That you are seeking to learn Sanskrit - amongst the oldest and richest languages of the world - is for us a matter of great joy, and we salute you. Our hope is that SanskritaPradipika will help you achieve that goal.

SanskritaPradipika - a little lamp for Sanskrit - aims to provide a leisurely introduction to the Sanskrit language. The intended audience is adult learners, familiar with English.

The tutor - freely downloadable, except for restrictions pertaining to copyright - is meant to be a primary source for those who are reading without the benefit of a teacher, and a supplement for students embarking on a first course of the language at a University.

SanskritaPradipika has been created in the Java programming language. Since Java is platform-neutral, the tutor will in principle work on every computer that can host the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), i.e. every computer that runs a browser such as the Internet Explorer or the Netscape Navigator. Yet it is important to state that our development platform is a very ordinary PC operated under Windows XP, and that - for lack of resources - the software has not been implemented for other types of platform.

To use the tutor you must therefore have a PC running some version of Windows, on which the JRE must also be installed. Clicking the Download link in the left hand margin will show you how the JRE and SanskritaPradipika can be installed in one simple step, leading automatically to the creation of a clickable icon on your computer's screen.

In developing SanskritaPradipika we have been guided by one principle: keep it simple, Jack. Thinking about this led naturally to the question: What kinds of difficulty does the beginner - studying any language - have to cope with, and how might they be alleviated? In seeking answers we were led to devise several aids to learning Sanskrit, which we believe are unique to this tutor.

First, there's the problem of mastering the Devanagari characters. (This is the name of the script in which Sanskrit is written today.) How does one begin to draw them? What do they sound like? If we could draw them slowly, we thought, instead of displaying them en bloc, the beginner might be able to copy the strokes as they are made. So we taught the machine how to sketch the vowels and the consonants - and their myriad combinations - as curves on the screen; then we made it do this slowly, with the separate strokes following the sequence that a kindergarten teacher uses in teaching Devanagari to her pupils. Finally we provided buttons to vary both drawing speed and font size, as well as to sound out each character. (Please note that the sound buttons have not been activated in the present version: we hope to remedy this defect - at least partially if not in full measure - in the next.)

Once we had the Devanagari character set, it was a simple matter to write down Sanskrit text. But here lay the second obstacle, as we saw it, for the novitiate. Given a Sanskrit sentence, how does one explicate the meaning(s) of its words? One way, of course is to write down meanings separately on the screen: but this, we found, is not quite the best approach, for it uses up too much real estate. Here's what we finally did: In writing a Sanskrit sentence, we colour each word differently. The English counterpart of each Sanskrit word is coloured similarly, thereby enabling the instant identification of corresponding words in either language. The pronunciation of each word is also given, by the use of diacritic marks. (The reader will note, and we hope forgive, the absence of diacritic marks from these pages. The decision to omit them from the Sanskrit words here was deliberate: beginners find them off-putting, while Sanskritajna pandits know where they must be applied anyway; but the tutor proper uses them in full measure. A detailed explanation of the pronunciation implied by each is accessible from the Contents page.)

Of the Chapters presented in this new version, Chapter 8 (on the declensions of the Sanskrit substantives, and comprising some 300 screens) is longer than all the remaining taken together. Beginning with a description of the terms pratipadika, pada, karaka and vibhakti, it illustrates them by means of hundreds of simple sentences, as well as by some of the most popular of the Sanskrit subhashitani (which word means, quite literally, good sayings). These are pithy aphorisms, proverbs, couplets or quatrains – distillates of the wisdom of ancient scholars – that are exemplars of style and idiom, and gravid with meaning. Scattered throughout Chapter 8, they have been collected for the reader’s enjoyment and edification in Chapter 11.

But for the serious scholar the most useful feature of Chapter 8 may be the collection of tables of inflexions for most types of noun, pronoun or adjective. Two mouse clicks – one to identify the last character of a substantive, and the other its gender – are all that is required to view almost every paradigm of interest.

Finally, we attempt to address the problem of bridging across incommensurate - and perhaps incommensurable - languages: one whose vocabulary and ideology come to us from an ancient time, and which has been the conveyance of a culture unique in this world; and the other of an altogether different linguistic structure, in which new ideas and words are coined every day. One approach that we have tried is to offer detailed, and even occasionally repetitive, explanations of the Sanskrit grammar, drawing where possible upon examples that may be familiar to one brought up in a Western milieu. Many pages have a LearnMore button, and some labeled TryThis, Explore or Note. Clicking on these leads to deeper discussions of points of interest, or to further relevant examples. The information accessible from the LearnMore buttons is generally based on sutras (pithy aphorisms) of the Ashtadhyayi of Panini (~ 500 BCE), the best known of the ancient Sanskrit grammarians. The word sutra means thread, and the Ashtadhyayi (or Eight Chapters) contains something like four thousand of them.

SanskritaPradipika exploits the remarkable facilities that Java provides for graphics, and for the creation of graphical user interfaces. For example, if you wish to view a Devanagari character – vowel or consonant - sketched before your eyes, in slow motion and large size, a click on its button suffices (Chapters 2 & 3); and if you would want to look at the form assumed by a consonant when it is followed by a vowel, again, simply click on their respective buttons (Chapter 3); but should you find yourself overtaken by a pressing desire to know the shape of the conjoint which results when any two consonants are brought together, why, just click on their buttons, in the requisite order (Chapter 4); and finally, if you are interested in the table of declensions of a substantive, written out both in Devanagari and in the Latin alphabet – and duly augmented with diacritic marks - all you need do is to bring the mouse cursor upon a couple of radio buttons that help identify the gender and terminal character of the substantive, and click; and lo and behold! its 21 inflected forms are forthwith displayed, as if by magic! (Chapter 8). Many pages contain buttons for variant forms of inflexion, and for notes on points of interest.  

For ease of use, all the buttons screens of Chapters 2, 3 & 4 have been brought together in Chapter 12: no longer need one wade through large tracts of text to reach them.

For brief descriptions of chapter contents, and to download, please click on the links in the left margin. Chapters 1 - 4, 8, 11 and 12 and a section on diacritics are being offered at this time. Others will shortly be made available.

I believe SanskritaPradipika to be priceless: therefore it is offered gratis to anybody interested in using it as an aid to learning or teaching this beautiful language. But there’s another reason why SanskritaPradipika will never be sold for lucre: as you will know from the Credits link in the left-hand margin, this e-book has been dedicated to Swami Vivekananda, the one Man who, by reminding India of her past glory, shook her up from centuries of slumber; and who loved Sanskrit well. Through him I dedicate it too to his (and may I add, my) Lord and Master, the embodiment of God on earth, Paramahamsa Ramakrishna, a Being who had no use for all the wealth of this world. To trade SanskritaPradipika for pieces of silver would therefore be a travesty; but I consider myself well served whenever somebody, somewhere in the world, clicks on the Download button in the left margin, and writes back afterwards to say she finds the tutor useful.

If you use SanskritaPradipika to teach Sanskrit, please tell your students how they may freely download it.

If you think SanskritaPradipika to be of any worth to you, and wish to pay for its use, please send a donation to a Ramakrishna Mission near you.

Since the size of the software is large (24 MB), and downloads may sometimes take as much as an hour or even longer, and may frequently be interrupted, and must be resumed again and again, at great inconvenience: I do offer to mail, at the cost of the recipient, a CD for use on Intel/Windows platforms to most destinations worldwide. For more information, or to send your comments, please write me at: sudhir_kaicker@hotmail.com.

Sudhir Kaicker

August 15, 2004.