#NationalPoetryDay, desire of a flower, Status of Indian Literature? Sanskrit?

                         

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These words are echoed in my memory ever since school days. There is a long tradition in our History of literature of such high standard of creations. This is a style of poetry often called as छायावाद। 

But this particular poetry is full of devotion, patriotism and a kind of hammer on the accepted norms in society. The poet asks in form of the desire of a flower. What is the wish of a flower? does any one tries to know before plucking and offering it to anyone as per their wish. What if flower does not want to be decorated in the hairs of a Beauty queen? what if flower does not wish to be offered at the statue of God? 

Thus the poet hits at our conscience. What as a human we are doing?
As the human race began to explore this vast earth from the days of hunter-gatherers, cave dwellers and then to settlements, from there to small habitations that converted into basic villages, in our context we can write Vedic period then (Pre-Vedic and post Vedic??) later the different Janapad and MahaJanpad. Those grew into Nationalities- Magadh, Kalinga, Kekaya, Gandhaar, etc to name few. Then there is a period when we know the time by the names of dynasties?? Gupta, Nand, Maurya, Saakya, Kushan, Hun, Hoysala, Rashtrakut, Pallav, Pandya, Chola, Chera, Pal, Chandel etc.
Later Ancient India, Medieval India, etc.
But in all these ages the most integral part of Human life has been language, literature. Without which there could not have been any kind of communication.

What I mean is that in a nation where the poetry or the rhymes have been evolved many millenniums BC, yes-before Christ, then where our poetry stands TODAY?
Read it in light of the hastag? #NationalPoetryDay? 
Are they pointing towards the Indian Poetry or they are pointing towards the poetry brought from an alien country to India? We should see our Indian literature in light of the development of literature in other nations in world. Where was the literature of those countries when our ancient poets, created such a rich treasure. But now a days people will turn blind when name of #Sanskrit comes. Since most of the ancient works were in Sanskrit therefore those who don’t know Sanskrit cry loud and try to project our Sanskrit as something backward, and cry praise for English?? Irony. When English was born? But do they (people who breathe English) believe that any other language will not take place of English? Chinese or French or German, Japanese? People speaking these languages do not read write or speak English?? Even English of USA and UK are very different from each other.

Sanskrit in this land has played a role of unification of many cultures, faiths, traditions, local languages, philosophy, Music, arts, Architecture etc. How can we forget Sanskrit? It is our Root. Root to many Indian Languages. But due to some invaders and rulers we have been cut off from our roots. Thus new generation do not know about our great Indian rich Literature. Neither they study in school nor they listen or learn in their homes. The past and present generation is to be blamed for that.

If ruling parties can decide that there should be reservation on basis of caste then they could have given the first place to Sanskrit among all our Indian languages. But politicians fought over languages also.

Abhinavgupta went to Kashmir and wrote in Sanskrit. Adi Sankaracharya from Keral went around India and communicated with all and created his treasures in Sanskrit. I mean in those times most of the works were written in Sanskrit. Thus Sanskrit was the easiest mode of communication. What is status of Sanskrit today?

Time immemorial in India we have been hearing about वेद Ved or Veda and वैदिक साहित्य या काव्य Vedic literature. There are four Ved. Rigved ऋग्वेद  is the compilation of the hymns dedicated to various kinds of rituals etc.
मानव बोल चाल के लिए या भावों को प्रगट करने के लिए ध्वनियों को विभिन्न शब्दों तथा वाक्यों के द्वारा ही प्रयोग करता है. 
और यही शब्द स्थान परिवेश संस्कृति और काल के कारण विभिन्न भाषओं का रूप ले लेते हैं
भारत में हम व्यास का नाम सुनते आये  हैं ।  
व्यास भास वाल्मीकि विशाखदत्त शूद्रक आदि प्राचीन नाम स्मरण हो आते हैं | महाभारत गीता रामायण आदि का नाम सुनते आये हैं । 
ved are the oldest literature known in the human history. let anybody accept or reject this. Time they say is about 2 millennium BC? How does it matter for we Indian. We had a tradition of Shruti  श्रुति . A rich tradition of oral knowledge, as we grew up in our homes lots of legends are told by our grandmother and grandfather and later by our relatives, neighbourhood etc. There we don't ask any kind of proof? but since these kind of exchanges continue in our families and in society and thus this kind of rich bank of knowledge remains and continues to remain alive from generation to generation. All that is in form of SHRUTI. श्रुति  स्मृति. Smriti is another kind of literature. First what people hear and then what they remember and reproduce is called as  स्मृति Smriti? am i right?
thus there are Four वेद Ved, उपनिषद Upnishad, Smriti, पुराण puran etc all are forms of our rich literary treasure. There are Shusruti शुश्रुति .

The Vedic texts were orally composed and transmitted, without the use of script, in an unbroken line of transmission from teacher to student that was formalized early on. This ensured an impeccable textual transmission superior to the classical texts of other cultures; it is, in fact, something like a tape-recording.... Not just the actual words, but even the long-lost musical (tonal) accent (as in old Greek or in Japanese) has been preserved up to the present.

— Michael Witzel^[5]

Ancient Indians developed techniques for listening, memorization and recitation of their knowledge, in schools called Gurukul, while maintaining exceptional accuracy of their knowledge across the generations.^[28] Many forms of recitation or pathas were designed to aid accuracy in recitation and the transmission of the Vedas and other knowledge texts from one generation to the next. All hymns in each Veda were recited in this way; for example, all 1,028 hymns with 10,600 verses of the Rigveda was preserved in this way; as were all other Vedas including the Principal Upanishads, as well as the Vedangas. Each text was recited in a number of ways, to ensure that the different methods of recitation acted as a cross check on the other. Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat summarizes this as follows:^[29]

• Samhita-patha: continuous recitation of Sanskrit words bound by the phonetic rules of euphonic combination;
• Pada-patha: a recitation marked by a conscious pause after every word, and after any special grammatical codes embedded inside the text; this method suppresses euphonic combination and restores each word in its original intended form;
• Krama-patha: a step-by-step recitation where euphonically-combined words are paired successively and sequentially and then recited; for example, a hymn "word1 word2 word3 word4...", would be recited as "word1word2 word2word3 word3word4 ...."; this method to verify accuracy is credited to Vedic sages Gargya and Sakalya in the Hindu tradition and mentioned by the ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini (dated to pre-Buddhism period);
• Krama-patha modified: the same step-by-step recitation as above, but without euphonic-combinations (or free form of each word); this method to verify accuracy is credited to Vedic sages Babhravya and Galava in the Hindu tradition, and is also mentioned by the ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini;
• Jata-pāṭha, dhvaja-pāṭha and ghana-pāṭha are methods of recitation of a text and its oral transmission that developed after 5th century BCE, that is after the start of Buddhism and Jainism; these methods use more complicated rules of combination and were less used.

These extraordinary retention techniques guaranteed an accurate Śruti, fixed across the generations, not just in terms of unaltered word order but also in terms of sound.^[28][30]That these methods have been effective, is testified to by the preservation of the most ancient Indian religious text, the Ṛgveda (ca. 1500 BCE).^[29]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas
The Rigveda Samhita is the oldest extant Indic text.^[76] It is a collection of 1,028 Vedic Sanskrit hymns and 10,600 verses in all, organized into ten books (Sanskrit: mandalas).^[77] The hymns are dedicated to Rigvedic deities.^[78]

The books were composed by poets from different priestly groups over a period of several centuries from roughly the second half of the 2nd millennium BC (the early Vedic period), starting with the Punjab (Sapta Sindhu) region of the northwest Indian subcontinent.^[79] The Rigveda is structured based on clear principles – the Veda begins with a small book addressed to Agni, Indra and other gods, all arranged according to decreasing total number of hymns in each deity collection; for each deity series the hymns progress from longer to shorter ones; yet, the number of hymns per book increases; finally, the meter too is systematically arranged from jagati and tristubh to anustubh and gayatri as the text progresses.^[60] In terms of substance, the nature of hymns shift from praise of deities in early books to Nasadiya Suktawith questions such as, "what is the origin of the universe?, do even gods know the answer?",^[75] the virtue of Dāna(charity) in society,^[80] and other metaphysical issues in its hymns.^[81]

There are similarities between the mythology, rituals and linguistics in Rigveda and those found in ancient central Asia, Iranian and Hindukush (Afghanistan) regions.^[82]

The Samaveda Samhita^[83] consists of 1549 stanzas, taken almost entirely (except for 75 mantras) from the Rigveda.^[50][84] The Samaveda samhita has two major parts. The first part includes four melody collections (gāna, गान) and the second part three verse “books” (ārcika, आर्चिक).^[84] A melody in the song books corresponds to a verse in the arcikabooks. Just as in the Rigveda, the early sections of Samaveda typically begin with hymns to Agni and Indra, but shift to the abstract. Their meters shift also in a descending order. The songs in the later sections of the Samaveda have the least deviation from the hymns derived from the Rigveda.^[84]

In the Samaveda, some of the Rigvedic verses are repeated more than once.^[85] Including repetitions, there are a total of 1875 verses numbered in the Samaveda recension translated by Griffith.^[86] Two major recensions have survived, the Kauthuma/Ranayaniya and the Jaiminiya. Its purpose was liturgical, and they were the repertoire of the udgātṛor "singer" priests.^[87]

from above i wanted to stress that Kavya काव्य existed in our India way back from the period of Ved. But singing and dancing must have been in existence long before ved were created and these are the integral part of human life. But here we are talking about the written form or in form of a structure. That can be referred as Literature, it gives a well structured form to poetry. 

After the Ved came the Mahabharat, Geeta, Ramayan etc. all such things were in form of verses in Sanskrit and in other languages also in India. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hindi-language_poets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_poets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_poetry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ancient_Indian_poets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Indian_poets