Progress Of Indic Languages Vs English

[Guest]

Lot of inputs have been forthcoming, some very novel, some very practical.

If I may summarize, so far:

- 'National Language' notion is useless and not well-founded. It is not required (even harmful) to 'force' any one single language upon the whole nation as large and diverse as India.

- English need not be 'dumped'. In fact English is very useful. What is needed is to not allow it to become THE FIRST and PRIMARY language of education.

- Individual efforts, although useful, are not very effective. Need government initiatives. For that need political will, driven by Dharma.

- Still, needed is ONE pan-India language / government language. That language better be Sanskritam. Those with not enough self confidence will consider this impractical. But they should study the history of Israel. The early Jewish migrants spoke more than 2 dozen languages, and Hebrew was limited to rabbi-language, like Sanskrit. But will-power conquers all, and Hebrew is the language of Israel today. Other examples include Turkey, and China.

- Even historically in India, any strong Hindu samrat (like Vijayanagar, Chola, Maratha, Shahi-Nepal) has chosen Sanskrit/devanagari as the government language. It is important to remember Raja Rajendra Chol, who after conquering Sinhala and taking the title of LankA-bhU, issued coins inscripted in Sanskritam (in addition to Tamil). Shivaji emphasized on Sanskrit. Nepal's Prithvi Narayan Shah was faced with same dilemma - to use Devanagri script or Tebetan. He elected for Sanskritized Nepali in Devanagri script. Krishna Dev Rai used Sanskrit. Guru Govind Singh opted for Devanagri and propogated Sanskritized Gurmukhi.

- One generation is all it takes to learn a language (again). 20 years is all it requires. Sanskrit would be a better integrater of Indic languages. (What will Dravidists say?)

- What is also needed is some positive media projection of Indic Languages. Some strong leaders required. (I am happy to read the news that Jagran is entering now in electronic media and planning for film-making too. They just launched a new FM station called 'Radio Mantra'. It is being piloted in the town of Panipat, before they roll it out to other cities. As the name suggests, it will have a culture-based programming, and be competing with 'Red FM' of Hindustan and 'Radio Mirchi' of TOI. I hope they dont get carried away themselves in the crowd of p-secs)