Shri. Vishwanath Khaire
A Scholar of Folk Culture, Linguist and Indology
Vishvanath Khaire is a multifaceted person – engineer by training; author, poet, playwright by nature; linguist for the love of languages; scholar and researcher by choice. For the past thirty years, his work has shed light on little-understood aspects of Indian languages as well as Indian mythology. Based on a systematic study of several languages and the relationships between them, he has proposed the ‘Sammata संमत (Samskrit-Marathi-Tamil)’ hypothesis which describes the unity of all Indian languages and of the formation of Sanskrit from their ancestor dialects. The Sahitya Akademi Bhasha Samman was awarded to Vishvanath Khaire for his substantial scholarly contributions to the enrichment of Indian languages, and his valuable work in the field of classical and medieval literature.
Mr Vishvanath Khaire was born in Supe, Maharashtra on March 29, 1930. He secured fourth rank when he matriculated from Pune in 1946. He went on to Fergusson College and College of Engineering Pune, from where he graduated as B.E (Civil Engineering) with first rank in 1951. As a Civil Engineer, he worked on the Kakrapara Irrigation Project in 1952 and with Bombay Port Trust in 1953. From 1954-84 he worked in Central PWD holding senior responsible positions up to Chief Engineer in Jawahar Tunnel Project in Kashmir, Siddharth Rajmarg Project in Nepal, Delhi Development Authority , World Bank Urban Development Project in Yemen etc.
He has lived and worked all over India including Kashmir, Delhi, Madras and various places in Maharashtra, as well as in Nepal and Yemen. His work took him many places, and his love for literature and languages led him to learning many languages. He is fluent in Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and English. He also knows Tamil, and has learnt German, Nepali and Arabic. He has even composed poetry in Nepali! Even while working as an engineer, his related creative work included writing the script for a documentary on the Jawahar Tunnel and songs in Nepali/Hindi on the Siddharth Rajmarg. For more than thirty years he has been an author, researcher and linguist, receiving several awards for his research and literary work, culminating in the Sahitya Akademi Bhasha Samman in 2010. He lives in Pune with his wife Umadevi.
About New Indology
For two hundred years now, Indology has been built on two untenable axioms: one, that Vedic Sanskrit was brought into India by aggressor tribes to be imposed on the indigenous peoples; two, that there are two major families of Indian languages in North and South India, unrelated to each other. However much denied, there has also been an undercurrent of thinking, correlating races with these language families. The axioms influenced conclusions about the course of history in India, often based on wishful interpretations of the letter of ancient and medieval mythological texts. Indian linguistics was forever tied to the Indo-European theory, with hardly any attempt to correlate the living Indian languages to those of antiquity or to their neighbours. Over the last thirty years, Vishvanath Khaire’s in-depth research in Sanskrit, Tamil and Marathi (the contact language of the supposed two families), has provided enough evidence of the unity of the two families, indicated the formation of Sanskrit from ancestors of the living Indian languages, and provided the means for proper understanding of Indian Mythology. This is New Indology. New Indology is calling for nurture and development by Indologists of the 21st century.
Engineering Career & Contributions
1952
Kakrapara Irrigation Project
1953
Bombay Port Trust
1954-1984
Central Public Works Department (Chief Engineer)
1976
Chief Engineer, Property Valuation Dept., Chennai
Yemen & Nepal Contributions
Urban Development, Siddhartha Highway
