Sanskrit Primer App
कालो जगद्भक्षकः kālo jagadbhakṣakaḥ
Time eats the world
अजरामरवत् प्राज्ञो विद्यामर्थं च चिन्तयेत् ।
गृहीत इव केशेषु मृत्युना धर्ममाचरेत् ॥
ajarāmaravat prājño vidyāmarthaṃ ca cintayet |
gṛhīta iva keśeṣu mṛtyunā dharmamācaret ||
A wise man must think of (acquiring) knowledge and wealth as though he were not subject to old age or death;
But he should perform his dharma (duty) as if Death had seized him by the hair.
The above sutra from Hitopadesa succinctly summarised how one should approach life w.r.t. knowledge, wealth and dharma. It exhorts one to have an extreme sense of urgency when it comes to performing one’s dharmic duties given Death is always lurking in the corner. With regards to knowledge and wealth it exhorts one to continue the pursuit of these until the last moment of our lives. Most of us end up taking the exact opposite approach!
The above aphorism is just a tiny glimpse into the vast ideas and thoughts that were expressed since times immemorial via Sanskrit spanning literature, philosophy, poetry, drama, music and Hindu/Indic scriptures. Sanskrit is the medium for sabda pramana (verbal testimony) which is epistemically at the core of Indian philosophy.
On sabda (word), the great Raja Rao in his essay quotes from Bhatrihari’s Vakyapadiya:
“The Brahman who is without beginning or end, whose very essence is the Word (Sabda), who is the cause of the manifested phonemes, who appears as the objects, from whom the creation of the world (seems to) proceed. Brahman is called Phoneme (akshara) because it is the cause of the phoneme. And Bharatrihari continues, this is the first step in the ladder leading to salvation: this is the royal road for all those who desire liberation.“
From hoary antiquity the primordial nature of sabda and Sanskrit was extolled by scholar-saints. As devabhasa (language of the gods), Sanskrit transcends desha (space) and kala (time). It is in a sense the great unifier of this devabhumi (sacred geography) as one hears the same hymns being chanted from time immemorial whether by the namboodiri priests at Badrinath in the Himalayas or vaidikas at Antarvedi at the sangamam of Godavari.
For a practicing Hindu, Sanskrit is sanatana (eternal) and its origin in a way is intertwined with the process of cosmic evolution as described in the Nāsadīya Sūkta (Hymn of Creation from Rig Veda):
“But, after all, who knows, and who can say Whence it all came, and how creation happened? The gods themselves are later than creation, so who knows truly whence it has arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin, he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, he, who surveys it all from highest heaven, he knows — or maybe even he does not know.”
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In present times, most students in India never get an exposure to Sanskrit in their school curriculum and so the barrier to explore these vast corpus of works is very high to overcome, forcing one to rely on translations which oftentimes get infused with the translator’s biases.
Having studied in English medium schools (ICSE board) in the 1980s, my personal exposure to Indian languages was very limited with hardly any exposure to their formal grammar. I had zero introduction to Sanskrit apart from the mantras and slokas we were exposed to during religious ceremonies. An interest in taking a deeper dive into Indian philosophical and religious thoughts led me on my Sanskrit learning journey while I was working in the SF Bay Area. I bought a bunch of Sanskrit books written by colonial Indologists in English which were mostly very pedantic. I also browsed through a few of the classical grammar texts all of which assume prior familiarity with the language.
Luckily for me during that time I ran into volunteers from Samskrita Bharati who were passionate about teaching Sanskrit. Attending a few of their classes was a great way for me to get introduced to the spoken aspects of the language as well. When I returned to India I took a year off and was fortunate to have found a passionate traditional scholar of Sanskrit who was teaching various grammar classes (including Laghu Siddhanta Kaumudi, Ashtadhyayi, etc) for interested beginners.
Exposure to these grammar texts was truly awe-inspiring as it provided glimpses into the genius of the ancient Sanskrit grammarians who were able to codify this rich language with such precision. Panini’s Ashtadhyayi which prescribed the grammar in less than 4000 sutras more than 2500 years ago is arguably the single greatest intellectual achievement of the human mind. No wonder that pioneers of modern linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure, etc) studied Sanskrit extensively and were deeply influenced by Panini’s works.
In the course of my Sanskrit learning I culled out material which I found useful across books and online sources which I felt would be useful for beginners like me. Around 2009–2010 I spent several months putting all this material together in an easy to read format in the Sanskrit Primer app. The app was developed for an audience who were coming with a very similar background as me — someone who had the desire to learn Sanskrit but did not have any prior background to the language (or grammar of any other Indian language for that matter) and was looking for a gentle introduction to the language.
It was meant to be a quick primer where I tried to equip the interested student with basics of the language to enable him/her to get into more serious study of the language. Given the form factor constraints and font limitations (devanagari fonts were not even supported circa 2010 on either platforms), I had to spend months of time on the material preparation and editing.
As a reference I’ve also included the complete dhatupatha provided by Panini as an appendix in the app. This handy reference has all the ~2000 verbal roots in alphabetical order. In the original dhatupatha, the roots are categorized into 10 verbal classes based on their conjugation patterns.
Sanskrit is unique in the sense that these roots form the building blocks for the entire vocabulary of the language. Almost all nouns are also derived from these verbal roots by adding prescribed prefixes and suffixes. By systematically combining these affixes literally tens of thousands of words can be generated from a single root. Not surprisingly Sanskrit with its generative grammar has not only such a large vocabulary but also has the capacity to form brand new words naturally for all possible new scenarios.
The app seems to have struck a chord with Sanskrit learners across the world with more than 1 million downloads across iOS and Android platforms. Based on feedback emails I received over the years, I was pleasantly surprised to see such a diverse range of user demographics using the app which frankly I never even anticipated: yoga instructors/practitioners in the US and other western countries, academics in south asian studies departments, advaita students from Argentina/Brazil, retired folks in India beginning to learn Sanskrit, hindu spiritual seekers, high school students in India taking Sanskrit as second/third language, etc.
As I got busy with my professional work I didn’t spend much time on maintenance and upgrading of the app. As a result of not doing the mandatory updates, the app got removed from iOS App Store a few years back and from Android Play Store a few months back. Though over the years several nice Sanskrit learning mobile apps have been published, I realised there was still demand for my app based on the update requests from users.
Recently I was able to spend some time doing a complete update of the Android app which involved mostly migrating to gradle and bumping up the min SDK support. After scouring through all my old backups, luckily I could find the private signing key and so was able to release the Sanskrit Primer app again on the Play Store. Hopefully soon I can do the same on the iOS platform as well but it would be a little more challenging since I don’t seem to have the app project code in my backups!
