A mark of powerful civilizations is the integrative, or more historically, the dominating force they exert on other, small civilizations and communities. The ongoing incorporation of western-liberal thought, born in Christian colonization of the past few centuries, just represents the success of Christian supremacists, irrespective of one’s likeness to this. The fact that we write in English, use idioms and phrases and formal systems developed during this era is very well discussed and accepted unanimously, with minimal opposition. In fact, quite laughably, any critique and opposition against the hegemony of English is also written in English, for universal consumption.

There are people who do endeavor to write and represent subjects and sciences in local scripts and languages whenever possible. This attempt might seem futile to majority of the aforementioned public who have accepted English as lingua franca unopposed, but countries like Japan, China, Germany, etc., do require, if not mandate, learning of their regional languages in order for communication and business. And these countries are successful at that. It is ironic to me that now and again I see some individuals who see merit in English’s hegemony claimimg that Sanskrit is the “oppressor’s language” but, are happy to learn German if they want jobs overseas, or that those who enjoy anime, and then develop an urge to learn Japanese, engage in writing hāiku-s.

It is not sufficient that we merely have the will to represent subjects and sciences, complex or simple, in Sanskrit, because it indeed is a powerful language, rather we commit to realizing this will. But let us consider some obstacles before discussing solutions.

Firstly, it must be understood that writing in Sanskrit does not end with just translating whatever you would have written in English otherwise. To illustrate what I mean, take this introductory paragraph from Beautiful Soup Documentation:

Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.

Now this might seem gibberish to a person not familiar with Python or programming in general, but it is equally gibberish to me if I want to write something about Beautiful Soup in Sanskrit. Why? For starters the word “library” used to describe Beautiful Soup has a very specific meaning in programming, and definitely does not denote the more popular ‘collection of books’ in this context. So I cannot use the word पुस्तकालय (pustakālaya) when attempting such a task. Taking the second sentence, “parser”, “idiomatic ways of navigating”, “parse tree” – all of these phrases have a very specific meaning and it is not merely enough to translate these into Sanskrit because what you would be doing is just that - translating. You would not be building a culture of writing in Sanskrit relative to these subjects but rather just doing what Google Translate can do. No, the resolve should be to represent very subject of Computer Sciences in Sanskrit in its entirety, so that people who come after you, and whatever progress they make in this field, can also write in Sanskrit, without having second thoughts or feeling awkward.

I just provided a basic example using that site. This is even more true when you get to subjects like Chemistry, Biology, Quantum Physics, etc., because the formal systems of these subjects have developed in Latin/Greek languages and scripts for centuries at this point. While there are Sanskrit works that do deal with, or at least can be interpreted in a way to deal with these, they have not progressed for the same period of time and are stuck when they were being last studied. Those Latin or Greek words, whatever they would have meant originally, come to mean something else entirely. For example, the word “calculus” in Latin means “small rocks” or “pebbles” and became a general word for counting since Roman-s used these pebbles in their counting tools and over-time, much after Roman Empire’s collapse, has come to represent a branch of Mathematics that deals with changing of values over a period of some other values. Talk about a rollercoaster. And yes, some of the names of the subjects in Sanskrit are also named after the tools they were used to study such as bīja gaṇita for Algebra or rekhā gaṇita for Geometry, but what I mean is currently we would be trying to come up with words in Sanskrit against Latin words which have developed for centuries. So direct translations too are either insufficient or unnecessary.

And that is exactly what is the issue is here, the time complexity; we are going to be playing catch up for some time, before we can have individuals who think and write, primarily in Sanskrit. I am not going to discuss how can that be achieved because it is obvious: pump up education in Sanskrit. That is really it. And again, it is not sufficient that students score good marks in the subject, there is a necessity of an active culture.

Now, “Why?” is a good question. What good does it do to convert everything into Sanskrit instead of continuing to use Latin/English. The answers to these are also obvious. We are a Sanskrit people, not English. Many of our ideas can be represented properly only in Sanskrit or its derivatives, not English. Our core tenets like dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa and other darshana-s can only be understood and practiced if one knows their true meanings only in Sanskrit, not English. But ultimately, there is no better reason or no more a logical reason than we just want Sanskrit to become India’s prathama bhāṣā again, since this is one of major features that united us. Hence, “āryīkaraṇa” of writing, an attempt to shift or define formal systems in Sanskrit, language of ārya-s and its culture.

I will be discussing some solutions and standards we can use for various formal systems in part 2 of this blog.