‘Gita, Mahabharata Scholars In 10-15 Years’: Pakistan University Resumes Sanskrit First Time Since Partition

Final Updated:December 13, 2025, 10:09 IST

The professors helming the project careworn on the necessity to see classical languages as cultural bridges, saying Sanskrit is an integral segment of Pakistani-Indian world heritage

Lahore College of Management Sciences in Pakistan is instructing Sanskrit in its faculty rooms as a consequence of big student interest with professors, Dr Ali Usman Qasmi and Dr Shahid Rasheed, on the helm of the project. (Describe: @IndianTechGuide/X)

For the principle time since the 1947 Partition of India, a college in Pakistan has resumed the instructing of Sanskrit – on the open supplied as a workshop, it has now expanded into a four-credit path.

Lahore College of Management Sciences (LUMS) is instructing Sanskrit in its faculty rooms as a consequence of big student interest, with professors — Dr Ali Usman Qasmi and Dr Shahid Rasheed — on the helm of the project.

Both the lecturers careworn on the necessity to see classical languages as cultural bridges, saying Sanskrit is an integral segment of Pakistani-Indian world heritage and well-known for accessing outdated faculty texts. They acknowledged the initiative targets to coach local students to see the affluent, nonetheless uncared for, Sanskrit archive held on the Punjab College library and hopes to encourage future programs on works just like the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita.

The LUMS furthermore plans to provide programs in Mahabharata and Gita. “Hopefully, this devices a momentum,” Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, who is the director of the Gurmani Centre at the university, told The Tribune. “In 10-15 years, we could see Pakistan-based scholars of the Gita and Mahabharata.”

This comes as a well-known cultural and tutorial milestone. The Tribune reported that it started as a three-month weekend workshop that step by step developed into a elephantine four-credit university path after an overwhelming response.

Qasmi told The Tribune that the weekend workshop became as soon as birth to all, along side students, researchers, lawyers, and lecturers.

“After we saw the response, we made up our minds to introduce it as a unprejudiced university path. Even though the replacement of students is nonetheless minute, we hope it could presumably perchance well grow over the subsequent few years. Ideally, by spring 2027, we wants with a idea to educate the language as a elephantine-year path,” Qasmi was quoted.

He stressed that the initiative aligns with the university’s broader language ecosystem, which already includes languages like Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Baluchi, Arabic, and Persian.

Noting that much of the region’s literature, poetry, art, and philosophy date back to the Vedic age, Qasmi said it then becomes even more vital to read classical texts in their original language.

‘WE NEED TO OWN IT, IT IS OURS TOO’

Dr Shahid Rasheed, associate professor of sociology at Forman Christian College, is at the heart of this initiative. He took a sabbatical from his current occupation after Qasmi reached out to him.

Rasheed, who has studied other classical languages like Arabic and Persian, teaches the Sanskrit course at LUMS. He said his interest in the language started long before he started teaching it and, due to a lack of local teachers or textbooks, had to resort to learning it online under Cambridge Sanskrit scholar Antonia Ruppel and Australian indologist McComas Taylor.

He said classical languages contain much wisdom for mankind while noting that modern languages derive from classical traditions, separated only by a “veil”.

“I essentially impart grammar. When I became as soon as instructing shubhashitas, the wisdom verses or shlokas, a good deal of my students have been fascinated to search for that so many Urdu words reach from Sanskrit. Many didn’t even know that Sanskrit became as soon as diversified from Hindi. Within the principle week, they stumbled on it a traumatic language. Nonetheless as soon as they grasped the logical structure, they started enjoying it. The pleasure of solving one thing complex is big,” he was quoted.

Despite potential political sensitivities, both scholars believe the intellectual climate is shifting. Rasheed said Sanskrit is the “binding language of the entire region”, insisting that “now we must have it”.

“Folks quiz me why I am learning Sanskrit. I record them, why will must we no longer learn it? It is miles the binding language of your whole build. Sanskrit grammarian Panini’s village became as soon as in this build. Valuable writing became as soon as performed here all the strategy by the Indus Valley Civilisation. Sanskrit is form of a mountain – a cultural monument. We wish to have it. It is miles ours too; it’s no longer tied to any express religion,” he was quoted.

Within the slay, he acknowledged, the perform is to foster regional figuring out and reconnect with outdated faculty traditions. If of us are to reach nearer, he added, spirited the affluent classical traditions is well-known and, if extra Muslims in Pakistan took up Sanskrit, and additional Hindus and Sikhs in India started learning Arabic, it is continually a contemporary, hopeful initiate for South Asia.

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