Learning and performing Sanskrit as a sacred language: Children’s religious repertoires and syncretic practice in London

Abstract

Aim: We investigate how children in the Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu/Saiva faith community in London learn and use Sanskrit alongside Tamil and/or English and other multimodal and embodied resources to communicate with the Divine. Methodology: The data were collected as part of a 3-year multi-sited collaborative team ethnography documenting how migrant children become literate in faith settings. Data and analysis: The data consist of participant observations across religious education classes, the Temple, and the home, and interviews with the key participant child, Chantia, her brother and the Chief priest at the Temple. The analysis focuses on instances in the data where sacred language learning and performance are thematised. In addition, we analyse a digital video recording of Chantia’s daily morning prayers using transvisuals. Findings: Learning Sanskrit consists of integrating a limited set of Sanskrit religious texts and practices, such as key religious concepts, mantras, and poetic verses in children’s evolving religious repertoire and is embedded in children’s everyday religious socialisation across contexts. Chantia unites and syncretises a range of conventionalised semiotic resources, including religious texts in Sanskrit to communicate with the Divine and personalise her act of worship. Conclusions: Children’s religious repertoires are learned, deployed, adapted, and expanded differently depending on the affordances of the socio-cultural context. Chantia’s meaning-making process is much more complex than the rigid categorisation of the different modal resources she deploys, forming an integrated system of communication. Originality: Our conceptualisation of Sanskrit sacred language learning is anchored on a multilingual and multimodal perspective that does not privilege Sanskrit over other (sacred) languages nor linguistic over non-linguistic resources. Significance: Our paper extends current critique of logocentric perspectives in applied and sociolinguistics to the examination of religious repertoires that are often driven by a communication hierarchy positioning sacred languages at the top and other aspects of communication as secondary.