India: The decline of Sanskrit has little to do with the ascendancy of English.

Daily News and Analysis, July 24, 2013

Lamenting the death of Sanskrit from a narrow perspective

by Jyoti Punwani

BJP chief Rajnath Singh’s remarks against English and Anglicization are both correct and incorrect. Whatever the advantages of having English as the de facto national language, one fact still remains: it is the language of the elite. The 2001 census revealed that only one in every ten Indians could speak English.

The 2005 Indian Human Development Survey expanded the small circle of Indians who could do so considerably — to 28 per cent men and 17 per cent women. Fluency remained restricted to less than 15 per cent.

Yet, English rules. And because of that, more and more parents are sending their children to English medium schools. It’s a truism that a child learns best in the mother tongue. But today, more and more of our children struggle as they acquire their primary learning in a foreign tongue. No one in their homes speaks English. These days, few of them talk to each other in English in school too, even in English medium schools in Mumbai. So, for the majority of children in the majority of English medium schools, everything about the language through which they acquire knowledge, from pronunciation to content, is alien.

The poems about daffodils, clover, pies and pudding mean nothing. The only solution is to mug everything, but you can’t mug grammar. Unless you hear English being spoken around you, why would you answer: “She found’’ to the question “What did she find”? Doesn’t it make sense to simply copy the question and say: “She find”? Imagine the years of time and effort saved if the same learning was acquired in a language one is at ease in. It’s not impossible. The Chinese, with whom we compare ourselves all the time, have done it. And they aren’t exactly lagging behind us globally.

There’s another fundamental damage the dominance of English has done to us.
The desperation to learn English has led to the decline of Indian language schools. Less and less Indians are likely to be aware of the literature of their mother tongue. What does that do to our cultural identity? Those of us who think in English — aren’t we alienated from the cultural traditions of our parents? What about the alienation from the mass of Indians? Anglicization has indeed brought for many of us a feeling of cultural rootlessness. Mourning that loss doesn’t mean glorifying the culture. You can accept that our ‘glorious 5000-year-old’ culture had some pretty rotten elements in it, even while feeling sad that you can’t relate to it.

What’s disturbing about Rajnath Singh’s remarks is his linking of that culture with Sanskrit. The decline of Sanskrit has little to do with the ascendancy of English.
When was Sanskrit ever our lingua franca? It was always the language of Hindu scripture; the medium of instruction for a tiny, caste-specific section. It wasn’t even the language in which they conversed!

Sanskrit died decades ago, and few felt the loss. The majority of Indians continued to speak and develop their own languages. The denial of the best opportunities to these people, who may be scholars in their own fields but bad at English, and the resultant loss of national potential — that’s what should be worrying the man who went from a village school to a first-class master’s degree in physics.

Rajnath Singh’s lament about the loss of Sanskrit because of Anglicization only reveals his Brahminical, narrow view of Indian heritage. But then what else can you expect from an RSS man?

The author is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist.