 |
Spoken Sanskrit
The faculty members at Devavānī have always been highly aware of the importance of the oral component of Sanskrit, for it is a vast gateway to the language’s tradition, its richness, and its character. The spoken part of Sanskrit, however, is habitually neglected in Indian Studies in the West. For people to seriously maintain that we can amputate the spoken component of a language and still leave it very much intact defies belief. And yet this is the Western academic perception regarding Sanskrit, one which we hope will change for the better as time goes by.
To help spread spoken Sanskrit, therefore, a monthly contribution will be published on the Devavānī web site from the start of the 2009/2010 course, by Sadananda Das, who is a specialist in the didactics of spoken Sanskrit, an author, and a doctor of Sanskrit at the University of Leipzig. Dr Das has kindly agreed to select a subhashita [a wise saying] each month, which he will recite and comment on in Sanskrit. You can listen to both the recital and the commentary for free on the Devavani web site or by downloading them from it in an MP3 file. The commentary texts will gradually be posted in PDF format for study.
 |
|
Sadananda Das
Dr. Sadananda Das was born in Utkala, in eastern India. From his childhood through to his teenage years he studied in his hometown. Following graduation in Sanskrit language at the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan University in New Delhi, where he was awarded the gold medal in 1989, he began postgraduate study at the University of Pune. |
|
|
|
At the University of Pune he obtained a master of arts degree, with distinction, in 1991. He also did his doctorate there, writing his thesis on Vedic theories of creation. He then worked for three years (1993–1996) at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, in Varanasi. After that, he worked for eight years (1997–2005) at the Alice Boner Institute, Varanasi, first as a research assistant and later as the research officer.
Since 1988, Dr. Das has specialized in teaching spoken Sanskrit. He has lectured in this field of expertise at many schools and universities in India, and has also taught summer courses at universities around the world. For ten years, he has given a summer course in spoken Sanskrit at the Department of Classical Indology of the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. He has also taught introductory spoken Sanskrit courses, as a visiting lecturer, at the universities of Tübingen, Bern, Lausanne, Zurich, Florence, and the Australian National University (ANU).
Since 2005, he has been a lecturer in Sanskrit at the Institute of Indian and Central Asian Studies of the University of Leipzig. |
|
|
|
