A Classical Scene: 3 Films in Sanskrit

Three films in Sanskrit will soon be released in India. Can they help revive the ancient language?

- Sneha Bhura

When Arshi A Sattar, noted for her English translations of Valmiki’s Ramayana and the Kathasaritsagara, was studying Sanskrit in the US, she remembers watching GV Iyer’s Adi Shankaracharya (1983)—India’s first Sanskrit feature film—as a ‘language exercise’. The movie outing was hardly meant to generate a can’t-wait-to-watch kind of excitement. She and her peers spent most of their time exchanging notes on possible translations of what was being said onscreen. Today, after a hiatus of more than a decade, there are three new Sanskrit films lined up for release in the course of the next year. Will they go beyond a niche audience and help create a well-defined genre of modern Sanskrit cinema in the future? Sattar is skeptical. ‘As for the ‘future’ of Sanskrit films, I can’t see it as terribly bright. Unless in the next few years we are persuaded that Sanskrit is the only language we should be speaking,’ she says over email.