In my book, ‘Sanskrit-speaking’ Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development: Imagining Sanskritland, I set out to explore one of the most enduring and powerful linguistic imaginaries in South Asia: the idea that Sanskrit is not merely a classical or liturgical language, but a living, spoken vernacular capable of anchoring modern life. My concern is not simply whether Sanskrit is spoken, but how the idea of Sanskrit circulates socially, politically, and economically. I ask what work this idea performs. What kinds of futures does it promise? What kinds of pasts does it curate?

Rather than treating Sanskrit as an abstract linguistic system, I approach it as a social force embedded in contemporary India and in transnational networks. Revered as the “Language of the Gods,” Sanskrit carries extraordinary symbolic capital. In the book, I examine how this symbolic power is mobilised in projects of rural revivalism, nationalist discourse, yoga entrepreneurship, census classification, and global wellness tourism. I use the term “Sanskritland” to describe this imagined cultural and linguistic space – a utopian terrain where language, authenticity, spirituality, and development converge.

My argument unfolds along three interwoven trajectories.

First, I examine how Sanskrit imaginaries shape personal and collective biographies. During my ethnographic fieldwork, I encountered individuals who understood Sanskrit not merely as a language to be studied, but as a pathway to ethical refinement, civilisational continuity, and spiritual legitimacy. In these narratives, Sanskrit is rejuvenated through yoga-inflected lifestyles and global soft-power circuits. It becomes a marker of authenticity within the international wellness economy, where mantras, chants, and Sanskrit terminology circulate far beyond India’s borders. I show how this global Sanskrit is often detached from everyday communicative use yet deeply embedded in aspirations about heritage, purity, and holistic living.

Second, I situate Sanskrit within the broader historical sociolinguistic landscape of South Asia. I draw on archival materials and sociolinguistic theory to trace how colonial and postcolonial language ideologies elevated Sanskrit as the apex of Indian knowledge systems. These ideologies continue to inform contemporary development narratives that seek to harmonise economic progress with spiritual continuity. I argue that Sanskrit’s perceived timelessness makes it especially attractive in debates about modernity. It appears to offer development without rupture – progress without cultural loss. In this way, Sanskrit becomes central to what I call the “metaphysics of development”: the underlying philosophical assumptions that allow language to be imagined as a vehicle for moral and material transformation.

The third trajectory – and perhaps the most empirically grounded – involves my analysis of census data from 1872 to 2011. Public discourse often invokes the idea of “Sanskrit-speaking villages” as evidence of successful linguistic revival. I wanted to see what the numbers actually reveal. When I examined the census data, a different picture emerged. Claims of Sanskrit as a mother tongue tend to cluster in urban environments, not rural ones. Moreover, Sanskrit is rarely listed as a sole or primary language; it usually appears alongside Hindi or English, often as a tertiary code. These findings challenge the romanticised image of self-contained rural Sanskrit communities. They reveal instead a complex sociolinguistic reality in which Sanskrit functions symbolically and strategically rather than as an everyday vernacular.

By juxtaposing ethnographic narratives with demographic data, I aim to decouple myth from empirical pattern without dismissing the power of either. The myth of the Sanskrit-speaking village persists not because it is statistically dominant, but because it resonates with broader cultural and political desires. It offers a vision of civilisational coherence and moral order. It promises an alternative to the perceived fragmentation of modern life.

Another strand of the book examines the entanglement of Sanskrit with the global proliferation of yoga. As yoga has become a worldwide phenomenon, Sanskrit has travelled with it – sometimes as sacred sound, sometimes as branding, sometimes as cultural capital. I analyse how this circulation contributes to India’s soft-power strategies and to global markets that commodify spirituality. In these contexts, Sanskrit is less a communicative medium than a credential of authenticity. Its presence legitimises products, practices, and identities. I argue that this global script both amplifies and transforms the meaning of Sanskrit within India itself.

Throughout the book, I advocate for a critical sociolinguistic approach that takes language ideologies seriously. I am less interested in adjudicating whether Sanskrit revival is “successful” and more concerned with understanding how and why the revival is imagined in the first place. What kinds of social relations does it produce? Whose aspirations does it serve? How does it intersect with caste, class, education, and mobility?

Ultimately, Imagining Sanskritland is about the tension between nostalgia and futurity. Sanskrit is invoked as an ancient inheritance, yet it is also projected as a key to a sustainable and spiritually grounded future. By tracing this paradox, I hope to show how language can function simultaneously as memory and aspiration, as data point and mythic symbol, as tool of governance and object of devotion.

In an era when cultural heritage and economic development are increasingly intertwined, I believe we must look carefully at how linguistic utopias are constructed and deployed. Sanskritland, as I present it, is not a fixed territory but a dynamic and contested imaginary. By examining it ethnographically, historically, and statistically, I seek to illuminate the powerful role language plays in shaping how societies imagine both who they are and who they wish to become.

The following footage is part of short documentary series I created from fieldwork.

Here’s a link to Patrick’s book >

You can read more of Patrick’s work HERE.

Patrick S.D. McCartney, PhD, is an anthropologist and Phoenix Fellow at Hiroshima University’s Faculty of Letters in Japan with a doctorate in sociolinguistic and cultural economic anthropology from the Australian National University (2016). His interdisciplinary research spans classical philology, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and computational social science, focusing on Sanskrit revival movements, yoga and wellness cultures, and the politics of language, heritage, and development in South Asia and beyond. He has conducted extensive ethnographic and demographic research on Sanskrit and its sociocultural imaginaries, including the concept of “Sanskrit-speaking” villages and the global circulation of Sanskrit through yoga and soft power networks. As part of a broader analytical focus on Cultural Imagination as Infrastructure: Language, Ritual, and Metaphysical Development Across Asia, his current research and next book focus on the Ethnohistory of Ritual Pole-Climbing Acrobatics at Agricultural Festivals across Asia .