“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either”. – Sir William Jones

But the policy of the British rulers, seeking to break the Brahmanical structure of the Indian Society by banning all Sanskrit education and encourage only English and thus give importance to the English culture, reduced Sanskrit, which till then was the language of learning and communication across the country, even as it used the local phonetic language script, as now the language of only a few, mostly priests and language experts. Today, Sanskrit is being recognized as being an extraordinarily precise and well-structured language with a flexible root structure having the potential to easily expand its vocabulary and with a rigor and depth of thought and consciousness not available in other languages. It should be noted that Shri. Bharath Rao or Yajnadevam, as he calls himslef, as deciphered the Sindhu-Saraswati Script as being Sanskrit.

History has over the centuries encouraged the extraordinary growth and spread of English (in India as English (Indian) or ‘INGLISH’ and its use, and of Hindustani, across the country. We need to recognize and act on this and not only bemoan the fact that none of the other languages have kept pace.

Let us note how other Countries, faced with a similar problem of being multilingual, had dealt with the situation.

• On attaining Independence, President Sukarno of Indonesia in around 1945 called together all the linguists of the many dialects spoken across his Country and asked them to come up with a common language and script for Indonesia based not on the Javanese language, spoken by most people of the country all in the Java region, but based on the Malay language more widely spoken by those out of the Java region. This was to prevent the dominance of the Javanese, something the Hindi purists in India should note. When the egos of each of these linguists came into play and they were ‘dilly-dallying’ over the importance of the task; he is reported to have ordered all of them confined to a University Campus till they settled the matter amongst themselves. This led to protests and outcry. But as the President was unmoved, they quickly got down to the task and within a few months arrived at an acceptable working form of the Country’s language- ‘Basha Indonesia’, using a modified form of Roman / Latin script. The language was further standardized in 1972.
• President Sukarno was perhaps only following what another great Leader had done for his Country years before; President Kemal Ataturk of Turkey had standardized the ‘Roman Alphabet’, with suitable accent and diacritical marks or ‘Matras’ for Turkish.
• In India it is not possible or even desirable to resort to such drastic measures. But the objective is to be recognized as desirable and hence, a more consensual and democratic way is to be found to attain the objective. What could be more so than the fact that by default, if nothing else, the present situation where common usage has accorded such a status to two languages and the fact that there is a irresistible demand to recognize the importance of the ‘Mother’ tongue and of Sanskrit. It is these languages that we discuss here after.
• In multicultural and multilingual Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew recognized that – “Many official and equal languages with English as the common working language is the only practical way. However, up to school level it would be good to have local language schools to instil the local culture in them.”
• Basha Indonesia, not only did away the hierarchy consciousness of the Java language wherein different words were used to designate or address people with higher or lower social status, but also, developed a simple and easy to learn grammar, allowing suffixes and prefixes to word roots to create new words with immediately predictable meanings, something as in Sanskrit.

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