Sanskrit Literature - scope, careers, colleges, skills, jobs, salary

Definition

Sanskrit, is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism; a philosophical language of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism; and a literary language and lingua franca of ancient and medieval India and Nepal.  Because of transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia, it was also a language of high culture in some of these regions during the early-medieval era.

Sanskrit is a standardized dialect of Old Indo-Aryan, having originated in the second millennium BCE as Vedic Sanskrit and tracing its linguistic ancestry back to Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Indo-European. As the oldest Indo-European language for which substantial written documentation exists, Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies. The body of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts. The compositions of Sanskrit were orally transmitted for much of its early history by methods of memorization of exceptional complexity, rigor, and fidelity. Thereafter, variants and derivatives of the Brahmi script came to be used.

• Vedic and Sanskrit literature comprises the spoken or sung literature of the Vedas from the early-to-mid 2nd to mid-1st millennium BCE, and continues with the oral tradition of the Sanskrit epics of Iron Age India; the golden age of Classical Sanskrit literature dates to Late Antiquity (roughly the 3rd to 8th centuries CE). Indian literary production saw a late bloom in the 11th century before declining after 1100 CE, hastened by the Islamic conquest of India, due to the destruction of ancient seats of learning such as the universities at Taxila and Nalanda. There are contemporary efforts towards revival, with events like the All-India Sanskrit Festival (since 2002) holding composition contests.
• The Indian youth has realized the importance of this language in recent years and therefore is the demand for its courses.