Chamu Krishna Shastry

Shastry, along with some of his friends, went on to start the ‘Speak Samskrit’ Movement in 1981 from Bangalore. His method of teaching Sanskrit is to let the student learn it in the same language rather than through another language by translation. Learning Sanskrit can be a forbidding exercise because it is being taught through translation. To make it easier for the students, Shastry's method is not to learn the language through grammar, but to teach Sanskrit as it is spoken. Students thus do not have to wrestle with the nuances of an arcane syntactics. It's then easier to master the language, so much so that even semi-literate people can opt for the course.

He was also a member of the Central Government constituted Sanskrit Committee that developed the "Road Map for the Development of Sanskrit – Ten Year Perspective Plan" document in 2016.

Chamu Krishna Shastry (born 23 January 1956) is an Indian language activist who has been working for the revival of the Sanskrit language. He is the co-founder of the Samskrita Bharati movement, which is aiming to make Sanskrit popular across the world. He is secretary of Samskrit Promotion Foundation. On 25 January 2017, Government of India announced "Padma Shri" award in the category Literature and education for his contribution towards the promotion of Sanskrit.

Shastry was born on 23 January 1956 in Kedila village near Mangalore (Bantwal taluk). He learnt Sanskrit from the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha at Tirupati. As a teenage RSS worker he was underground during Emergency. It was during this period that he first read V.D. Savarkar and Swami Vivekananda's writings on Sanskrit.