basIcally books - Overseas Indian

sanskritThe world’s onlySanskrit daily entersits 42nd year ofpublication.Brij Khandelwal visitsits office to checkon the newsFor the last 42 years, a family hasbeen working away quietly andassiduously in Mysore, in thesouth of India, to publish a dailynewspaper in Sanskrit — a languagewhich doesn’t find many takers in Indiatoday. The four-page Sudharma hasclaims to being the only daily newspaperpublished in Sanskrit. Priced at `1, itcarries articles on the Vedas, yoga,religion, and also politics and cultureamong others.In the face of the burgeoningreadership of newspapers in English andother modern Indian languages, it hasmanaged to create a niche of its own loyalreaders. They number no more than2,000 or thereabouts, not enough tokeep the paper running, yet Sudharmacontinues to tread the ‘right path’ as itsetymology would suggest.With no advertisements coming in anda very small subscribers’ list to bring inany revenue worth reckoning, the daily isstruggling to carry on in the face of theall powerful logic of profit-oriented business.“That’s because no State or Centralbody comes forward to assist us in anyway and the response from variousorganisations in the private sector isindifferent,” says K.V. Sampath Kumar,Editor of Sudharma.Sampath’s wife, Jayalakhsmi, is alsoactively involved in the daily exercise ofgetting the newspaper out every morning.She reacts sharply to the query as to whyshould anyone publish a paper in a “deadlanguage”? “Who says Sanskrit is dead?Every morning, people recite shlokas,conduct pujas... all our ceremonies, includingthose at the time of marriage,childbirth and death, are in Sanskrit.” Thetwo are the paper’s contributors andpublishers, rolled into one.It was in 1970, on the 14th of July, thatKalale Nadadur Varadaraja Iyengar, a24 Pravasi Bharatiya July 2011