>According to Tripathi, the problem of Sanskrit being narrowed to religion is a colonial inheritance. British Orientalists, he argues, created an image of Sanskrit as the language of ritual and one religious community, ignoring its vast Buddhist, Jain, Carvaka, scientific, theatrical, poetic and philosophical corpus.
I don't understand how you can take what happened to AH Dani at BHU and say this with a straight face.
Let's go a bit back and try to understand what happened with Buddhists of India. A whole religion exterminated from such a vast land.
From down south of India - the Proto Tamil language is the basis for modern Tamil, Malayalam and others. We still have Sanskrit being used by Temple priests. One of changes in the last decade is - Tamilnadu finally has temples with priests using Tamil for religious rituals. Sanskrit was gate kept by the priestly class. It’s not a colonial reframing.