Lahore — For the first time since the 1947 Partition, a Pakistani university has reintroduced Sanskrit instruction, with Lahore University of Management Sciences launching a formal course after an initially popular weekend workshop. The short, three-month programme drew enough interest to be expanded into a four-credit semester offering, and university officials hope to grow it into a year-long class by spring 2027.
Faculty say the move responds to an untapped scholarly resource inside Pakistan. Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, director of the Gurmani Centre, notes that the Punjab University library contains one of the region’s largest but least-examined holdings of Sanskrit materials. A collection of palm-leaf manuscripts was catalogued in the 1930s by J.C.R. Woolner, yet few Pakistani researchers have worked with those texts since Partition; most study to date has been conducted by scholars from abroad. Training a new generation of local Sanskritists, Dr Qasmi argues, could open those archives to Pakistani scholarship.
LUMS plans to expand offerings beyond language classes to include courses on major Sanskrit works such as the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita. Dr Qasmi predicts that, with continued investment, Pakistan-based scholars working on these texts could emerge within a decade or so.
The programme was initiated by Dr Shahid Rasheed, an associate professor of sociology at Forman Christian College whose interest in Sanskrit predates LUMS’s effort. Dr Rasheed studied classical grammar largely through online mentoring with international scholars and devoted nearly a year to mastering traditional grammar before taking a sabbatical to teach at LUMS. His syllabus emphasizes grammatical fundamentals and introduces students to subhashitas, short verses that convey classical ethical and practical wisdom.
Participants have reported surprises in the classroom. Many were struck by how numerous Urdu words trace back to Sanskrit roots and by the linguistic distinctions between Sanskrit and modern Hindi. What first appeared as a forbidding subject has, students say, revealed itself as a highly regular and intellectually rewarding system. Instructors describe a moment when learners begin to see connections across languages and feel the satisfaction of decoding difficult material.
LUMS places Sanskrit within a wider language curriculum that already includes Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi, Arabic, and Persian. Advocates stress that engaging with Sanskrit is not an exercise in exclusivity but a way to recover shared cultural and literary histories that cross present-day borders. Much South Asian literature, art, and philosophy draw on traditions going back to the Vedic period, and direct access to classical texts can enrich regional humanities research.
Although teaching a language with fraught political associations carries sensitivities, both Qasmi and Rasheed sense an opening in the academic climate. They argue that Sanskrit should be treated as part of the region’s common heritage rather than the preserve of any single community. Promoters of the programme also suggest a practical hope: expanded cross-cultural language learning in South Asia could help bridge communal divides if more people study each other’s classical and modern tongues. For now, the LUMS course marks a cautious but notable step toward reviving Sanskrit scholarship inside Pakistan.
