Many young people in India hate Sanskrit in the same way that Winston Churchill hated Latin at Harrow. It was because of his inability to master the Latin declensions — similar to the Sanskrit ones — that he could not make it to the Cambridge University and instead landed in Bangalore. Even those who had succeeded in scraping through Latin in the public schools meant for the upper classes and the grammar schools, which ordinary people like Shakespeare attended, did not relish the chore of learning Latin. There was also the taxing exercise in school Latin that students were expected to write metrical verse in imitation of the Latin masters. Of course, Latin is not a compulsory subject anymore, and fewer students opt for classics at the university level in England. Thankfully, young Indians did not ever have to miss university because they did not grasp Sanskrit tenses at school.

COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

But Sanskrit still remains a nightmare for school students in many parts of the country because it exists as what is known as the third language. If English is the medium of instruction, then Hindi is a second language, and Telugu/Tamil/Marathi/Bengali are third languages. There are many Telugu-, Tamil-, Marathi-, Bengali- speakers, who opt for Sanskrit because it is supposed to fetch more marks. And all that a student needs to do is to grit his or her teeth, and learn by rote the few things that are there in the syllabus. There is then a genuine dislike and distaste for Sanskrit among the young, and no amount of preaching about the beauteous elegance of the language will remove the bad taste in the mouth for the youngsters. Dislike for Sanskrit usually fades away with the years, and some people realise in their middle and later years that they had missed out on accessing the literary treasures of the classical language. 

There are people who have been pleading the case for learning Sanskrit, and they fall into a medley of confused groups. One of them is that of the nationalists who believe that Sanskrit is the classical language of India and that it needs to be preserved as a matter of patriotic duty. This group is, of course, barking up the wrong tree because most of the other languages in the country developed as a revolt against Sanskrit, even while some of them were greatly influenced by the older language. It is similar to the emergence of modern European languages against the domination of Latin through the Middle Ages and into the early Modern Period. Dante, the great Italian poet, was one of the early ones, who chose to write his magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, in Italian instead of in Latin. In India, most of the early writers in the languages chose to write in the vernacular instead of in Sanskrit though they were masters of Sanskrit. The two big examples are those of Kamban, who wrote the Ramayana in Tamil and of Tulsi Das who wrote in Avadhi though the two knew their Sanskrit and their Valmiki. The birth and growth of the many Indian languages in the last millennium is an expression of Indian nationalism, which predates the modern version of nationalism. So, it would be quite fake to argue that Sanskrit is a pre-eminent national language. All languages in India are pre-eminently national.

The case for Sanskrit rests on purely scholarly and literary grounds. It is a beautiful language which has had a long run from about 1500 Before the Common Era (BCE) to well beyond 18th century Common Era (CE). It was not purely a language of religion, though it was that too, nor was it purely literary though there are unrivalled classical gems strewn all over. It has historical, technical and scientific works ranging from grammar and logic, medicine and astronomy, aesthetics and literature. It would be a pity to become strangers to this vast treasure. It is necessary that there be enough incentives for the few who are interested in the language to study it and do the ever-needed research work, and keep the knowledge connections alive. 

If the intention is to preserve the intellectual heritage of India, there is a need to encourage and incentivise the learning of the other two classical languages — Arabic and Persian. It is true that no great work of Arabic was written in India, excepting perhaps that of Alberuni’s Tarikh-al-Hind, which is an intellectually challenging work. But Arab scholarship in India over the centuries has been deep, and even brilliant. This can be seen in the fact that in the 1890s, the Amir of Kabul wanted the famous scholar of Maghreb (West) Ibn Khaldun’s Tarikh (History) to be translated into Persian, and he turned to Indian Arabic scholars to do it, and he offered financial assistance for the project. Even as late as 1880s, an Arabic scholar from Uttar Pradesh, Maulvi Hakim Syed Ghulam Hasnain Kashori translated the work of the great physician and scholar Ibn Sina’s Arabic magnum opus, Al Qanun, into Urdu. It was published by Lucknow’s great publisher of the time, Munshi Nawal Kishore. India’s Arabic scholars connect the country with the intellectual inheritance of the Arabs from Iraq to Morocco. India’s Arabic scholarship would have paid intellectual and strategic dividends in the post-Independence era if the country had sustained the Arabic scholarly community. There is a need to revive Arabic learning and scholarship in the country. It still exists in scattered Arabic departments. There should be renewed efforts to incentivise these departments in the country. Arabic is still the influential language of science and literature and India enjoys the natural advantage of a pool of Arabic scholars, however small. There is a need to expand this resource.

Persian has a greater advantage over Arabic in India. Many Indian historians and poets in the country wrote in Persian in the same way that many Indians today write histories and literary works in English. There was the curious cultural war in 19th century triggered by the feisty Mirza Ghalib, who argued that the Indians writing in Persian were not good enough. It is similar to the battle whether Indians writing in English wrote as well the native speakers in England and in America. It is true that Iranians did not recognise the Indian Persian writers and their works but India need not defer to Iranians as we do not defer any more to England and America. Ghalib’s Persian ode to Banaras/Kashi in his mathnavi written in 1828 and called, Chiragh-e-Dair reveals that Persian is part of the Indian national fabric. All of the Persian works of Mir, Ghalib and Iqbal should be translated into other vernaculars. 

For the moment we shall not revive the old quarrel with Raja Rammohun Roy for arguing against Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian and in the favour of English. Reclamation of the classical heritage of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian does not depend on fighting the ghost of Roy. 

The author is consulting editor, dna