Lathanga is a village in the Jagatsinghpur district of coastal Odisha, in the deltaic country between the Mahanadi and the sea. Manmohan Acharya was born there on 20 October 1967, to Pandit Mayadhar Acharya and Parvati Devi, in a household where Sanskrit was a living working language rather than a school subject. He became one of the most productive Sanskrit poets of his generation in India, and, unusually, one whose verse was actually performed rather than only printed.

A Household Language

His father was a pandit, and Acharya's early training was traditional. He learned Sanskrit grammar, prosody and the classical poetic corpus in the way it had been taught for centuries, through recitation and memorisation, before he encountered it as an academic discipline. That grounding shows in his work: he composed in classical metres with an ease that is now rare, and he wrote as though the language had never stopped being spoken.

He went on to formal study and took his doctorate from Sri Jagannath Sanskrit University at Puri in 2003. He worked as a poet, lyricist, playwright, essayist and researcher, and he wrote for performance from very early on.

Verse Written to be Sung

The distinguishing feature of Acharya's career is that his Sanskrit was set to music and danced. He wrote extensively for Odissi, the classical dance form of Odisha, producing lyrics, dance-dramas and scripts that choreographers took up and staged. This mattered because Odissi's traditional Sanskrit repertoire draws overwhelmingly on Jayadeva's twelfth-century Gita Govinda and a small number of other historical texts. Acharya was one of very few modern writers whose new compositions entered that repertoire on their own merits.

His collection Gitamohanam is the best known of these works. A devotional song from it was used in the 2009 Hindi film The Desire, carrying his Sanskrit to an audience that would never have encountered it otherwise. Gita-Milindam, a set of fifteen devotional songs, works in the same lyric register.

His other titles include Palli-panchaasika, published in 1987 when he was only twenty, a set of fifty verses on village life that reflects the world of Lathanga directly; Subhasa-charitam, a verse treatment of Subhas Chandra Bose; Sri Sivananda-Laharika; and Yati-giti-satakam. He also wrote patriotic song compilations in Sanskrit, a genre with very few practitioners.

Why the Work Matters

Modern Sanskrit literature occupies an odd position in Indian letters. It has a national academy that recognises it, a small circle of writers and readers, and almost no general audience. Most contemporary Sanskrit verse is written for other Sanskritists.

Acharya worked against that. He wrote for singers, dancers and audiences rather than for scholarly journals, chose subjects with immediate popular appeal such as devotion, patriotism, and village life, and accepted that his verse would be heard rather than read. He also worked deliberately within Odia cultural forms rather than treating Sanskrit as belonging to a pan-Indian elsewhere. The result is a body of work that functioned as living literature in a way that very little modern Sanskrit does.

His awards reflect that recognition within the Sanskrit world. He received a Sanskrit eloquence award in 1990 and the Vanikavi award in 1991, an honorific he was afterwards widely known by. In 2009 he was given the Bharata-Bharati-Samman by the National Sanskrit Sahitya Academy, and in 2012 the Chinta Chetana National Baisakhi Award.

Odisha has a long and somewhat overlooked history of Sanskrit composition, running from the temple culture of Puri through centuries of devotional and dramatic writing produced for the service of Jagannath. Acharya worked consciously inside that tradition. His doctorate was taken at Puri, his devotional verse addresses the deities of the Odishan pantheon, and his dance-dramas were written for the state's own classical form. He was, in effect, arguing that Sanskrit belonged to a particular place and a particular temple culture as much as to a pan-Indian inheritance, and that a poet writing in it in the late twentieth century could still write from where he stood.

He was also a teacher and an essayist, and he took seriously the problem of transmission: how a language sustained by a shrinking number of households could acquire new speakers and new writers. His answer, consistently, was performance. A song heard at a recital reaches people who would never open a volume of verse, and several of his compositions did exactly that.

An Early Death

Manmohan Acharya died in 2013 at his residence in Cuttack. He was forty-five, or in his forty-sixth year, and by any measure the work was unfinished. He had produced a substantial catalogue in under three decades of writing, and his output was still accelerating.

What he left is a demonstration that Sanskrit composition need not be an antiquarian exercise. His lyrics continue to be performed by Odissi dancers, his devotional songs remain in circulation, and his verses on village life preserve, in a classical language, a portrait of the deltaic Odisha countryside where he grew up. For a heritage project, the specific value of his life is that it links two things usually kept apart: the most formal literary language on the subcontinent, and a small village in Jagatsinghpur where a boy learned it at home from his father.