I study Sanskrit – one of the rarest, weirdest degrees in the country

In the college bar in freshers’ week, when normal people tell you they do History, I have the hilariously repetitive experience of explaining  that I’m studying Sanskrit, an ancient dead Indian language.

If someone had been filming me, they would have seen me inwardly cringing every time someone looked at me incredulously and said “Sand Script?! Is that your whole degree?” I try to dodge telling people for as long as possible, steering the conversation towards sports or societies or what we’re eating for dinner, but it’s not really something you can avoid.

Studying Sanskrit is a conversation opener, in a way. Some Hermione Grangers pretended to know all about it, and say something like “ohh yes that’s an Egyptian language isn’t it, I’ve read all about it”, and you don’t exactly want to be rude and correct them, because why on earth should anyone know about Sanskrit?

Sanskrit is the language of the ancient Indian elite, a Classical language roughly parallel to Latin or Greek in the Western world, and its earliest forms date back to at least 1200 BC.

Sanskrit stopped being a living language (if it ever was one) when it was documented by a man called Pānini in the 4^th Century BC, a terribly meticulous grammarian to silence all future grammarians. Throughout India’s rich and turbulent history, a whole treasury of poetry, legal documents, fables, recipes, treatises and other literature has evolved.

This corpus is vast – far larger than can even have the surface scraped in a three year BA. The Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and of course the Karma Sutra are among the most famous Sanskrit texts in the West, but there are so so many more that have never even been translated.

With our tutors, we translate erotica about women with snail trails, women with three rolls of fat that resemble mountains, and women whose breasts are pushed together so tightly that even a lotus fiber can’t fit between them.

We translate stories about vampires and black magic and exploding heads, and sometimes we come across a word that is more than two lines long. We discover that daal and chapatti existed in ancient times, and translated recipes about lentils, ghee and chopped vegetables.

One day, we spent a whole hour trying to work out a precise yoga pose mentioned in a poem, until a third year hops on the table and shows us. Our classes are varied, and in many ways studying Sanskrit is just as trippy and mental as you might imagine.

There are useful things about studying Sanskrit too, though. For one, it’s the root of many Indian languages, meaning that if you want to learn Hindi, for example, you have a bit of a head start. Computer scientists also herald Sanskrit as being the language closest to coding, as it’s unbelievably precise and systematic.

One of the best things about studying Sanskrit are the trips to India. In second year, while most people are doing internships or thinking about jobs, the Oriental Institute will give you up to £1000 to go to Pondicherry, a small French town in Tamil Nadu.

In India, people’s reactions about us studying Sanskrit can go one of two ways. Either it’s “why aren’t you doing something useful like engineering”, or it’s a total amazement and delight that we’ve decided to study their heritage, and touch a language that most Indian people avoid after primary school because its too hard.

One of the best reactions was in Maharastra, when my friend and I casually mentioned that we studied Sanskrit, and ended up in the regional paper, with a whole article about us.

Sometimes though, there’s no denying that Sanskrit is mind-numbingly, soul-destroyingly boring. The word panini no longer makes me think of sun-dried tomatoes and mozzarella, but of 3959 grammar rules, bahuvrihis, and the clock going so slowly sometimes it goes backwards.

Only three people study Sanskrit at Oxford per year, so in a way we Sanskritists are pretty special. Back in the days of Victorian Colonialism, Sanskrit was held in high regard at Oxford, and the Chair had some of the largest funding in the university. Nowadays, when novelists or comedians want to drop in the world’s most rarefied, esoteric and pointless university degree, they regularly prey on Sanskrit, because it is almost unanimously agreed that it really is just a weird subject.

if you meet a Sanskritist, you’re right to assume that they’re probably a little mad. As I look around our class, which also includes MPhil and Dphil students, I often reflect on what a weird bunch they are… until recently when an American boy, who I’d consider to be one of the most eccentric of all, admitted that he thinks everyone else is weird?! Which just goes to show, no one who studies Sanskrit can be a cookie-cutter normal sort of person, or they’d be in a different department.