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.

Vinod Mankara, an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Kerala, is more hopeful. He was first exposed to the refined elegance of Sanskrit as a child when he would visit temples in his hometown to watch elaborate Kathakali performances with his grandparents. He was besotted with the richly detailed spectacle of this classical dance-drama rendered in chaste Sanskrit. One particular play stayed with him. What Mankara really liked about Nalacharitham was how the play dealt with flesh-and blood human figures rather than the gods, goddesses and demons in all the other Kathakali performances he had seen. He later studied the play in college and went on to make a critically-acclaimed documentary on it titled