests that the combination of such words, conceived to deliver a specific spiritual message, will mostly lose its meaning over translation.

The Sanskrit lang...

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...g built in the West as a result of Hindu immigration, the demand for Sanskrit teaching and learning is not there. And why should it be after all? After all, these Hindu immigrants responsible of giving root to Hinduism in the West do not know Sanskrit themselves; the Hinduism they know is through the regional languages of India. Many Hindu people argue that regional languages are close enough to Sanskrit, but the problem is with such argument; even the regional languages are not being taught well enough to the new generations. And if the history of immigrant cultures has any measurement in America, the regional languages of India will fade away after one or two generations in the great melting pot of the country. This means that the second generations of Hindu immigrants are gradually losing their regional ethnic roots and becoming increasingly westernized.