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Why Study Sanskrit?Sanskrit is the gateway to premodern, and especially pre-Islamic, India. It also served as a language of culture and religion and as a lingua franca in Central, East, and particularly Southeast Asia. It was carried into those regions along with the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. The position of Sanskrit in Asia can be likened to that of Latin in medieval and early modern Europe. Sanskrit is recognized as one of the official languages of India and every university there has a Sanskrit department. Sanskrit is of great value to the cultural self-definition of Hindu communities that have now spread across the globe. To children of Indian cultural background, Sanskrit opens the door to their classical culture. To academic students of Sanskrit, it is a gateway to the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and to the pre-modern history of the subcontinent and beyond. Discovery of Sanskrit by the west in 1770s led to the development of Indo-European linguistics and reconstruction of the Indo-European language family and the cultural and religious pre-histories of Europe. Thus, the historical understanding of languages such as English requires some understanding of Sanskrit. Sanskrit is also the ancestor of a number of the South Asian languages taught at the University of Michigan, including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Urdu.
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