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IMHO, Sanskrit quotes sound cool to those who know Prakrit languages just like Latin and Greek quotations sound cool to those who know Romance languages (and even to those who know English, like myself).
Yes, there is a revival, and an interest. But Sanskrit has always been known to the "priestly" class even though they never conversed in it. This new revival is not going to lead to actual communication, just a lot of visual art based on the script and quotations. IMHO.
Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions.
Why would Sudraka,Vatsayana, Brhathari write in Sanskrit if no one spoke it?
I think, and it is just my speculation, that for most of Indian History, Sanskrit was the link language.
Just like "Latin" in the USA and Europe of the early 17th and 18th centuries, when all academic instructions were carried out in Latin!
So, nobody used Sanskrit as the primary language, but everyone could or knew someone who could convert Sanskrit to the local dialect.
It is almost like how Chinese and Colombian traders might sign a contract for coffee purchase in English. Neither might use English in most of their daily operations.
This, but also social sciences and interdisciplinary research (especially in the NLP, CompLing, and ML space).
"A third elective is chosen from Accelerated Classical Greek/Italian/German, Sanskrit, ..."
https://www.sydgram.nsw.edu.au/life-at-grammar/academic/
My children had a great time there.
I don't understand how you can take what happened to AH Dani at BHU and say this with a straight face.
As India grew richer, the newer generation of liberal arts colleges (eg. Ashoka) and humanities programs in public universities (eg. IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad, JNU) started attracting and hiring Western educated faculty and researchers (Indian as well as Foreigners) to help revitalize interest in humanities and social sciences.
India also now has a new generation philanthropists who are starting to donate to this kind of research (eg. Murthy and the "Murty Classical Library of India" at Harvard).
There is a similar revitalization for older texts in Tamizh, Telugu, Koshur, Pahari, Tibetan, etc as well.
There is no official "Prakrit", by definition of the term itself. "Prakrit" just means "natural" and the way I understand it, was the term for all colloquial dialects/languages across India.
"Sanskrit", on the other hand, meant "cultured" and its grammar, at least for the last 2500 years, is strictly defined by Panini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...)