Modasamskritam
Dr. Varsha Sharda's Sanskrit songs for children, rebuilt as state-of-the-art 3D animation for a global project backed by Samskrita Bharati.
The Project
Modasamskritam is a global project backed by Sanskrit Bharti USA and Canada. It takes up the work of Dr. Varsha Sharda, a renowned Sanskrit scholar, who some years ago produced a series of the same name in audio form: kid-friendly Sanskrit songs that help children learn the language through a very experiential method of teaching.
Folk Sutra's Modasamskritam takes that existing work and creates state-of-the-art 3D animation videos for it, so that the series is updated and made more accessible to children of the present age.
The Subject
Sanskrit occupies a strange position among Indian languages. It is a scheduled
language of the Republic, the liturgical and scholarly language of a
civilisation, and the ancestor of much of the subcontinent's vocabulary — and it
is declared as a mother tongue by only a few tens of thousands of people. It is
studied enormously more often than it is spoken.
Samskrita Bharati exists to change the second half of that. Its method is the
Sambhashana Shibir, the ten-day spoken-Sanskrit camp, and its central conviction
is pedagogical rather than ideological: that Sanskrit fails to stick because it
is taught as a grammatical system to be decoded rather than as a language to be
used. Teach it conversationally, from day one, and it behaves like any other
living language.
That argument applies with most force to children, who acquire languages by use
and not by declension tables, and who are the audience where the difference
between the two methods shows up fastest. Songs are the oldest instrument for
that — rhythm and repetition doing the work that drilling does badly — which is
what Dr. Varsha Sharda's original audio series was built on.
How We Are Making It
The production is a global collaboration, bringing together 3D artists and Sanskrit scholars, and is backed by Sanskrit Bharti USA and Canada.
