About the Book

Sanskrit Non-Translatables is a path-breaking and audacious attempt at Sanskritizing the English language and enriching it with powerful Sanskrit words. It continues the original and innovative idea of nontranslatability of Sanskrit, first introduced in the book, Being Different. For English readers, this should be the starting point of the movement to resist the digestion of Sanskrit into English, by introducing loanwords into their English vocabulary without translation.

The book presents a thorough mechanism of the process of digestion and examines the loss of adhikara for Sanskrit because of translating its core ideas into English. The movement launched by this book will resist this and stop the programs that seek to turn Sanskrit into a dead language by translating all its treasures to render it redundant. It discusses fifty-four non-translatables across various genres that are being commonly mistranslated. It empowers English speakers with the knowledge and arguments to introduce these Sanskrit words into their daily speech with confidence. Every lover of India’s sanskriti will benefit from the book and become a cultural ambassador propagating it through routine communications.

REVIEWS

“This book makes a convincing case that English is deficient in its ability to express the profound meanings of the shastras for which Sanskrit words are necessary. I congratulate the authors for their innovative thinking and bold initiative.”
- Swami Govindadev Giri, Trustee and Treasurer, Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra


“Sanskrit Non-Translatables takes fifty-four indisputably foundational concepts, arranges them in a fourfold typology that moves from terra firma to terra cognita to the cosmos, and contests the irrationality, the untenability and the ‘design’ of their widely employed English equivalents. With its well-thought-out prefatory essays, this is a book that every English-educated Indian must read to further ‘decolonise’ his mind and stand up to the hegemony of Western thought.”
- Dr. Kapil Kapoor, Chairman, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla


“Rajiv Malhotra carries his battle for Sanskrit a step further in this book. Short of having Sanskrit itself as the language of pan-Indian intellectual discourse, we must insist that as long as English continues to play this role, Sanskrit words should be used in English on account of their unique semantic valence so that a whole culture and an entire worldview is not lost in translation.”
- Prof. Arvind Sharma, McGill University


“Sanskrit Non-Translatables is an important book that makes a powerful case for what it calls the Sanskritization of the English language by introducing key Sanskrit loanwords into English vocabulary and keeping them untranslated. This is a bold and innovative approach that deserves to be pursued in parallel with teaching Sanskrit itself.”
- Dr. Subhash Kak, author of Matter and Mind,
The Gods Within, and other books