Sanskrit

the name applied by scholars to the ancient literary language of India. It is the literary language of the ruling caste, a language related, as is now well known, to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans and to the tongues of western Europe. Many common words are almost identical with the corresponding words in English, German, French, Italian, etc. The Sanskrit alphabet consists of fifty letters. Fourteen vowels are recognized. To those unacquainted with the subject the volume and breadth of Sanskrit literature is surprising. The sacred writings consist chiefly of hymns, chants, and prayers. They are made up in four collections called the Veda. The first collection is known as the Rig-veda. It contains 1,028 hymns, in all, 10,600 verses. The other collections consist of ceremonial chants, sacrificial prayers, mystic hymns, marriage ceremonies, burial rites, and the like.

There are two Sanskrit epic poems of great length, the first, the Ramayana, containing 48,000 verses, celebrates the deeds of a certain king and his four sons. An enormous bow, a female demon, the king of the monkey tribe, a bridge built of rocks and trees by monkeys and an ordeal by fire are included in the subject matter. The other, the Mahabharata, called, by way of translation, The Great Poem, contains 200,000 complete verses. It is nearly eight times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey combined. There are many other epics, some of them written as recently as the sixth century of the Christian era.

The list of dramas includes about fifty plays. There are also collections of lyric, descriptive, and didactic poetry, as well as volumes of fables and narrative. One book of fables purports to relate the advice given by two jackals who play the part of counselors to the lion, king of beasts. Others are collections of fairy tales. One series of fables, believed to have been written or compiled about the twelfth century, contains seventy stories related by a parrot. Another consists of thirty-two stories told by as many statues standing around an old throne. Their object is to dissuade a certain candidate from sitting down on it. Sanskrit is lacking in the sort of fiction known as novels. There are extensive codes of law and a considerable literature of philosophy. A number of works pertain to the transmigration of the soul. Grammars, rhetorics, dictionaries, and treatises on music, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics complete the list.

Sanskrit is a regular subject of instruction in the universities of India and of Europe. It is interesting to know that one of the most learned Sanskrit scholars of modern times, Professor William Dwight Whitney of Yale, was an American. His grammar of the Sanskrit language is a leading college text on that subject. The language is a difficult one to learn.

See India; Mahabharata