Sanskrit, Metalinguistic Awareness, and the Transfer Question: What the Evidence on Classical-Language Study Implies for India's Multilingual Classroom

सार

Claims that studying Sanskrit confers general cognitive benefits — sharper memory, improved logical reasoning, enhanced overall intelligence — circulate widely in Indian educational discourse and increasingly inform curricular decisions under India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, yet such claims are rarely traced to controlled research. This paper examines what the empirical literature on classical-language study and metalinguistic awareness actually supports, and what it does not. Drawing on bilingualism research, the linguistic interdependence hypothesis, a large-scale controlled study of Latin instruction, the single directly relevant empirical study of Sanskrit schooling, and research on Indic-script orthographic transparency, the paper argues that a narrow, defensible case exists for near-transfer benefits — chiefly lexical and morphological awareness transferring to cognate Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi — while the broader claims of domain-general cognitive enhancement common in popular and policy-adjacent literature lack adequate evidentiary support and are vulnerable to the same preselection confound identified in the Latin-transfer literature. The paper concludes with implications for how Sanskrit instruction under NEP 2020's three-language formula should be evaluated and marketed to avoid overpromising.