New Delhi: The Survey of India has released an updated political map of India in the Sanskrit language, as part of the National Science Day celebrations, after 18 years.
The last time such a map was released was back in 2002, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA government was in power.
The Sanskrit and the Hindi maps were unveiled today, Friday, February 28, 2020 at Vigyan Bhavan by Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister of Science & Technology.
Demand for a Sanskrit map
The Sanskrit map has made a comeback after being published intermittently since 1977. The Survey of India, which is part of the Department of Science and Technology, had published Sanskrit maps in 1979, 1983, 1988, 1997 and 2002.
Surveyor General of India Lt Gen. Girish Kumar (retd) told the media “We have been publishing (the maps) regularly in English, and sometimes in Hindi. Now I want to regularly bring out these maps in all regional languages, and since Sanskrit is an ancient language, we should definitely support it.”
He added that there is a demand for Sanskrit maps for exhibitions and events, especially in the Hindi belt, while organisations and institutions in Haridwar and parts of Uttar Pradesh also keep asking for such maps, reports theprint.in.
Deputy director at the Survey of India, Pankaj Mishra, pointed out that a lot of administrative changes had taken place since the last Sanskrit map was published in 2002.
Names of States and cities in the new Sanskrit map
Most of the names of cities and states are the same as in Hindi, with additional Sanskrit suffixes of ‘am’ and ‘ah’. Rajasthan, for example, is shown as ‘Rajasthanam’, Punjab is called ‘Punjabah’, Kerala is ‘Keralam’, while Karnataka is ‘Karnatakah’.
Even the English-suffixed Nagaland has been Sanskritised by adding just an ‘am’ — the map calls it ‘Nagalandam’.
The new union territories of Ladakh and Jammu & Kashmir are given as ‘Laddakhah’ and ‘Jammuh Kashmirah’.
City names follow a similar pattern — Mumbai and Kolkata remain as is, ‘Dillih’ and ‘Chennaih’ feature minor Sanskritisation, while Gangtok becomes ‘Gangatokah’.
The map also marks water bodies like rivers and reservoirs — the river names, being mostly Sanskrit-derived, remain pretty much the same, while the reservoirs are marked as ‘Govind Sagarah’, ‘Nagarjunah Sagarah’,
The map even Sanskritises neighbouring countries and their cities — ‘Afghanistanam’, ‘Pakistanam’, ‘Islamabadah’ and ‘Peshawaram’. China is marked as ‘Cheen-Ganrajyam’ (literally, China republic), while the region of Tibet is called ‘Tibbat-Swayatt-Kshetram’, the equivalent of Tibet Autonomous Region, as China calls it.
However, the map also features some faux pas, such as referring to lakes as ‘jheelah’—such as the ‘Sambhar-jheelah’ in Rajasthan and the ‘Mansarovar-jheelah’ in China. The Sanskrit word for lake is ‘sarovar’ or ‘sar’, while ‘jheel’ is a Hindi word.