Unwarranted linguistic revivalism

Indias largest opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems uncertain about whether it wants to take the nation forward to a progressive future or backwards into the feudal past which it views as a golden age. Within the BJP itself, on the one hand, there is Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and recently appointed the partys national campaign manager for the 2014 general election, who stresses good governance and end to corruption, appealing to urban youth. On the other hand, there is Amit Shah who has raised the divisive, age-old issue of building a Ram temple on the site of the demolished Babri mosque at Ayodhya, and BJP president Rajnath Singh, who has suddenly discovered the English language as the mother of all evils, which is destroying Indian culture and development.In the late 1950s, after completing school, my father, a committed Anglophile, decided that I should try for admission into Oxford or Cambridge, which he regarded as the best universities of the world. To qualify for admission, I was required to write an entrance examination in one of three classical languages (this requirement has since been abolished) — Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. Therefore I engaged a Sanskrit tutor and spent about two hours every day for three months preparing for the test. The discipline req-uired learning by rote. Those who chose Latin or Greek did the same. However, once the exam requirement was fulfilled, the language was quickly forgotten. When I was admitted into Cambridge, I learned that students who had passed the Latin or Greek exams forgot what they had learned very quickly. Thats because when one learns something by rote, it passes out of the mind unless you can keep practicing what you learnt. In other words, just like Greek and Latin learning Sanskrit had been a complete waste of time as all three are dead languages, spoken by very few people in the world (classical Greek is very different from colloquial Greek). Another reason why Sanskrit died out was because only the higher castes were allowed to learn it and it became a victim of the pernicious caste system. Therefore its amazing that the BJP president is championing learning of Sanskrit in this day and age. The BJP chief would do well to recall the anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu in the 1950s, when Hindi zealots who had evolved a purist Sanskritised Hindi, tried to ram it down the throats of non-Hindi speaking people in peninsular India. This policy almost led to Tamil Nadu seceding from India. Much before that, while acknow-ledging the importance of a link language for the country, Subhash Chandra Bose, in many ways a far-sighted leader, had suggested that Hindi in the Roman script be adopted as it may be more acceptable to the south. But this suggestion was shot down by Hindi chauvinists and purists. A foolish and unworkable ‘three-language formula was enunciated and soon abandoned. Anyway, since then a colloquial Hindus-tani — a mix of Hindi, Urdu and also…