Patrick S. D. McCartney, "Sanskrit-Speaking' Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development" (Routledge, 2026) - New Books Network

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[01:25]
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welcome to the New Books Network
[01:29]
B
hello and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balkaran. More importantly, I have the pleasure of welcoming back to the podcast Dr. Patrick McCartney, who is author of this brand new Rutledge publication, Sanskrit Speaking Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development. Really fascinating stuff, Patrick. Welcome to the podcast.
[01:50]
A
Thanks Raj. It's nice to be back on your podcast.
[01:54]
B
Yeah, we chatted previously a little bit about the backstory, but for those who may not have caught the previous episode, tell us about just your foyer into Sanskrit speaking villages. How did you get into this topic of study here?
[02:08]
A
Well, I mean it started with first learning about the Sanskrit language and then coming across the the idea that people still spoke it. And that fascinated me. And through my Masters in Linguistics I became quite interested in language revitalization and endangered languages in general. And so I decided that wouldn't it be fun to go off and look at the whole phenomenon of people speaking Sanskrit. And one of the things that really fascinated me about it was just how defined the the opinions of people were on this topic, not just amongst the general public, but even more so among scholars. And when I was in the kind of early days of just trying to find information and I was asking you know, like more established scholars for, for advice. You know, some people were just about shouting at me or you know, like, what are you doing? You're wasting your time. This is, this is stupid topic. No one speaks Sanskrit. That was one idea. But then the other idea at the far end of that spectrum was that was, you know, a much more romantic and, and idealized kind of position that isn't it wonderful that there are these villages where everyone speaks Sanskrit? And so that, that really, that tension between these two, two ideas just really drew me into it as a, as a topic. And so I first went to a yoga ashram in the south of Gujarat, which is where I ended up doing my PhD fieldwork called Shanti Mandir. And the reason I went there is because I knew some people who were involved with that organization and they said, oh, there's, it's actually a Sanskrit mahavidyalaya. It's a, most of the people who live in the ashrams, you know, studying Sanskrit there are the students there or the, you know, they're the teachers. And so that would be a good place for you to go and, and look at spoken Sanskrit because people actually speak Sanskrit there. So, so I went there and looked at code switching between Hindi and Sanskrit and just tried to, you know, basically conduct some sort of sociolinguistic study on, on trying to understand, you know, do people speak Sanskrit there or not? Are they native speakers of Sanskrit, you know, asking kind of basic questions like that. Anyway, from there, the, the, that was 2009 and you know, here we are close to two decades later and I'm still thinking about this topic.
[04:49]
B
So it's certainly a fascinating topic. I mean, Sanskrit is, it's an extraordinary language. I don't mean that necessarily in terms of scholar in the field or winning an Indophile. It's, it's objectively an extraordinary cultural phenomenon. And the extent to which, whether it was after a mother tongue, it's a fascinating question. Right. And then compound that with the extent to which not only has the Sanskrit been preserved for a long time, it's evolved, obviously. Well, actually not so much since Panini, but the preservation of, you know, like, would we not be fascinated to know whether or not there were Latin speaking villages somewhere in Italy? Like this would be a fascination. So then you kind of mentioned these two little questions toward the end of your opening and I think the audience are like, yes, well, we want to know the answer. Are there people who speak Sanskrit in these villages? Are there native Sanskrit speakers? What did you find?
[05:49]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, the Short answer is I found people who do speak Sanskrit and they do live in villages. But you know, the whole phenomenon of bilingualism and second language acquisition is, it's a minefield in terms of, you know, the possibilities of how you can, how you can empirically assess someone's linguistic competency in, in different languages. And you know, for instance, you know, I met people who claim to be able to speak Sanskrit because they could say omn. You know, that's, that doesn't mean you can speak Sanskrit and have a conversation in it like we're talking now. And you know, at the far end again of that the spectrum of competency, you can find people who are quite conversant and can speak a high register of, of Sanskrit. You know, the pundits who have spent their lives just immersed in, in texts. And, but the, the whole thing with the, the Sanskrit speaking village is that it's, it's kind of a, there's, there's, there's kind of a ground up aspiration and there's always a top down kind of imposition as well. Where, where you've got these different forces at play where, you know, people, there are, there are different things going on. It could just be that people would like to, to speak the language of, you know, their heritage, they want to speak the heritage language or, you know, it's part of a bigger kind of project that has to do with, you know, you know, I wrote this article back in 2014 about the sanitizing power of Sanskrit and through going to the Samskrita Bharati spoken Sanskrit camps, you know, the ideology that's pushed through that is that if people are lucky enough to hear Sanskrit being spoken, then there will be some cultural and moral transformation of community of the world, of the cosmos even. And so that's the kind of, that's the other side of it. And that's where I ended up titling the book the Metaphysics of Development.
[08:07]
B
Okay, so, so let's just clarify a couple of things. If the listeners might be wondering, are there villages where people speak Sanskrit above and beyond sort of the ritual or philosophical space?
[08:24]
A
Well, I mean, so the Internet will have you believe that there are.
[08:27]
B
No, no, you zoom asking, not the Internet.
[08:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the thing. So the Internet will says one thing. But my experience of going to, I went to several of these villages across North India and yeah, I found people that speak Sanskrit right now. But it depends what you, what you define Sanskrit to be. You know, people. I could sit there and converse more or Less for hours with, with people who, who, who could speak Sanskrit. But that might have only been 10 or 20 people in a village of a thousand. Right. But you know, you'll find the Internet will say that everyone in this village speaks fluent native level Sanskrit all the time. That they've, they've shifted away from the local language of that, that community even. Yeah. So every village I went to, basically it was, it was more or less kind of actually quite difficult to find more than a handful of people who you would consider to be more than just conversational in Sanskrit. But I did find people who do speak Sanskrit.
[09:43]
B
Right. And so, and those people, understandably, it would be next to impossible for any culture anytime to forego a mother tongue, although in a second tongue, and then use that when there is the sort of the gravitas, the training in mother tongue. So there were people then, a minority as you say, who were fluent in Sanskrit. And the question that comes to mind is were they at all using your above and beyond typical ritual or philosophical discursive usage? Did you find people using it in Swordova and every day?
[10:22]
A
Yeah, I, I mean I did, but it was always a bit of the observer's paradox in terms of, you know, like for instance, I would, I would, I would hide around a corner and wait to kind of make my presence known, just to kind of catch catch like, what are they speaking? Sanskrit? Because I knew as soon as I turned the corner they would start speaking Sanskrit to me. Me. And I had many instances where, say I was sitting amongst a bunch of people and they're all talking like Ohmiyya, like Assamese. Right. Because I went to this one village up in Assam and they're just talking Assamese to each other and then they would, if they wanted to talk to me, they spoke to me in Sanskrit sort of thing. You know, there's these sorts of dynamics. But we could, there are people that you could, yeah. Talk about. I mean, depending on each person's level of competency and how many different domains of. They could, you know, discuss things in, you know, it was, it was possible to find people who we could, we could talk about anything, just about.
[11:30]
B
But you didn't observe Sanskrit being spoken in a mundane fashion.
[11:35]
A
I mean. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. I observed it in my presence. I can't see if, say if they spoke Sanskrit amongst each other when I'm not there.
[11:43]
B
So. So you collapse the wave function by observation.
[11:47]
A
Yeah, exactly. So. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, so. So it was a bit. That was always A bit frustrating to, to kind of try and come up with ways to speak or to, to understand, you know, how much Sanskrit is actually spoken here. It's one of the things about trying to do anthropological fieldwork, I guess.
[12:09]
B
So then what, what's your book arguing? What do you hope folks would most take away from this work?
[12:16]
A
I think that Sanskrit is a, well the, the phenomenon of people speaking Sanskrit is far more complex and dynamic than, than perhaps a lot of people give it credit for. And again from both directions. So you've got the people who say oh, you know, like Sanskrit doesn't, no one speaks it. But then at the same time people do speak it, people do aspire to speak it. And I think one of the main arguments that I put forward is that it doesn't actually matter to a lot of people whether or not Sanskrit is spoken. And that's what the subtitle is about, Imagining Sanskrit land. Because it's more about the scape that is cultivated in people's minds. It doesn't matter because I met so many people who would say, oh yeah, there's a village, I've heard about this village somewhere in India where everyone speaks Sanskrit. Do you know where it is? Do you know what it's called? Do you know how to get there? No, no, I just know it. I've read about it on the Internet. And so for a lot of people that's all that's required. But then again at the other end, the top down perspective as well is that Sanskrit is, is a, is a development tool for building the nation and also, and also the world as far as some people are concerned. And so I don't think that aspect of, of the whole Sanskrit speaking phenomenon is, is something that, you know, too many people have thought about how, how it is part of national policies to you know, if you think about for example Narendra Modi and his push to have the International Day of Yoga established at the United nations and then Sanskrit is, is considered part of a package to, to, you know, help with climate change, for example. You know, these are sort of the rhetoric that is pushed but then again it's also just a massive black hole as well because in one of the chapters I go quite deep into analyzing Uttarakhand and how every year Uttarakhand government makes this claim, we're going to make a Sanskrit village in every block or every division or we're going to have 108 Sanskrit villages across the entire state. And they've been saying this for decades and they've thrown crawls and millions of crores of rupees at this, you know, tens of millions of US dollars over the years and there's nothing to show for it. So you've, you know, it's far more to it than just than a lot of people might pay attention to. And I think that's what, that's what I show in the book is that it's, it's, it's much more interesting than, than people might initially think.
[15:17]
B
It's springtime. Which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9. You can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief. How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu. the sale only lasts for a month. So go and get some books. Yeah, so let us try to contextualize and maybe locate that interesting a little bit for more general readers and also for those in other fields. So this book is obviously not about the grammar of Sanskrit or not even necessarily the literature of Sanskrit. It's about the phenomenon of Sanskrit which is say the usage of Sanskrit for political and social purposes. Maybe the intersection of the language and the imaginaire or how we imagine things. What do we talk about? Whatever Christian or Hindu context, you know, we imagine the world is like this. And so it's sort of, you know, for some reason what keeps coming to, what kept coming to my mind as, as I was looking at your book was this notion of forest permits. It is a brilliant literary trope in Saska literature, but it may never have been a reality. But it's irrelevant. It's doing phenomenal work of encoding and ideology. When you have householders living in the forest. It's this, this really this idealization of sort of Brahmanic ideology that now is both ascetic and both grahesta. And so, so, so it's doing such crucial work. And I kept coming up to this idea that, you know, whether or not there are fluid Sanskrit speaking villages, the very idea that conjures is doing work in the cultures.
[17:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's spot on. That's, that's pretty much the crux of, of one of the main arguments is that it doesn't matter if people are Speaking Sanskrit, it's that out there somewhere in the darkness, so to speak. You know, there's that hermetically sealed Gandhian economy somehow just, you know, keeping that idea of the tradition of, of Sanskritic culture alive in some pristine village. And that's good enough for I think a lot of people to know that that might be the case.
[18:09]
B
You two also, your book does cover content above and beyond Sanskrit's usage. In this context of nation building or sort of cultural affirmation, what would you say about sort of perhaps, you know, the language outside of the subcontinent?
[18:30]
A
Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind is modern Israeli. And so a lot of people consider it to be Hebrew. But there's the work of Gillard Zuckerman, for example, who has put forth a rather convincing argument that modern Israeli is, is really just Yiddish. So like an Indo European grammar with a Semitic kind of vocabulary. But then it's kind of given this, the status of this ancient language, you know, the supposed language of the Old Testament and all that. But that's really Greek anyway. But that's another story. Yeah, and also, so the other examples are like Esperanto and these other constructed languages that were kind of given the idea that they could again kind of create this world, this utopian world through getting, changing people's consciousness through changing language use. And so Sanskrit kind of fits into that category of helping to build a utopia through, through language change or language shift. So everyone could, if everyone were were to change from English being the current global lingua franca, to Sanskrit, then according to certain ideologies that would, that would help immensely with creating a better world. But one of the, one of the, the things about that is that, you know, if you go back and you look at the earlier grammarians, Panini, Katyana, Patanjali, you know, they, they were describing language shift that was happening from old Vedic into, you know, the, the later versions of Vedic and then into Classical and the language shifts that were occurring in their communities and the, the kind of moral panic that was created and the, the fixing of if, you know, if you speak Sanskrit, then you will attain some moral benefit and so will the community. And that was based on the idea that everyone. Oh, well, what gave Sanskrit its power was the attention to the grammatical detail. But the irony today is that the spoken Sanskrit movement, or at least the Sanskrita Bharati kind of approach, which is basically the default revitalization method, it essentially tells the prospects who want to learn to speak Sanskrit that they should not worry about grammar. So it kind of puts the whole kind of potency of Sanskrit's transformational power into a really interesting position where the thing that actually gives it its power is the thing that's actually being ignored. So, you know, that leads me to like, question like, you know, how much power does this language, you know, potentially have?
[21:36]
B
Yeah, let's have a, if you don't mind, have a little closer look at that idea. If I'm understanding you correctly, what you have just said is that the, it is understood that the power in Sanskrit has to do with its pristine grammatical features that were codified or clinched most famously by Platonic. Yes. So would a listener might think, well, is it not the case throughout the Vedic period that the language would have been considered extraordinarily powerful for ritual liturgical purposes, irrespective of grammatical inquiry.
[22:19]
A
Yes, but I mean, so I guess this is one of the common misconceptions is that, I mean, unless you're a historical linguist, then you've probably not in the position to notice that, you know, Sanskrit has changed and it's been constantly changing. And part of that whole codification was an attempt to capture the language that was changing and being forgotten. And so the language, the Sanskrit that's spoken today, especially the Sanskrit that, that is promoted by organizations like Samskrita Bharati and their tireless volunteers who teach all these camps is quite different. I mean, essentially it's Hindi with Sanskritized words and you can even find, so you can find, excuse me, instances of that in Sanskrit graffiti you might find painted on the, on the walls of, of buildings in these so called villages where, you know, like they'll use the copula asti, you know, which kind of like shows how it's just being, it's, it's basically just a Hindi sentence. Asti just replaces he, you know, in, in. In sentence sort of thing. So to say that, to say that, yeah, the Sanskrit spoken today is the, is in any way kind of the same as Vedic Sanskrit is a bit of a stretch really.
[23:49]
B
Oh no, certainly not. My question is regarding the claim that the power of the language was tied to its grammar. Whereas one imagines there are a great many practitioners who are blissfully ignorant of the grammar in various box, who would describe or experience the language as logical power.
[24:11]
A
Yeah, I get what you're saying. I guess the thing is that today people are. The spoken Sanskrit movement is about kind of divinizing space through conversation and kind of ritualizing just the mundane in a way that is separate from, you know, the whole Chandas, you know, the, the language of Ritual as a.
[24:42]
B
And.
[24:42]
A
And the. So the Vedica versus the Lokika kind of variety that. And so essentially it's kind of this. This. Yeah. What's his name? Adi Hastings. His earlier. His. He wrote his couple of papers about 15, 20 years ago on the Sanskrita Bharati movement. I think it's a really good. He does a really good job of showing this kind of the divinization of space and that's kind of licked by the mother tongue. I think his paper's called. It's really interesting. Yeah. And of course, Madhav Deshpande's work is. I mean, goes without saying that he. He has explored this stuff probably more than anyone else, I'd guess, to show the historical changes and, and how, you know, there was a point in time where, where people were essentially shifting to the. To the languages that the Prakrits or the. That were the. Became the modern Indian languages. And so there was a. There was an attempt to. To get people to reverse that language shift, essentially. And you see that kind of. Even so, I mean, one of the. I think the most interesting things is like, none of this is new. What, what the people are talking about today in terms of trying to preserve Lang Sanskrit or promote Sanskrit, have already been tried not just once, but several times throughout the centuries. And so I think that's also something that a lot of people probably don't really think about or have thought about.
[26:26]
B
Is this work that you're continuing in some way?
[26:29]
A
Yeah, I'm not sure. Actually. I actually had to. I had to cut a lot of. I had to cut a lot out of the final manuscript. It probably could have been at least twice as long as I did intend to put a lot of linguistic analysis in of conversations. But that I had to. I wanted to say something different to all this stuff that I've already published in your journal articles and book chapters. And so there's quite a bit of linguistic analysis of conversations in those papers. And I thought, well, I don't. I don't want to just, you know, just republish the same stuff. I wanted to say something new and that's why the book taken the shape that it did. And. But I've still got some things that I'd like to publish. Like, for instance, I've got all of this analysis of. I don't know if you've ever seen on YouTube you can find commentary of cricket matches that say they're all in Sanskrit, but actually once you start listening to them, it's like 50% Hindi and then if it's so like, there'll be a commentary in Sanskrit and then there's another guy who does the commentary in Hindi. But then even the, even the Sanskrit speaking commentator is, is dropping in like English loan words as well. So then you're like, what? You know, so that's, that's, I'd like to do some more work with that stuff. And yeah, this, there's more that could be said, but for now I'm kind of, I'm kind of content, I suppose I've been thinking about it for a long time and it'd be nice to think about something else also.
[28:10]
B
Yeah, really. I mean, your work really invites a new understanding, augmented, enriched understandings of Sanskrit, both with respect to whether or not it is a living language, also with respect to whether or not it is a static language since Pan, idealized or otherwise. And what comes to mind is certainly very, very different. At the other end of the spectrum of Sanskrit is the language we're speaking now, English, which has been extraordinarily, you know, dynamic to say the least, or extraordinarily, what can I say, porous to, to loan words and impressions. And, you know, so what we have is the English. Okay, so we're learning English, you know, what does that mean? Does that mean we're learning English as a new Southern? Does that mean we're learning English literature? And what about modern, you know, English? It is English that folks speak, whether in Australia, whether in Canada, whether in America, you know, Boston English, New York English text, and English, UK English, Indian English. So in a sense, obviously, because of our training and the nature of the history, the usage of Sanskrit, typically we think of Sanskrit in a particular way, not dissimilar perhaps to how Latin is now as a holder of text rather than something spoken day in and day out. But when you talk about the villages, it's almost as if there's an alternate universe where Sanskrit is comparable to English. And when we say English, there are a variety of ways in which people speak English with a variety of pedigrees and a variety of local loan words. And so looking at your book had my synapses firing about, well, what is Sanskrit? And really come back to this idea. Was it ever a mother tongue? I mean, ironically, what you're, what you're showing me, the, the, the notion, whether the, the, the idealization, the conceit or the, the attempt that this, this is a mother tongue actually really encourages me to, to ponder whether or not it was. And her mother tongue, you know, it's, it's it's really a fascinating phenomen.
[30:31]
A
Yeah. I think like to jump onto the, the topic of mother tongue. Like the, in the last section of the book where I dive deep into the census data and I think it's chapter 11. I, I go. I give a kind of historical survey of, of how the, in the census, the logic of the census, how the, the phrasing of mother tongue or language spoken at home or I forget all the, the different terms right now, but just how it changed. And that, I think that kind of, you know, resonates with what you were just saying about. It depends how kind of something is again, you know, classified as to, as to what it becomes. And that, that's something that's really interesting in the census data. Is that a. How languages are classified? How many languages can be counted in the census? You know, India has so many languages, it's almost impossible to, To. To count them all in a sense. But yeah, one of the things with the, the census data is this. That's actually probably the, the thing I've got the most amount of criticism for from people. It's like, why no one speaks Sanskrit. So why would you bother wasting your time with the Sanskrit. The Sanskrit daughter in the census? And it's that. Well, a. The world got locked down for a couple of years, so I couldn't go do the field work that I wanted to do. And the census data had just all been released. And so I was like, well, okay, I'll just, I'll just pivot and let's look at the census data. And as soon as I started looking at it, I was like, this data is funky. But I thought, okay, instead of just like wandering around India wasting time, going to all this effort to go find a village somewhere that might not have any. Anyone who speaks Sanskrit at all, because I found villages like that, I thought, how about we try and, you know, pinpoint them through aspiration? And that's, that's what I did with that census data. I was just like, yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter if. Because at some point I was just like, you know what? It doesn't matter if people speak Sanskrit. It's actually kind of difficult to find these villages where people speak Sanskrit. So let's change, let's change the tactic a little bit. And so the census data is really funky. And once you get into it, I mean, I've got much. I could probably write a book just on the census data. Actually. There's so much more I could say on that stuff.
[33:14]
B
Do you have thoughts yet as to what your next project will be on?
[33:19]
A
I have about like four projects on the go at the same time. That paper I sent you on the pole climbing acrobatic ritual stuff is probably top of the list. Just doing a global ethno history of pole climbing acrobatics and I'm trying to. I've got probably two halves or halves of two books written. One on kind of the global comparative history and one more on a kind of sociological study of legitimacy that comes through risk taking spectacle. So they're like kind of. They'll probably end up being like volume one and volume two of the two book series. I've got another half a book written on again. Basically the confluence of transhumanism, technocracy and theosophy is the best way to understand and how yoga and Sanskrit kind of merge. Merge with that through global governance. So the, the kind of. The main analytical thread of that is looking at yoga in Sanskrit through the lens of like the International Day of Yoga and Sustainability and climate change stuff. Trying to understand that the gnostic kind of influence that that is there. That again, isn't really kind of. I mean, a lot of people talked about gnostic influence in say the new age and how yoga links to that, but talking about it through a kind of governance lens is not really something that's occurred. So yeah, they're kind of the thing. But then also the thing I want to get back to is translating the Mala Purana and the wrestling sections in, in the Mana Salasa. I've got about half, half a translation of. Of that and I'd like to get back into the wrestling stuff as well. So that's pretty. There's some of the things. There are. There are more things, but yeah.
[35:24]
B
Well then perhaps this will not be our last podcast conversation.
[35:30]
A
Oh no, no, I hope not. Anyway, it's nice to chat to you, Raj.
[35:35]
B
Great. Well, thank you very much for appearing on the podcast today.
[35:38]
A
Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.
[35:40]
B
For those listening, we've been speaking to Dr. Patrick and Hartney on Sanskrit speaking villages, linguistic utopias and the metaphysics of development imagining Sanskrit land. Brand new Rutledge publication. The link is in the podcast notes. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading and keep contemplating what business the language of the gods has in the world of man.

Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Patrick S. D. McCartney, "Sanskrit-Speaking Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development" (Routledge, 2026)
Host: Dr. Raj Balkaran
Guest: Dr. Patrick S. D. McCartney
Date: May 28, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode explores Dr. Patrick McCartney’s latest book on the phenomenon of "Sanskrit-speaking villages" and examines broader questions about language, cultural imagination, and the politics of development. Dr. McCartney and Dr. Balkaran discuss the myth and reality of speaking Sanskrit in modern India, the social and political implications of language revitalization, and the metaphysical ideals that drive such projects. The episode dives deeply into how Sanskrit continues to function symbolically and materially in Indian nation-building and global cultural discourse, while addressing debates about what constitutes a "living language."

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Research

Motivation and Early Encounters
McCartney describes how his entry into the study of Sanskrit-speaking villages stemmed from general fascination with language preservation and revitalization, coupled with his own background in linguistics. He notes significant scholarly skepticism and public polarization about the existence and importance of Indian communities where Sanskrit is used daily.

"Some people were just about shouting at me... 'No one speaks Sanskrit.' ...at the far end ...was, you know, a much more romantic and idealized position... isn't it wonderful there are these villages where everyone speaks Sanskrit."
(03:00-03:28)
Initial Fieldwork
He began his fieldwork at Shanti Mandir in Gujarat, investigating actual language practices (code-switching between Hindi and Sanskrit) and people’s aspirations for Sanskrit usage.

2. Reality versus Myth: Are There Sanskrit-Speaking Villages?

Empirical Findings
While the internet often reports on entire villages speaking fluent Sanskrit, McCartney found that only a minority—sometimes as few as 10-20 individuals in a village of thousands—could sustain a conversation in Sanskrit.

"I found people who do speak Sanskrit and they do live in villages. But... it might have only been 10 or 20 people in a village of a thousand."
(08:29-08:49)
Nature of Usage
The use of Sanskrit is usually limited to specific domains—ritual, education, special occasions—and is seldom observed as a truly vernacular, everyday language. The phenomenon is more aspirational and symbolic than a widespread reality.

"I would hide around a corner... just to kind of catch: are they speaking Sanskrit? ...as soon as I turned the corner they would start speaking Sanskrit to me."
(10:22-11:29)
Observer's Paradox
McCartney highlights the difficulty of documenting spontaneous Sanskrit conversations due to the 'observer effect'—his presence often prompted people to perform Sanskrit for him.

3. The Ideology and Imagination of ‘Sanskrit-Land’

Why the Myth Matters
McCartney’s argument centers on the idea that the idea of Sanskrit-speaking villages is culturally generative, regardless of its empirical accuracy.

"It doesn't actually matter to a lot of people whether or not Sanskrit is spoken... It's more about the scape that is cultivated in people's minds."
(12:16-12:49)
Cultural and Political Work
The myth of fluent Sanskrit villages serves as a touchstone for national identity, heritage, and imagined cultural purity.

"It doesn't matter if people are speaking Sanskrit, it's that out there somewhere... there's that hermetically sealed Gandhian economy... keeping that idea of the tradition of Sanskritic culture alive in some pristine village."
(17:28-18:08)
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Forces
The phenomenon is shaped both by grassroots aspirations and governmental/top-down projects. State initiatives (e.g., in Uttarakhand) have repeatedly invested enormous resources into the idea of creating Sanskrit-speaking villages, often with little to show for it.

"Every year Uttarakhand government makes this claim, we're going to make a Sanskrit village in every block... tens of millions of US dollars... and there's nothing to show for it."
(14:00-15:16)

4. Comparative Perspectives & Similar Language Phenomena

Sanskrit and Other Languages
McCartney draws comparisons with Modern Hebrew and constructed languages like Esperanto, where language revitalization embodies utopian or nation-building projects.

"Esperanto and these other constructed languages... given the idea that they could again kind of create this world, this utopian world..."
(18:29-20:00)
Sanskrit’s Changing Form
The type of Sanskrit promoted in revitalization movements (especially via Samskrita Bharati) is often closer to Sanskritized Hindi, with little emphasis on grammatical purity historically prized by early grammarians.

"...the spoken Sanskrit movement... essentially tells the prospects... not to worry about grammar. So it kind of puts the whole potency of Sanskrit's transformational power into a really interesting position..."
(20:45-21:36)

5. Sanskrit’s Power: Grammar, Ritual, and Social Function

Shifting Conceptions of Power
The episode examines whether Sanskrit’s supposed “power” lies in its liturgical, ritual, or grammatical features, and how this transforms in present-day spoken contexts.

"The spoken Sanskrit movement is about kind of divinizing space through conversation and kind of ritualizing just the mundane..."
(24:10-24:41)
Historical Shifts
Sanskrit’s history has seen repeated attempts at reversal of language shift; current efforts echo previous centuries’ attempts to maintain or revitalize its use.

"People are talking about today in terms of trying to preserve Sanskrit or promote Sanskrit, have already been tried not just once, but several times throughout the centuries."
(25:30-26:26)

6. Critical Reflections on Language Data and Policy

Census Data and Its Problems
The reliability and significance of census data on Sanskrit reveal both the difficulties of measuring language use and the performative element of declaring languages in official records.

"...the census data is really funky...I could probably write a book just on the census data."
(32:25-33:14)
Labels Like ‘Mother Tongue’
The book details how changing census definitions shape what counts as language or mother tongue, and inform wider debates about identity and nation.

7. Future Research & Broader Implications

Next Projects
McCartney is pursuing several new research directions, including the global history of pole-climbing acrobatics, the role of spectacle in claiming legitimacy, and the interplay between transhumanism, theosophy, yoga, and Sanskrit in global governance and ideology.

"I've got probably two halves of two books written...also...translating the Mala Purana and the wrestling sections in the Mana Salasa..."
(33:18-35:24)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On field responses:
“Some people were just about shouting at me, 'What are you doing? You're wasting your time. This is stupid topic. No one speaks Sanskrit.' ... But then the other idea at the far end...was...isn't it wonderful that there are these villages where everyone speaks Sanskrit?"
(02:28-03:20, McCartney)
On the reality of Sanskrit speech:
"But you know, you'll find the Internet will say that everyone in this village speaks fluent native level Sanskrit all the time...Actually, quite difficult to find more than a handful..."
(08:29-09:42, McCartney)
On the purpose of myth:
"It doesn't actually matter to a lot of people whether or not Sanskrit is spoken...it's more about the scape that is cultivated in people's minds."
(12:16-12:49, McCartney)
On comparative cases:
“So like, Esperanto and these other constructed languages...they could create this utopian world through...changing language use. And so Sanskrit kind of fits into that category...”
(19:01-20:15, McCartney)
On policy and effectiveness:
"Uttarakhand government makes this claim...to have 108 Sanskrit villages...they've been saying this for decades and they've thrown crores...and there's nothing to show for it."
(14:00-15:16, McCartney)
On his own future:
"For now I'm kind of, I'm kind of content, I suppose. I've been thinking about it for a long time and it'd be nice to think about something else also."
(28:10-28:30, McCartney)

Timestamps for Key Segments

01:53 — Dr. McCartney’s entry into the topic and early fieldwork
05:49 — Are there really Sanskrit-speaking villages? Empirical findings
08:23 — Nuanced reality: degrees of Sanskrit fluency and usage
10:22 — Observer’s paradox and methodological challenges
12:08 — Book’s central argument: the power of imagination and myth
14:00 — State language policy and repeated “Sanskritization” attempts
17:28 — The cultural work of imagined Sanskrit spaces
18:29 — Comparative discussion: Hebrew, Esperanto, Sanskrit
20:45 — Irony: Spoken Sanskrit movement and grammar
24:10 — Divinizing the mundane via Sanskrit conversation
25:30 — Recurring patterns in Sanskrit’s history
32:25 — Census data: methodological reflections
33:18 — Future projects and ongoing research

Conclusion

This episode offers a richly textured exploration of the status and symbolism of Sanskrit in contemporary India and beyond. Dr. McCartney’s research exposes the complex, often contradictory space between linguistic myth and reality, and examines how the idea of “Sanskrit land” continues to shape both state policy and cultural consciousness. The interplay of aspiration, ideology, and practice reveals as much about modern India’s dreams as it does about its linguistic realities.

For more information, check out the book:
Patrick S. D. McCartney, "Sanskrit-Speaking Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development" (Routledge, 2026).

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[01:25]
A
welcome to the New Books Network
[01:29]
B
hello and welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balkaran. More importantly, I have the pleasure of welcoming back to the podcast Dr. Patrick McCartney, who is author of this brand new Rutledge publication, Sanskrit Speaking Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development. Really fascinating stuff, Patrick. Welcome to the podcast.
[01:50]
A
Thanks Raj. It's nice to be back on your podcast.
[01:54]
B
Yeah, we chatted previously a little bit about the backstory, but for those who may not have caught the previous episode, tell us about just your foyer into Sanskrit speaking villages. How did you get into this topic of study here?
[02:08]
A
Well, I mean it started with first learning about the Sanskrit language and then coming across the the idea that people still spoke it. And that fascinated me. And through my Masters in Linguistics I became quite interested in language revitalization and endangered languages in general. And so I decided that wouldn't it be fun to go off and look at the whole phenomenon of people speaking Sanskrit. And one of the things that really fascinated me about it was just how defined the the opinions of people were on this topic, not just amongst the general public, but even more so among scholars. And when I was in the kind of early days of just trying to find information and I was asking you know, like more established scholars for, for advice. You know, some people were just about shouting at me or you know, like, what are you doing? You're wasting your time. This is, this is stupid topic. No one speaks Sanskrit. That was one idea. But then the other idea at the far end of that spectrum was that was, you know, a much more romantic and, and idealized kind of position that isn't it wonderful that there are these villages where everyone speaks Sanskrit? And so that, that really, that tension between these two, two ideas just really drew me into it as a, as a topic. And so I first went to a yoga ashram in the south of Gujarat, which is where I ended up doing my PhD fieldwork called Shanti Mandir. And the reason I went there is because I knew some people who were involved with that organization and they said, oh, there's, it's actually a Sanskrit mahavidyalaya. It's a, most of the people who live in the ashrams, you know, studying Sanskrit there are the students there or the, you know, they're the teachers. And so that would be a good place for you to go and, and look at spoken Sanskrit because people actually speak Sanskrit there. So, so I went there and looked at code switching between Hindi and Sanskrit and just tried to, you know, basically conduct some sort of sociolinguistic study on, on trying to understand, you know, do people speak Sanskrit there or not? Are they native speakers of Sanskrit, you know, asking kind of basic questions like that. Anyway, from there, the, the, that was 2009 and you know, here we are close to two decades later and I'm still thinking about this topic.
[04:49]
B
So it's certainly a fascinating topic. I mean, Sanskrit is, it's an extraordinary language. I don't mean that necessarily in terms of scholar in the field or winning an Indophile. It's, it's objectively an extraordinary cultural phenomenon. And the extent to which, whether it was after a mother tongue, it's a fascinating question. Right. And then compound that with the extent to which not only has the Sanskrit been preserved for a long time, it's evolved, obviously. Well, actually not so much since Panini, but the preservation of, you know, like, would we not be fascinated to know whether or not there were Latin speaking villages somewhere in Italy? Like this would be a fascination. So then you kind of mentioned these two little questions toward the end of your opening and I think the audience are like, yes, well, we want to know the answer. Are there people who speak Sanskrit in these villages? Are there native Sanskrit speakers? What did you find?
[05:49]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, the Short answer is I found people who do speak Sanskrit and they do live in villages. But you know, the whole phenomenon of bilingualism and second language acquisition is, it's a minefield in terms of, you know, the possibilities of how you can, how you can empirically assess someone's linguistic competency in, in different languages. And you know, for instance, you know, I met people who claim to be able to speak Sanskrit because they could say omn. You know, that's, that doesn't mean you can speak Sanskrit and have a conversation in it like we're talking now. And you know, at the far end again of that the spectrum of competency, you can find people who are quite conversant and can speak a high register of, of Sanskrit. You know, the pundits who have spent their lives just immersed in, in texts. And, but the, the whole thing with the, the Sanskrit speaking village is that it's, it's kind of a, there's, there's, there's kind of a ground up aspiration and there's always a top down kind of imposition as well. Where, where you've got these different forces at play where, you know, people, there are, there are different things going on. It could just be that people would like to, to speak the language of, you know, their heritage, they want to speak the heritage language or, you know, it's part of a bigger kind of project that has to do with, you know, you know, I wrote this article back in 2014 about the sanitizing power of Sanskrit and through going to the Samskrita Bharati spoken Sanskrit camps, you know, the ideology that's pushed through that is that if people are lucky enough to hear Sanskrit being spoken, then there will be some cultural and moral transformation of community of the world, of the cosmos even. And so that's the kind of, that's the other side of it. And that's where I ended up titling the book the Metaphysics of Development.
[08:07]
B
Okay, so, so let's just clarify a couple of things. If the listeners might be wondering, are there villages where people speak Sanskrit above and beyond sort of the ritual or philosophical space?
[08:24]
A
Well, I mean, so the Internet will have you believe that there are.
[08:27]
B
No, no, you zoom asking, not the Internet.
[08:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the thing. So the Internet will says one thing. But my experience of going to, I went to several of these villages across North India and yeah, I found people that speak Sanskrit right now. But it depends what you, what you define Sanskrit to be. You know, people. I could sit there and converse more or Less for hours with, with people who, who, who could speak Sanskrit. But that might have only been 10 or 20 people in a village of a thousand. Right. But you know, you'll find the Internet will say that everyone in this village speaks fluent native level Sanskrit all the time. That they've, they've shifted away from the local language of that, that community even. Yeah. So every village I went to, basically it was, it was more or less kind of actually quite difficult to find more than a handful of people who you would consider to be more than just conversational in Sanskrit. But I did find people who do speak Sanskrit.
[09:43]
B
Right. And so, and those people, understandably, it would be next to impossible for any culture anytime to forego a mother tongue, although in a second tongue, and then use that when there is the sort of the gravitas, the training in mother tongue. So there were people then, a minority as you say, who were fluent in Sanskrit. And the question that comes to mind is were they at all using your above and beyond typical ritual or philosophical discursive usage? Did you find people using it in Swordova and every day?
[10:22]
A
Yeah, I, I mean I did, but it was always a bit of the observer's paradox in terms of, you know, like for instance, I would, I would, I would hide around a corner and wait to kind of make my presence known, just to kind of catch catch like, what are they speaking? Sanskrit? Because I knew as soon as I turned the corner they would start speaking Sanskrit to me. Me. And I had many instances where, say I was sitting amongst a bunch of people and they're all talking like Ohmiyya, like Assamese. Right. Because I went to this one village up in Assam and they're just talking Assamese to each other and then they would, if they wanted to talk to me, they spoke to me in Sanskrit sort of thing. You know, there's these sorts of dynamics. But we could, there are people that you could, yeah. Talk about. I mean, depending on each person's level of competency and how many different domains of. They could, you know, discuss things in, you know, it was, it was possible to find people who we could, we could talk about anything, just about.
[11:30]
B
But you didn't observe Sanskrit being spoken in a mundane fashion.
[11:35]
A
I mean. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. I observed it in my presence. I can't see if, say if they spoke Sanskrit amongst each other when I'm not there.
[11:43]
B
So. So you collapse the wave function by observation.
[11:47]
A
Yeah, exactly. So. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, so. So it was a bit. That was always A bit frustrating to, to kind of try and come up with ways to speak or to, to understand, you know, how much Sanskrit is actually spoken here. It's one of the things about trying to do anthropological fieldwork, I guess.
[12:09]
B
So then what, what's your book arguing? What do you hope folks would most take away from this work?
[12:16]
A
I think that Sanskrit is a, well the, the phenomenon of people speaking Sanskrit is far more complex and dynamic than, than perhaps a lot of people give it credit for. And again from both directions. So you've got the people who say oh, you know, like Sanskrit doesn't, no one speaks it. But then at the same time people do speak it, people do aspire to speak it. And I think one of the main arguments that I put forward is that it doesn't actually matter to a lot of people whether or not Sanskrit is spoken. And that's what the subtitle is about, Imagining Sanskrit land. Because it's more about the scape that is cultivated in people's minds. It doesn't matter because I met so many people who would say, oh yeah, there's a village, I've heard about this village somewhere in India where everyone speaks Sanskrit. Do you know where it is? Do you know what it's called? Do you know how to get there? No, no, I just know it. I've read about it on the Internet. And so for a lot of people that's all that's required. But then again at the other end, the top down perspective as well is that Sanskrit is, is a, is a development tool for building the nation and also, and also the world as far as some people are concerned. And so I don't think that aspect of, of the whole Sanskrit speaking phenomenon is, is something that, you know, too many people have thought about how, how it is part of national policies to you know, if you think about for example Narendra Modi and his push to have the International Day of Yoga established at the United nations and then Sanskrit is, is considered part of a package to, to, you know, help with climate change, for example. You know, these are sort of the rhetoric that is pushed but then again it's also just a massive black hole as well because in one of the chapters I go quite deep into analyzing Uttarakhand and how every year Uttarakhand government makes this claim, we're going to make a Sanskrit village in every block or every division or we're going to have 108 Sanskrit villages across the entire state. And they've been saying this for decades and they've thrown crawls and millions of crores of rupees at this, you know, tens of millions of US dollars over the years and there's nothing to show for it. So you've, you know, it's far more to it than just than a lot of people might pay attention to. And I think that's what, that's what I show in the book is that it's, it's, it's much more interesting than, than people might initially think.
[15:17]
B
It's springtime. Which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4 through June 9. You can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audiobook from Princeton University Press. Just go to press princeton.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief. How Evidence Shows what really Works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press princeton.edu and use the code spring50. That's S P R I N G50 press princeton.edu. the sale only lasts for a month. So go and get some books. Yeah, so let us try to contextualize and maybe locate that interesting a little bit for more general readers and also for those in other fields. So this book is obviously not about the grammar of Sanskrit or not even necessarily the literature of Sanskrit. It's about the phenomenon of Sanskrit which is say the usage of Sanskrit for political and social purposes. Maybe the intersection of the language and the imaginaire or how we imagine things. What do we talk about? Whatever Christian or Hindu context, you know, we imagine the world is like this. And so it's sort of, you know, for some reason what keeps coming to, what kept coming to my mind as, as I was looking at your book was this notion of forest permits. It is a brilliant literary trope in Saska literature, but it may never have been a reality. But it's irrelevant. It's doing phenomenal work of encoding and ideology. When you have householders living in the forest. It's this, this really this idealization of sort of Brahmanic ideology that now is both ascetic and both grahesta. And so, so, so it's doing such crucial work. And I kept coming up to this idea that, you know, whether or not there are fluid Sanskrit speaking villages, the very idea that conjures is doing work in the cultures.
[17:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's spot on. That's, that's pretty much the crux of, of one of the main arguments is that it doesn't matter if people are Speaking Sanskrit, it's that out there somewhere in the darkness, so to speak. You know, there's that hermetically sealed Gandhian economy somehow just, you know, keeping that idea of the tradition of, of Sanskritic culture alive in some pristine village. And that's good enough for I think a lot of people to know that that might be the case.
[18:09]
B
You two also, your book does cover content above and beyond Sanskrit's usage. In this context of nation building or sort of cultural affirmation, what would you say about sort of perhaps, you know, the language outside of the subcontinent?
[18:30]
A
Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind is modern Israeli. And so a lot of people consider it to be Hebrew. But there's the work of Gillard Zuckerman, for example, who has put forth a rather convincing argument that modern Israeli is, is really just Yiddish. So like an Indo European grammar with a Semitic kind of vocabulary. But then it's kind of given this, the status of this ancient language, you know, the supposed language of the Old Testament and all that. But that's really Greek anyway. But that's another story. Yeah, and also, so the other examples are like Esperanto and these other constructed languages that were kind of given the idea that they could again kind of create this world, this utopian world through getting, changing people's consciousness through changing language use. And so Sanskrit kind of fits into that category of helping to build a utopia through, through language change or language shift. So everyone could, if everyone were were to change from English being the current global lingua franca, to Sanskrit, then according to certain ideologies that would, that would help immensely with creating a better world. But one of the, one of the, the things about that is that, you know, if you go back and you look at the earlier grammarians, Panini, Katyana, Patanjali, you know, they, they were describing language shift that was happening from old Vedic into, you know, the, the later versions of Vedic and then into Classical and the language shifts that were occurring in their communities and the, the kind of moral panic that was created and the, the fixing of if, you know, if you speak Sanskrit, then you will attain some moral benefit and so will the community. And that was based on the idea that everyone. Oh, well, what gave Sanskrit its power was the attention to the grammatical detail. But the irony today is that the spoken Sanskrit movement, or at least the Sanskrita Bharati kind of approach, which is basically the default revitalization method, it essentially tells the prospects who want to learn to speak Sanskrit that they should not worry about grammar. So it kind of puts the whole kind of potency of Sanskrit's transformational power into a really interesting position where the thing that actually gives it its power is the thing that's actually being ignored. So, you know, that leads me to like, question like, you know, how much power does this language, you know, potentially have?
[21:36]
B
Yeah, let's have a, if you don't mind, have a little closer look at that idea. If I'm understanding you correctly, what you have just said is that the, it is understood that the power in Sanskrit has to do with its pristine grammatical features that were codified or clinched most famously by Platonic. Yes. So would a listener might think, well, is it not the case throughout the Vedic period that the language would have been considered extraordinarily powerful for ritual liturgical purposes, irrespective of grammatical inquiry.
[22:19]
A
Yes, but I mean, so I guess this is one of the common misconceptions is that, I mean, unless you're a historical linguist, then you've probably not in the position to notice that, you know, Sanskrit has changed and it's been constantly changing. And part of that whole codification was an attempt to capture the language that was changing and being forgotten. And so the language, the Sanskrit that's spoken today, especially the Sanskrit that, that is promoted by organizations like Samskrita Bharati and their tireless volunteers who teach all these camps is quite different. I mean, essentially it's Hindi with Sanskritized words and you can even find, so you can find, excuse me, instances of that in Sanskrit graffiti you might find painted on the, on the walls of, of buildings in these so called villages where, you know, like they'll use the copula asti, you know, which kind of like shows how it's just being, it's, it's basically just a Hindi sentence. Asti just replaces he, you know, in, in. In sentence sort of thing. So to say that, to say that, yeah, the Sanskrit spoken today is the, is in any way kind of the same as Vedic Sanskrit is a bit of a stretch really.
[23:49]
B
Oh no, certainly not. My question is regarding the claim that the power of the language was tied to its grammar. Whereas one imagines there are a great many practitioners who are blissfully ignorant of the grammar in various box, who would describe or experience the language as logical power.
[24:11]
A
Yeah, I get what you're saying. I guess the thing is that today people are. The spoken Sanskrit movement is about kind of divinizing space through conversation and kind of ritualizing just the mundane in a way that is separate from, you know, the whole Chandas, you know, the, the language of Ritual as a.
[24:42]
B
And.
[24:42]
A
And the. So the Vedica versus the Lokika kind of variety that. And so essentially it's kind of this. This. Yeah. What's his name? Adi Hastings. His earlier. His. He wrote his couple of papers about 15, 20 years ago on the Sanskrita Bharati movement. I think it's a really good. He does a really good job of showing this kind of the divinization of space and that's kind of licked by the mother tongue. I think his paper's called. It's really interesting. Yeah. And of course, Madhav Deshpande's work is. I mean, goes without saying that he. He has explored this stuff probably more than anyone else, I'd guess, to show the historical changes and, and how, you know, there was a point in time where, where people were essentially shifting to the. To the languages that the Prakrits or the. That were the. Became the modern Indian languages. And so there was a. There was an attempt to. To get people to reverse that language shift, essentially. And you see that kind of. Even so, I mean, one of the. I think the most interesting things is like, none of this is new. What, what the people are talking about today in terms of trying to preserve Lang Sanskrit or promote Sanskrit, have already been tried not just once, but several times throughout the centuries. And so I think that's also something that a lot of people probably don't really think about or have thought about.
[26:26]
B
Is this work that you're continuing in some way?
[26:29]
A
Yeah, I'm not sure. Actually. I actually had to. I had to cut a lot of. I had to cut a lot out of the final manuscript. It probably could have been at least twice as long as I did intend to put a lot of linguistic analysis in of conversations. But that I had to. I wanted to say something different to all this stuff that I've already published in your journal articles and book chapters. And so there's quite a bit of linguistic analysis of conversations in those papers. And I thought, well, I don't. I don't want to just, you know, just republish the same stuff. I wanted to say something new and that's why the book taken the shape that it did. And. But I've still got some things that I'd like to publish. Like, for instance, I've got all of this analysis of. I don't know if you've ever seen on YouTube you can find commentary of cricket matches that say they're all in Sanskrit, but actually once you start listening to them, it's like 50% Hindi and then if it's so like, there'll be a commentary in Sanskrit and then there's another guy who does the commentary in Hindi. But then even the, even the Sanskrit speaking commentator is, is dropping in like English loan words as well. So then you're like, what? You know, so that's, that's, I'd like to do some more work with that stuff. And yeah, this, there's more that could be said, but for now I'm kind of, I'm kind of content, I suppose I've been thinking about it for a long time and it'd be nice to think about something else also.
[28:10]
B
Yeah, really. I mean, your work really invites a new understanding, augmented, enriched understandings of Sanskrit, both with respect to whether or not it is a living language, also with respect to whether or not it is a static language since Pan, idealized or otherwise. And what comes to mind is certainly very, very different. At the other end of the spectrum of Sanskrit is the language we're speaking now, English, which has been extraordinarily, you know, dynamic to say the least, or extraordinarily, what can I say, porous to, to loan words and impressions. And, you know, so what we have is the English. Okay, so we're learning English, you know, what does that mean? Does that mean we're learning English as a new Southern? Does that mean we're learning English literature? And what about modern, you know, English? It is English that folks speak, whether in Australia, whether in Canada, whether in America, you know, Boston English, New York English text, and English, UK English, Indian English. So in a sense, obviously, because of our training and the nature of the history, the usage of Sanskrit, typically we think of Sanskrit in a particular way, not dissimilar perhaps to how Latin is now as a holder of text rather than something spoken day in and day out. But when you talk about the villages, it's almost as if there's an alternate universe where Sanskrit is comparable to English. And when we say English, there are a variety of ways in which people speak English with a variety of pedigrees and a variety of local loan words. And so looking at your book had my synapses firing about, well, what is Sanskrit? And really come back to this idea. Was it ever a mother tongue? I mean, ironically, what you're, what you're showing me, the, the, the notion, whether the, the, the idealization, the conceit or the, the attempt that this, this is a mother tongue actually really encourages me to, to ponder whether or not it was. And her mother tongue, you know, it's, it's it's really a fascinating phenomen.
[30:31]
A
Yeah. I think like to jump onto the, the topic of mother tongue. Like the, in the last section of the book where I dive deep into the census data and I think it's chapter 11. I, I go. I give a kind of historical survey of, of how the, in the census, the logic of the census, how the, the phrasing of mother tongue or language spoken at home or I forget all the, the different terms right now, but just how it changed. And that, I think that kind of, you know, resonates with what you were just saying about. It depends how kind of something is again, you know, classified as to, as to what it becomes. And that, that's something that's really interesting in the census data. Is that a. How languages are classified? How many languages can be counted in the census? You know, India has so many languages, it's almost impossible to, To. To count them all in a sense. But yeah, one of the things with the, the census data is this. That's actually probably the, the thing I've got the most amount of criticism for from people. It's like, why no one speaks Sanskrit. So why would you bother wasting your time with the Sanskrit. The Sanskrit daughter in the census? And it's that. Well, a. The world got locked down for a couple of years, so I couldn't go do the field work that I wanted to do. And the census data had just all been released. And so I was like, well, okay, I'll just, I'll just pivot and let's look at the census data. And as soon as I started looking at it, I was like, this data is funky. But I thought, okay, instead of just like wandering around India wasting time, going to all this effort to go find a village somewhere that might not have any. Anyone who speaks Sanskrit at all, because I found villages like that, I thought, how about we try and, you know, pinpoint them through aspiration? And that's, that's what I did with that census data. I was just like, yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter if. Because at some point I was just like, you know what? It doesn't matter if people speak Sanskrit. It's actually kind of difficult to find these villages where people speak Sanskrit. So let's change, let's change the tactic a little bit. And so the census data is really funky. And once you get into it, I mean, I've got much. I could probably write a book just on the census data. Actually. There's so much more I could say on that stuff.
[33:14]
B
Do you have thoughts yet as to what your next project will be on?
[33:19]
A
I have about like four projects on the go at the same time. That paper I sent you on the pole climbing acrobatic ritual stuff is probably top of the list. Just doing a global ethno history of pole climbing acrobatics and I'm trying to. I've got probably two halves or halves of two books written. One on kind of the global comparative history and one more on a kind of sociological study of legitimacy that comes through risk taking spectacle. So they're like kind of. They'll probably end up being like volume one and volume two of the two book series. I've got another half a book written on again. Basically the confluence of transhumanism, technocracy and theosophy is the best way to understand and how yoga and Sanskrit kind of merge. Merge with that through global governance. So the, the kind of. The main analytical thread of that is looking at yoga in Sanskrit through the lens of like the International Day of Yoga and Sustainability and climate change stuff. Trying to understand that the gnostic kind of influence that that is there. That again, isn't really kind of. I mean, a lot of people talked about gnostic influence in say the new age and how yoga links to that, but talking about it through a kind of governance lens is not really something that's occurred. So yeah, they're kind of the thing. But then also the thing I want to get back to is translating the Mala Purana and the wrestling sections in, in the Mana Salasa. I've got about half, half a translation of. Of that and I'd like to get back into the wrestling stuff as well. So that's pretty. There's some of the things. There are. There are more things, but yeah.
[35:24]
B
Well then perhaps this will not be our last podcast conversation.
[35:30]
A
Oh no, no, I hope not. Anyway, it's nice to chat to you, Raj.
[35:35]
B
Great. Well, thank you very much for appearing on the podcast today.
[35:38]
A
Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.
[35:40]
B
For those listening, we've been speaking to Dr. Patrick and Hartney on Sanskrit speaking villages, linguistic utopias and the metaphysics of development imagining Sanskrit land. Brand new Rutledge publication. The link is in the podcast notes. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading and keep contemplating what business the language of the gods has in the world of man.