I guess one of the main purposes behind making this album was to introduce the thoughtful listener to the Sanskrit language, the ancient mother tongue that gave birth to so many linguistic children. Its an old language. How old? Well, its hard to date Sanskrit but if you said ‘many thousands of years old’ you would not be far off the mark. The Sanskrit language was said to have originated in ‘the cities of the gods’ before coming to Earth – so say the people who spoke it.
Sanskrit is certainly celestial sounding and poetic to listen to, and perfectly lends itself to song. There are 46 letters in the beautiful script, all with unique sounds, and several more tenses than there are in many other tongues. Sanskrit is a very good language for talking about levels of consciousness, degrees of love, and the most refined philosophical concepts. In the western world we have always borrowed words from Sanskrit and will continue to do so, as long as we need to describe spiritual ideas for which an English word is not quite adequate. Yoga, for instance, is one of them. As is avatar, buddha, karma, kirtan, samsara, shanti, om and so on.
There was a civilization to go along with the language of course, for what is language without a people and a culture? Certainly a language dies if a culture dies, and it thrives if the culture is vibrant and successful. We know much less about the culture of the Sanskrit-speaking people than we do about the Romans, but that’s probably because we in Europe were slightly more interested in the people who invaded our islands and ended up staying for such a long time!
But from the days of Queen Victoria, when the British were exploring India and beyond, there has been great fascination in the ancient epics and yoga texts left behind in song and poems. Preserved either on palm leaves or in the recitations of gurus and their disciples, these works fascinated our forefathers and have engaged the thinking people of the world ever since.
You can read more about the ideas conveyed in the Sanskrit language in ‘The Ideas’
