Friday, February 16, 2018

The Sound of Sanskrit

This Saturday morning, randomly browsing I found this link on YouTube and heard the song.


I was deeply impressed!

My sudden liking of Sanskrit sounds began when I heard the Baahubali movie songs, which have some Sanskrit Shloks, especially the song in which Baahubali lifts the Shivling and walks to the waterfall. Listening to that in the movie Baahubali made me realize how beautiful Sanskrit sounds! And listening to this song, Shiv Tandava Stotram, has verified that opinion. This is a great track to listen to. Don’t miss the visuals in the video.

I’ve been a fan of heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Nightwish, Within Temptation etc. but listening to this track I realize that even though their songs are great, we do have a great advantage over such bands. They sing songs in English and English language is not inherently musical. It takes effort to find the right words to make it sing-song. I know this because I’ve written poems and lyrics in English during my college days (http://perpetualthoughts.wordpress.com/).
However in Sanskrit language, you can pick any Shlok and sing it the way you like and it will sound awesome!
In India, just because we give English importance and Hindi is our (most of us) mother tongue (and both taught since our first day in school), most of us neglected Sanskrit studies in our school days (which starts quite late in 5th or 6th standard). But over the years I’ve realized the glaring limitations of English as a language and began to appreciate Hindi and Sanskrit. For instance, English language has the concept of Capital and small letters, clearly indicating the tendency to divide people in upper/lower class or white/black race and so on. Whereas Hindi and Sanskrit has no such distinction and all are contained under the same horizontal line, denoting every Varna as equal! More on that later.
An afterthought. These heavy metal bands have excellent music. My desire is that if we take music of, say Iron Maiden, and write lyrics in Sanskrit, we could have the best of both worlds! That would be a great union of West and East and prove Mark Twain wrong.

And for those of you who accept the good aspects of our culture only after its validated by the West, here’s Bob Marley singing Om Namah Shivaay :)