How did we get here?
I think it's safe to say that pretty much everyone who got his education in India knows what I'm talking about. In a vast majority of Indian educational institutes, there's a pathological focus on rote memorization. This is what the Journal of Management Research and Analysis has to say about it.
Rote learning has been the cornerstone of the Indian education system for decades.
Well they are off by a few orders of magnitudes. We've been doing it for thousands of years. 4000 years to be exact, or as exact as one can be when talking about things that old, epoch time hadn't been invented back then.
Earliest estimates of the creation of RigVeda go back to 2000 BC. Some sages in the Indian subcontinent created the collections of ideas that later became RigVeda around 3500-4000 years ago, But they had a big problem that made the preservation of these scriptures nearly impossible. They didn't know how to write!
Writing was yet to be invented. It simply wasn't a thing back then, so those sages thought of an interesting solution to this problem. They would gather a bunch of kids in a group, sit them down, and recite the scriptures to them. And the kids would memorize the entire thing, word by word, passage by passage, like a human flash drive (The pdf of the first book is 750 pages, I don't know if I should be impressed or horrified). By the time the kids grew up, they were well versed in these scriptures, and then they recited it to their children. And that's how it went. These scriptures were passed down, generation after generation, verbatim. They were a rigid, rigorous, evolved form of the folk lores which have been around for tens of thousands of years.
When you save a file to a flash drive, you don't want it to think about what you're writing to it. You want it to save the file exactly how you wrote it, and then reproduce it exactly how it was saved, down to the last bit. Those sages created a system within their schools whose purpose was to do this, using human beings. Over time these scriptures became part of the overall culture and traditions of the region. They would be recited in ceremonies and religious events. And when that happened, they became immortal. These traditions have survived nearly four millennia, countless wars, rise and fall of empires, the creation of the democratic government of india, and numerous attempts by media and the ministry of education to do a reform, and it's still here with us. Our schools are still doing that in the age of computers.
The Problem of Pronunciation
I knew a kid who used to pronounce "daughter" as "dog hater". He did this because in hindi, the way a word is spelled matches the pronunciation almost exactly. There are a few edge cases, but you could count them on one hand, and even those edge cases are very consistent. When someone reads the hindi phrase "यह वस्तु", they're going to pronounce that in a very specific way decided by the rules of the language. In sanskrit, however, the spelling matches the pronunciation exactly. There can be a little distortion when moving from word to word quickly, but within a word, the spelling decides the pronunciation about as closely as it might be possible. Sanskrit is the mother language of hindi. Almost all languages in the Indian subcontinent belong to a family called the Brahmic family of scripts, and almost all of them are extremely phonetically consistent. All of these languages originated from the same language around 2000 years ago. It was around that time that the written sanskrit was invented and scriptures were written down for the first time as well. The subcontinent already had a well established culture of oral transmission of scriptures when the written sanskrit was being created. Scriptures had already integrated into the society. Wrong pronunciation of the chants in a ceremony was, and still is, considered a bad omen. So the written sanskrit had to be phonetically accurate to be a proper medium for the preservation and propagation of scriptures. It doesn't just encode the ideas, it also encodes the way those words are supposed to be spoken out loud, for, you know, backward compatibility. It's a lot like the musical notation in western music.
It's funny that Indian classical music doesn't have a precise notation for transcribing music. There are two reasons. First is that shastriya music isn't made up of discrete notes, there's a continuous transition between pitches. And second is that there is an improvisation aspect in shastriya music which reduces the usefulness of transcription. It still follows the old student teacher model.
Do you have a source for these claims?
No. I'm not a linguist or a historian. I can't point you to research papers. These are just the ideas and explanations that make sense to me and help me make sense of the things I see in this country.