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I took Sanskrit as an undergrad at Princeton as an alternative to Latin. It was hard to absorb all the declensions, to be honest, and still connect to the text

I took Sanskrit as an undergrad at Princeton as an alternative to Latin. It was hard to absorb all the declensions, to be honest, and still connect to the text. The assumption is that you were eventually going to read Bhagava Gita or some other religious text. Also, the Sanskrit course got very political, for reasons I could not relate to at all, involving the history of India. The textbook remains on my bookshelf, gathering dust.

devnonymous 9y ago
This is a problem with a lot of Indian studies[1]. The subjects are so intertwined with religion, culture, mythology (to say nothing about the biases and opinions of the people who would be teaching you) that while on one hand it helps in establishing context, on the other hand it distracts from the subject matter which honestly are deeply interesting independent of their cultural baggage. [1] In case you're curious, what exactly I mean by Indian studies, some examples are all form of classical Indian music (and that's quite a few ..if you are to consider learning specific musical instruments by themselves as a subject, besides music theory), classical Indian dance forms, Yoga, Ayurveda ...etc