Last year, the Indian government participated in the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok, sending 250 scholars and even providing partial funding for the event.This despite the fact that at one time in India, lower castes (more than 75% of modern Hindus) weren’t even allowed to listen to the language being recited. All in all, one could agree that there's a lot of people who associate Sanskrit with India, and sadly enough, with a meter of nationalism. Surpisingly however, the first people to leave any evidence of speaking Sanskrit weren't Indians, but the Mittani people of Syria. Between 1500 and 1350 BC, the Mittani dynasty ruled over what is now Syria, and despite speaking a different language, had distinctly Sanskrit names such as Purusa, Tusratta, Suvardata, Indrota and Subandhu. The earliest form of Sanskrit known to us is found in the Rig Veda, the sacred texts of Hinduism, which is said to have been written between 1500-1200 BC

Rigvedic Sanskrit was not originally found in India though, but in inscriptions in Northern Syria.

The founding language of the family from which Sanskrit is from is called Proto-Indo-European, which gave rise to the Proto-Indo-Iranian. According to the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, the earliest speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian were from the southern Urals and Kazakhstan. This language gave rise to a group of people speaking an early form of Sanskrit.

Some of these people moved west towards what is now Syria and some east towards the region of the Punjab in India.

The people who moved west spoke the same language and recited the same hymns that would later on be compiled into the Rig Veda by their counterparts who had ridden east. The people who had ridden west soon lost most of their culture, but the people who rode east towards Punjab had preserved their culture better, and thus wrote the Rig Veda, and in turn, gave rise to the myth that Sanskrit started in India.