"“… Sanskrit still allows a poet to transcend his or her parochial context and reach out to a space shaped by a wider, inherited discourse. At the same time, Sanskrit enables a skilled poet to condense into the space of a single work— even a single verse — an entire world of specific associations, contents and meaning… It is clear, at least to me, that Sanskrit did not share Latin’s fate. Intense regionalization in the literary realm tended to go hand in hand with highly innovative “Sanskritization”, to use an old term— that is, continuous experimentation with both new forms of Sanskrit literary production and the canonical terms, categories and modes of Sanskrit-informed culture and theory more generally. There were, of course, tensions, rivalries, and all kinds of exotic combinations, many of them internal to the emerging vernaculars themselves; but far from contributing to the demise of Sanskrit as a powerful imaginative vehicle, these very tensions provide acute evidence of its continuous cultural vitality.”"