Chamu Krishna Shastry

Chamu Krishna Shastry (Devanagari: चमू कृष्ण शास्त्री) is co-founder, All India Prashikshana Pramukh of the Samskrita Bharati movement, which is aiming to make Sanskrit popular across the world.

Shastry was born in Kedila village near Mangalore. As a teenager RSS worker he was underground during Emergency. It was in jail that he first read V.D. Savarkar and Swami Vivekananda's writings on the scientific possibilities of Sanskrit. He learnt Samskrit from Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, Tirupati and, along with some of his friends, went on to start the ‘Speak Sanskrit’ Movement in 1981. The movement has evolved into the not-for-profit organisation Samskrita Bharati, which is active all over India and in 13 countries including USA, Japan and UAE.

His method of teaching Sanskrit is to learn it in the same language rather than through other language by translation.

The "Ten-day Sanskrit Speaking Course", which Shastry has been implementing through a network of 130 full-time workers and 3,000 Sanskrit Bharati volunteers, has a conversation-based syllabus. Learning Sanskrit can be a forbidding exercise because it is being taught through grammar. To make it easier for the students Shastry's method is not to learn the language through grammar and teach Sanskrit as it is spoken. The students thus do not have to wrestle with the nuances of an arcane syntactics. It's then easier to master the language, so much so that even semi-literate people can opt for the course. It also helps that the course is for free.

His organization which is a voluntary body committed to the cause of Sanskrit, has evolved a simple method that 1985 has enabled nearly 29 lakh people to learn the language, one lakh of whom have decided to use Sanskrit at home in true Vedic style.

Sastry spends most of his time on teacher training, workshops, making of learning material and discussing Samskrit education with policy makers. He believes that not just Samskrit as language, but modern subjects like chemistry, maths, history etc should also be taught through Samskrit.

“Till now Samskrit has only been seen from a spiritual or religious perspective; it is high time Samskrit is approached from a scientific point of view as well.”