Challenges

India is a land of diversity comprising different communities, backgrounds, religions, and languages. In the last few years, many times we have witnessed politics over making Hindi as a national language of India. Most often it is advocated by supporters of Hindutva. The debate over this issue has been raging since independence. Hindi speakers feel very proud over this but non-Hindi speakers oppose it with full intensity.  People from the southern Indian States and West Bengal oppose the most, Hindi as a national language. Several institutions, groups of people, and individuals feel that it will ruin the diversity of the country and it is a violation of constitutional principle.

India has 22 listed official languages in the Eighth Schedule of The Indian Constitution.  India has 122 major languages and 1599 other languages, but ironically India doesn’t have a single language that can connect all the people of the country.  

Apart from this, the knowledge that our Vedas contains is being explored by people of Western countries and our knowledge is returning to us in a new format with the Western label. The irony is our education system never allowed us to read Vedas; and we were told that everything is discovered by Western people.

Solution

The introduction of the Sanskrit language as the National language of India could be the best possible solution. Introducing Sanskrit as a national language will be acceptable to almost all people of India because almost all Indian languages have roots in Sanskrit.

History of Sanskrit

Sanskrit is also known as “Samskrta” which is a compound word consist of sam and krta. Sam means well or good and krta means formed or prepared, So Samskrta means well-prepared. Sanskrit is 3500 years old Indic language of the ancient Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit is a primary liturgical language of Hinduism, and predominant language of principle texts of, Buddhism and Jainism. ‘Vedas’ and ‘Puranas’ were written in Sanskrit.

Sanskrit is related to Greek and Latin and several other living and extinct languages with historical significance to Europe, West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. Sanskrit is the root language of many Prakrit languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Kumauni, Garhwali, Urdu, Dogri, Maithili, Konkani, Assamese, Odia and Nepali. Grammar, phonology, and vocabulary of the Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam are significantly influenced by Sanskrit.

Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals and Buddhist practice in the forms of hymns and mantras. One of the first written records in the world was in Sanskrit.

Sanskrit as the most scientific language of the world

Sanskrit is the only scientific language that has no difference between hearing, reading, and writing. Sanskrit is also considered ‘Dev Bhasha’ of ‘Devvani’. Sanskrit alphabets grouped on the basis of the sound it is produced inside the mouth.

According to this vocal anatomy, the Sanskrit alphabets are Kantay (Guttural), Taalavya (Palatal), Oshthya (Labial), Murdhanya (Retroflex or cerebral), and Dantya (Dental). This is how the power of mantras being utilized because the energy of mantras lies in pronunciation.  The compilation of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical, and dharma texts.

Classical Sanskrit was created by Grammarian Panini. Classical Sanskrit enabled the expression of scientific ideas with great precision, logic, and elegance. NASA’s scientists have acknowledged that in Sanskrit the words are written exactly in the manner they are spoken or thought of. Sanskrit would be the most useful language in the future for the development of talking computers.  Sanskrit had the structure, semantics, and syntax which has inspired the later-formed languages; both natural languages and programming languages. The language with the highest number of words in the world is Sanskrit.  Sanskrit has the power to form a sentence in the minimum number of words than any other language.

Sanskrit revival: Current status

Attempts of reviving Sanskrit language have been undertaken in India, Australia, Germany, United Kingdom, United States and other European countries. In India, Sanskrit is one of the 22 official languages. Uttarakhand is an Indian state to have Sanskrit as its second official language. Himachal Pradesh is the second Indian state with Sanskrit as its second official language. As per consensus of 2011, number of Sanskrit speakers in India is 2,360,821; merely 0.19% of Indian population.

The schools governed by the Central Board of Secondary Education accepted  Sanskrit a third language. Mattur and Hosahalli (Karnataka), Jhiri, Baghuwar, and Mohad (Madhya Pradesh); Sasana (Odisha), and Ganoda (Rajasthan) are villages where natives speak Sanskrit. Only 18 universities (3 central, 1 deemed, and 14 state university) in India focusing on Sanskrit revival and Sanskrit studies. All India Radio also transmits news bulletins in Sanskrit twice a day across the nation.

At present, the Sanskrit language is being revived in all 6 continents. Most famous universities offering courses in Sanskrit around the world are Beijing University China, Kyoto University Japan, National University Singapore, National University of Taiwan, John Hopkins and Harvard University USA; McGill University, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, Canada; Hamburg, Heidelberg and Munich University Germany; University of Copenhagen Denmark; Zurich University Switzerland; the University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh and Cambridge University UK; Stockholm University Sweden; Australian National University, University of Sydney, University of Queensland and La Trobe University Australia; and University of Auckland, New  Zealand.

Germany alone has 14 Sanskrit Universities; and being a huge country both in terms of population and land area India is way behind with just only 18 universities. Unfortunately, even after reforms the number of Wikipedia pages in Sanskrit is only 10,000 and Sanskrit stands on 133rd rank, whereas English is on 1st rank with 5.08 million articles.

Future

Sanskrit should be introduced in the premier institutions of technology like IITs, NITs, IIITs, and other science and technology Universities. Our Vedas has a plethora of knowledge of science, technology, math, and Ayurveda; learning Sanskrit will help to explore that unexplored knowledge and help India in re-establishing as ‘Vishwaguru’ again. Indian Government making recommendations for reforms in the teaching of Sanskrit, though a radical shift rather than incremental reform is the call of the hour.

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