This whole Sanskrit-Hindi mess, where does one begin when one wants to write about it? That it is completely unnecessary? That forcing children to study something will achieve nothing? That the extreme-Hindutva brigade lacks anything remotely resembling finesse? That this is just the sort of thing about the Sangh Parivar that turns reasonable Indians off? That these people, by trying to ramrod Sanskrit into the education system, are doing a great disservice both to the language and to the so-called ancient Indic culture they are supposedly celebrating?
Where does one begin?
When the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was in power, Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal changed the Indian Institute of Technology entrance examination system for no reason at all. Delhi University, against all logic and widespread protest from teachers, extended the three-year undergraduate programme to four (a decision that has been overturned by the current government). Quite likely, introducing Sanskrit as a mandatory subject in the Kendriya Vidyalayas will have less of a negative impact than the two UPA moves we have mentioned, since it affects no one’s career prospects. But why do it at all?
And if you want to promote Sanskrit, why be so hamhanded that you actually end up hurting your own cause? Minister Smriti Irani’s Sanskrit campaign, as far as I can make out, has gone through the following stages:
v She announced that Sanskrit will replace German as third language in the central schools.
v She then said that this has to be done from the next term itself, not next year. This is, quite simply, pure undisguised bullying, without any concern for the disorientation and difficulties that 78,000 schoolchildren may face halfway through the academic year.
v Parents of some KV students filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court, challenging the imposition of Sanskrit. Irani then claimed that she was doing it only because it was unconstitutional for KVs to offer a foreign language as part of their curriculum. Well, here one must say that if she is correct, it should be investigated how the earlier government allowed the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghatan to enter into an agreement with German government agencies to introduce the language into the syllabus. However, is it really such a big issue? Why not allow children to study French, Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, whatever they want to, as long as there are competent teachers?
v Irani then said that of course she was not banning the learning of German. Students could always take the language as a hobby course.
v A couple of days later, in an interview with PTI news agency, Irani complained that no one was understanding what she had been saying. Apparently, she had never said that Sanskrit be made compulsory. Students were free to take any Indian language as their third language and Sanskrit was just one among the many choices they had. This, of course, implies that everyone reporting what she had been saying till now had either been hard of hearing or delusional, or both.
More importantly, even what she was saying now meant nothing. Because she knows very well that while students currently studying German theoretically have the option of picking any modern Indian language as third language, it’s logistically impossible for KVs to fulfill students’ choices in this limited timeframe. The KV policy is that a language will be offered only if 15 or more students opt for it. But even if 19 students in a KV in Maharashtra say that they want to study Tamil, how will the school manage to hire good Tamil teachers so quickly? So all the students of German will perforce have to switch to Sanskrit, for which there are teachers available.
In the meantime, the weird and most regressive side of the Sangh Parivar emerged in full flower. Uma Bharti has said that Sanskrit could, in the course of time, replace English as a link language for the country. This begs for a simple question: But why?
No one can accuse the Chinese government of being dumb, and it has been spending enormous amounts of money for almost two decades now on getting its countrymen to learn English. Knowledge of English is about the only—slim—advantage we Indians have over the Chinese (and a lot of other nationalities). Bharti’s thinking is just daft thinking.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Ashok Singhal, who was unhappily lurking on the sidelines for quite some time, has now found something to get him back into the field. He wants Sanskrit to be made compulsory and has been quoted in the media saying: “One foreign language (English) is enough… Sanskrit is the language of our country. Everything was written in Sanskrit thousands of years ago. If you want to eliminate it, you want to eliminate this country.”
First of all, with all due respect for Sanskrit, a mere fraction of Indians ever spoke Sanskrit. That is why the Buddha preached in Pali. In fact, there are many things that all Indians actually did thousands of years ago that you possibly wouldn’t want us to do today. For instance, all Indians wore garments of unstitched cloth. And all women went around bare-breasted.
But then, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other such Sangh Parivar organisations have never been noted for scientific temper. By keeping on making absurd claims like we built flying machines and nuclear weapons thousands of years before the Wright brothers and the Manhattan Project scientists were born, they actually do a huge disservice to our ancient learnings and real discoveries.
By promoting Vedic mathematics, they obscure the fact that the 6th century astronomer-mathematician Brahmagupta developed the concept of zero, the foundation of all modern mathematics. By focusing on cow urine, they damage the credibility of Ayurveda, which has thousands of medicine formulations that Western Big Pharma is dying to patent.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
It is the same with extreme-Hindutva claims about Sanskrit. It is a similar disservice they do to the language when they go around insisting that the world’s top computer scientists have said that Sanskrit is the ideal computer programming language. (This claim hasn’t yet been made in the present controversy, but I am sure that someone will come out of the woodwork soon hollering about this.) No scientist with any sense has ever said that. However, these are still arguments in a theoretical space. At the practical level, let us make three points.
One, to know and appreciate ancient Indic wisdom, one does not have to learn Sanskrit. Just as, to read Aristotle or Plato, one need not know ancient Greek. Most great Sanskrit texts are available in English translation and in most Indian languages. The Sangh Parivar would serve its own cultural cause far better if, instead of pushing Sanskrit down everyone’s throat, it tried to ensure that the texts are translated better, and made more accessible in more languages, Indian or foreign, in every way—in terms of availability, price and so on.
Do spread the knowledge of the language too, but by encouraging students to learn, not by imposing it on them. Do it with a positive energy, not based on arguments that reek of rancour and grievance and an exclusionary mindset.
Two, forcing students to learn something does not work. It goes against every enlightened concept of education and individual choice. And it can only ensure that the student develops an antipathy for the subject. Sure, there are some things everyone should learn: the three Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic. But just as everyone does not have to know calculus everyone does not need to know Sanskrit. One can be steeped in Indian culture and even spirituality, without knowing the language. For instance, Ramakrishna Paramhansa did not know Sanskrit.
The number of children who would retain their knowledge of Sanskrit or pursue it beyond school level will remain unchanged whether it is an optional or a compulsory subject. If it is made mandatory, you will only be curtailing a student’s freedom and diminishing her joy of learning.
So also the debate on increasing the importance of Hindi is amusing. When you scratch beneath the surface, you see that the dominant thought driving these “pro-Hindi” types is that India is a homogeneous country. Either from ignorance, or wishful thinking, these deluded individuals including the entire Sena brigade and these enthusiastic RSS types keep pointing to other countries wistfully. “Look at France!”, they say. “OMG see Japan! They have one language throughout their country and they’re super awesome. Yay for one national language!”
In their naïveté, they want to pretend that India is something it’s not. The populations of countries like France, Japan, Greece, Russia etc are not disparate. They dress the same way, have the same facial characteristics, share a common cultural heritage, and eat the same food. Their language hasn’t been imposed on them. It’s organic. No one in Japan stood up and said “Today we will all speak Japanese!” That’s because they didn’t have to. When the entire population is highly homogeneous, having one language is a natural outcome.
Hardcore Hindutva types want to reverse causality. They think that by writing a declaration on a piece of paper, they can suddenly ignore the hard fact that India’s population is not homogeneous. In fact, it’s a lot more like Europe with each state corresponding to a different country. Try making all the member states of the EU settle on one language and watch the fireworks fly! They might be united under a single currency, but the same language? Forget about it.
We do believe that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a pragmatic man. We hope that he sees that this whole commotion is totally unnecessary, and will not help ground Indians in their culture. There are far more important issues that the government and the Human Resources Ministry should be spending their energies on. This Sanskrit sloganeering evokes the worst fears of many Indians about a BJP government, a majority of whom might have even voted for the party in the Lok Sabha
elections! r
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