Saffronisation and Sanskrit Revival in India

The right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), which rose to power in India in 2014 believes that “A common spoken language with a vast literary heritage should ameliorate all the problems which beset modern India” (Hastings, 2008). For the BJP and its allied Hindu Nationalist groups, this language is Sanskrit. Not only has Sanskrit been dead, in some sense of the word, for centuries, but it was also never the…