‘Sanskrit-speaking’ Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development

This book is a recollection of McCartney’s journey across ‘Sanskritland,’ which is the term coined to refer to the utopian landscape within which the ‘Language of the Gods’ is thought to be spoken.

There are three destinations on the author’s journey. The first includes understanding how Sanskrit narratives are woven into yoga-inflected ‘lifestyles,’ forming biographies operationalised toward soft-power purposes. Next, the historical sociolinguistic contexts that have shaped Sanskritland are discussed, framed by application in sustainable development narratives. Finally, comprehensive demographic and linguistic analyses of Sanskrit across all of India’s census enumerations (from 1872 to 2011) shows the ‘shifting sands’ of Sanskrit’s ‘speakers’ and how the ‘Sanskrit-speaking’ village data show that most people who identify as speakers of Sanskrit live in urban areas and ‘speak’ Sanskrit as a third language. All of these together shed light on how, why, and where Sanskrit is spoken in the twenty-first century, the complex and dynamic historical and contemporary that have allowed this, and how both yoga and Sanskrit are instruments for development and soft-power projects.

This book is an essential read for scholars and students of linguistic anthropology, Indology and sustainable development.