A brief report on 10 days Spoken Sanskrit Program.
Article: The Ten days Spoken Sanskrit Program held successfully in collaboration with Samskrit Bharati, Assam.
Name of the faculties: From Samskrit Bharati (Assam) Sri Gautam ji, Sriman Satyajeet Saikia and Sri Anal Raut.
Introduction
India is a known as the great country for its oldest living civilization and for its great ancient history of culture, art, medicine, architecture etc and the great India’s language was samskrit for its being the most advanced grammar and it is most scientific developed language. Due to influence of foreign introduter and their anti samskrit policies this great language lost is glory and limited only to certain school. But in this age of democracy and advancement in modern science society is still feeling the need of of this great language. Big organisations like of NASA and many computer programming companies are working on to develop their programs in the platform of samskrit because it gives no error. Many advance country of Europe, America and Asian country life Japan introducing samskrit in their school curriculum. So the great need is coming even in India to promote this great language where it is listed as minority language. Due people are mostly running behind foreign language. In the promotion of samskrit among other Institution ‘Samskrit Bharati’ is pioneer and playing great role by making another mile stone in this journey ‘Centre for Traditional Education’ organises the ten days ‘Spoken Samskrit’ course in collaboration with ‘Samskrit Bharati’ in order to promote samskrit as a language of daily life.
This course started with discussion on the Glorious history of samskrit and its importance in modern time of science and space age. There were eight students enrolled for this course and among them five have successfully completed the ten days program, others were not regular but were kept in touched and visited in between as they had pre engagements either with their study or with job.
The pedagogy
The teaching methodology was very scientific, the teachers were well equipped with modern method of teachings and well trained they had many teaching tools with different object and arrangements of word they were focused on teaching through day to day conversation more interactively and practically instead of going deep way of academic style.
Their philosophy is that a child learns to speak while staying close to mother and by hearing from family member and neighbour. Even the child is not literally known to the techniques and grammar of the language but still he makes perfect conversation. This is actually is a natural process of learning. So our team has also made a similar approach of teaching Language (Samskrit).
This approach is tried and the result was good and inspiring. No student was using pen or paper while teacher is speaking. They were just made to listen and emphasis given on to use memory and in context to own personal day to day dealing in everyday life. At beginning it was looking quite difficult as it looks like foreign language. But slowly students started to discover that the Samskrit language is having many similarities to own mother tongue i.e. for maximum student Assamese and some of Manipuri, and as almost all of them know good Hindi and devanagari fonts (क ख ग घ… ) etc. And that gave a strong base to slowly understanding the conversation.
Our teacher have taken a approach that they will only speak samskrit while teaching in class and in general conversation with students, this approach was just like mentioned above a child initially hardly understand what mother is saying but by observing mother and her body language slowly child get understanding and in due time started to speak similarly after third day of our program many student stated to understand what teacher is asking for and the language started to become more familiar and that is what wanted to make very body comfortable with the samskrit language and making of feeling that it is not a foreign language.
As a guest lecturer the speech of Mr. Gautam ji from samskrit bharati given motivation and confidence. He has nicely explain that the How samskrit language is not a foreign language for us as we have taken birth in great country the Bharat varsha and in Indian family, and basically we are descendent of great Acharyas and rishis of Vedic time and we have sharing the same blood and great heritage so this language is in our blood that’s why our all regional language is drive from samskrit language only and share similar vocabulary. Samskrit is language of civilized people, and it give highest realization upon practice as the word samskrit means civilized work and from the very language comes the word samskriti means culture we can understand it more clearly by understanding the opposite meaning of samskriti is vikriti means deformed, so the samskrit is not mere a language it is a life style the way of living in civilized way which give perfection to human birth. That’s why it is called a Devanagary language the language of Gods.
A very nicely prepared handouts and small basic books were provided from fifth day onwards which helped in learning the language more efficiently, where about first person, singular and plural and basic grammar on word formation in day to day language was presented.
The course daily started with signing a Mangalacharana and shanty mantras and similarly ends with inspiring samskrit songs of samskrit bharati. Name of student who have successfully complete the program: Dr. Pronob Paul; Aditya dutta; E. Bhojmani Singh; Rakhi Sinha; Manu P Pathak. Students have shown their kin interest and desire to go more advances in to the course. Although this course is of limited time of ten day and of daily two hours still it helped lot in understanding the language. Based on the interest of student the advance course can be organising in future soon.
Our endeavor to get connected with our great heritage is very small and humble and we hope for progress in our endeavor.
Thank You very much!!