“Ayodhya had another name, and Delhi borrowed it two thousand years later.”
In the Pali literature of early Buddhism, the city of Sāketa appears regularly as one of the major settlements of the Kosala kingdom, dated to at least the fifth century BCE. The Buddha is recorded in the Majjhima Nikāya as having stayed in Sāketa, and the city is listed alongside Sāvatthī as a center of trade and learning. Scholars from T.W. Rhys Davids onward have identified Sāketa with Ayodhya, the holy city on the Ghaghra River in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Whether Sāketa and Ayodhya were the same city or adjacent settlements has been disputed since the eighteenth century.
The Sanskrit word sāketa is analyzed as sa, meaning with or together, combined with keta, meaning home, abode, or desire, giving the compound sense the longed-for place or the abode of belonging. In the Rāmāyaṇa and Purāṇic literature, Sāketa is used as a poetic synonym for Ayodhya, Rāma's birthplace. The poet Kālidāsa, writing in the Gupta period around the fourth or fifth century CE, used Sāketa throughout his Raghuvaṃśa as the name for Rāma's city. By the medieval period, Sāketa had become a learned name, a writer's word for a city that ordinary speech still called Ayodhya.
When South Delhi expanded rapidly after Indian independence, planners in the 1980s named new residential colonies after ancient Indian cities and Sanskrit concepts. Saket, the anglicized form of Sāketa, was assigned to a large colony south of the Qutub Minar complex. The choice was characteristic of post-partition naming practice: secular administrators reached past Mughal-period names toward Sanskrit ones without selecting anything tied to active religious controversy. Saket was ancient enough and literary enough to seem neutral.
Today Saket is primarily the location of one of Delhi's busiest mall complexes and a district court. The name that Kālidāsa thought grand enough for an epic poem now appears on auto-rickshaw route boards and metro platform signs. It is a peculiar fate for a word that once placed Rāma's golden city in the geography of Sanskrit literature. The ancient and the quotidian share the same three syllables.
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Today
In Delhi, Saket is a metro stop, a court complex, and a shopping district. The same three syllables that placed Rāma's city in the Rāmāyaṇa now direct commuters to Select Citywalk. Words travel this way: a poet's name for a holy city becomes an address in a city that did not exist when the poetry was written. There is no irony in this, only time.
The word's survival across two and a half millennia is not unusual for Sanskrit; what is unusual is that it survived through bureaucratic choice rather than continuous devotional use. A planner somewhere in 1980s Delhi reached into a list of ancient names and picked one. That act of reaching backward kept the word alive in daily speech. The past stays present when someone decides to use it.
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