Topic summary
Sachchidananda Vatsyayan
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Agyeya.
Early life and education
Agyeya was born as Sachchidananda Vatsyayan in PunjabiBrahmin family on 7 March 1911 in an archaeological camp near Kasia, Kushinagar district of Uttar Pradesh, where his father, Hiranand Sastri, an archaeologist, was positioned for an excavation. His mother was Vyantidevi (d. 1924) who was not much educated. Hiranand Sastri and Vyantidevi had 10 children, of whom Agyeya was the fourth. Agyeya spent his early childhood in Lucknow (1911–1915). Due to his father's professional appointment at various places, he had to shift to various places including Srinagar and Jammu (1915–1919), Patna (1920), Nalanda (1921) and the Ootacamund and Kotagiri (1921–1925). Due to this peripatetic lifestyle, Agyeya came into contact with different Indian languages and cultures. His father, a scholar in Sanskrit, encouraged him to study Hindi and taught him some basic English. He was taught Sanskrit and Persian by Pandit and Maulavi in Jammu.