“Sanskrit is the thread on which the pearls of the necklace of Indian culture are strung; break the thread and all the pearls will be scattered, even lost forever.” Dr. Lokesh Chandra
First let us examine the views of the first Prime Minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru, on the subject of Sanskrit. Around the time that India’s language policy was being debated in the Constituent Assembly, Nehru was reported on the 13th of February 1949 in newspaper “The Hindu” as declaring:
If I was asked what the greatest treasure which India possesses is and what is her finest heritage, I would answer unhesitatingly—it is the Sanskrit language and literature, and all that it contains. This is a magnificent inheritance, and so long as this endures and influences the life of our people, so long the basic genius of India will continue.
This is one of the strongest endorsements of Sanskrit by anyone. Nehru’s words are quoted often, especially in environs when Sanskrit needs to be defended by well-meaning and misguided secularists. Nehru’s support for Sanskrit would have been indeed important in those controversy-fraught times.
Nehru added later, in the Azaad Memorial Address:
India built up a magnificent language, Sanskrit, and through this language, and its art and architecture, it sent its vibrant message to far away countries. It produced the Upanishads, the Gita and the Buddha. Hardly any language in the world has probably played as vital a part in the history of a race as Sanskrit has. It was not only the vehicle of the highest thought and some of the finest literature, but it became the uniting bond for India, even though there were political divisions. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata were woven into the texture of millions of lives in every generation for a thousand years. I have often wondered if our race forgot the Buddha, the Upanishads and the great epics, what then would it be like.
Moving from the Constituent Assembly to the actual Constitution itself, we notice that at present it does not designate any language to be India’s national language. Article 343 of the constitution considers Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of India. It also allows for the continued use of English for official purposes. Article 345 also allows for any of the ‘national languages’ of the union to be adopted by the state legislature as the official language of that state. Until 1967, before the 21st amendment to the constitution, fourteen regional languages were recognized. Subsequently the number has grown to twenty two. The Sahitya Academy gives away annual awards in two additional languages. This means that currently twenty four languages in India enjoy official recognition. This account suggests that as far as the constitution is concerned all of India’s languages, especially the twenty two recognized by the constitution thus far, are national languages. At its weakest then, the case for Sanskrit as the national language in India does not require any further elucidation if Sanskrit is considered only one amongst the many national languages in India.
After the Constitution, the next and perhaps most important document to examine would be the Report of the Sanskrit Commission set up by the Government of India in 1956 under the Chairmanship of Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee. An examination of the Report of this Commission shows that the status of Sanskrit in contemporary India has a lot to do with both the politics and policies of the State. It was this Commission’s report, along with Report of the Official Language Commission of the Government of India that led to Sanskrit being one of the languages taught in Indian schools all over the country. According to the three-language formula, which still works at least up to the 10th Standard in Indian secondary schools, each student has to learn three languages, the mother tongue, Hindi or another Indian language, and English. To this day, in many school, Sanskrit is the third language, taken in addition to English and Hindi. The Report of the Commission is probably the most extensive and impressive argument in favour of Sanskrit education in independent India. The Commission actually recommended that Sanskrit be made “an additional official language” of India:
While for all administrative and ordinary day-to-day purposes, some pan- Indian form of Hindi may be used, it appears inevitable that, in course of time, the prospective All-India Language — Bharati Bhasa — at least in its written norm, which would be acceptable to all regions of India, especially in the higher reaches of education and literary activity, will be a form of simple and modernized Sanskrit.
Though this recommendation was not accepted, many of the Report’s findings have shaped the manner in which the Indian state treated Sanskrit.
One of the most remarkable chapters in the Sanskrit Commission Report is “Sanskrit and the Aspirations of Independent India” in which a defense and justification of Sanskrit is offered. The authors point to the role of Sanskrit in the national awakening of India, especially in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s song, Vande Mataram, which became the “Rashtra Gaan.” This song is entirely in Sanskrit except for a few sentences in Bangla.
The Commission also refers to the adoption of the Upanishadic dictum “Satyamevajayate” as the national motto of India, the Sanskritized “Jana Gana Mana” as the national anthem, the motto of the Lok Sabha “Dhamachakraprvartnaya,” of All India Radio (Akashvani), “Bahujan hitaya bahujana sukhaya,” of the Life Insurance Corporation, “Yogaksemamvahamyaham.” The practice of using Shri and Shrimati instead of Mr. and Mrs, and so on, also show how important Sanskrit is in our national life.
Sir William Jones in 1786 called Sanskrit a language “more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.” The long and unbroken continuity of Sanskrit is lauded. The Commission considers Sanskrit to be “in the broad sense of the term … the entire linguistic development of the Aryan speech in India,” from classical Sanskrit to the medieval Prakrit. We may extend this to include the modern Indian languages too. Sanskrit is thus “the linguistic and literary expression of that great Cultural Synthesis which is identical with Bharat-Dharma, the Spirit of India, or Bharatiyata, as it has been sometimes described.”
If we think of all the literature available in this linguistic system, it would be a vast treasury useful not only to India, but to the whole world: from the Vedas, the Vedangas, the Epics, the Kavya literature, drama, science, philosophy, aesthetics, indeed the endless knowledge in nearly all branches of human endeavor available in Sanskrit makes it a unique repository, the world’s heritage language. In fact, Sanskrit is conducive to all the four purusharthas or cardinal aims of life, Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha, with its vast repositories of knowledge and guidance in each of these realms. Without Sanskrit, the fullest development of the human mind is almost impossible.
Sanskrit is also the “great unifying force” in India, knitting a vast subcontinent from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Saurashtra to Kamarupa. Pointing out how the Chinese system of writing and modern Hebrew served to unify the newly formed nations of China and Israel respectively, the Commission asked why Sanskrit could not be expected to play a similar role in India. It was only Sanskrit that could play the role of unifying India: “This great inheritance of Sanskrit is the golden link joining up all the various provincial languages and literature and cultures, and it should not be allowed to be neglected and to go waste.