TIME TO GIVE INDIAN LANGUAGES ITS DUE
Language is not just a mode of communication among humans. It is also responsible for developing the identity of every individual human. It is the preferred language that all humans use to consume ideas through music, movies, literature, books etc forming their own thoughts, ideas and thus their own identity. Language has been an integral part of the ever evolving human civilization and it is probably the major reason for historians world over to understand history, and trace our evolution to this day.
It is thus quite understandable to witness various ugly disputes over languages, the desire of individuals and communities to always stand by their own language and as usual politicians using evoking this emotion among people to destroy the social, multicultural and secular fabric of our great nation. However, we as Indians, need to look past this divide and learn to appreciate the richness and variety of our lingual past and its treasure of achievements.
India is home to 122 languages and 270 mother tongues, as per the 2011 Census by the Indian Government, signifying the diversity that no other country could even come close to. Being a home to so many different languages, we have a huge collection of various literary resources in all these languages, also written texts encompassing various topics such as mathematics, medicine, astronomy, zoology etc. It is though sad, as majority of our population both past and present is oblivious to these treasures. This brings to mind the un famous statement made by Babington Maculey in his Minutes of Education where he says “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.
Manuscripts written in Sanskrit today have been recorded to be more than 30 million, which is far greater than that of Greek and Latin combined. Apart from Sanskrit the oldest living language in the world Tamil has more than 2 million Manuscripts. In our pursuit to run away from our recent colonial past, we as a country have unfortunately distanced ourselves from our extremely diverse and rich culture of languages. We are the country of Aryabhatta , inventor of ZERO, sushruta the father of Indian medicine, dating back to more than 2500 BC, the rich and diverse literature of the Tamil sangam era , dating between 400 BCE to 500 AD, are marvels of literature world over. It is a pity today that generations of Indians have never had the opportunity to even know the existence of such texts. Studying Shakespeare and Keats is not wrong, but keeping our population away from the world renowned works of Kalidas, thiruvalluvar etc is a pity.
It is more than 7 decades, since we are a free country, and as time passed our admiration and dependence on the English language has touched newer heights. So much so that it would not be wrong today to say that we as a country have successfully created a new divide among ourselves, the English Elite and the rest. Almost like a new Caste system. English under the pretext of helping us to be competitive in the world, has become our identity. We as a society have subconsciously become discriminatory towards our fellow Indians, who do not read or write English. English in our society has become a synonym for a Gentleman. Almost all Indian books today depict a man nicely suited up as a Gentleman not a man in Dhoti. These subtle identities have crept up into our collective subconscious and unfortunately kept us away, from our past glory and distinctive identity.
According to various estimates not more than 30 % of Indians are able to speak English in various degrees, that leaves around 60–70% of the majority population still unable to neither speak nor write the language, but even they have to fight their way on a daily basis in our country, right from reading names of shops, reading menus in restaurants to various online activities which is predominantly in English. It is very obvious that not teaching English would be unreasonable, however we could have definitely done or can still do it by making it the second language, just like countries, like Japan, France, Germany, Finland etc, who have stuck to their cultural pasts and still have become the modern technologically advanced nations that they are today. In this age of modern technology, it would definitely be a very good idea to go back and find our roots, through our rich local languages and mother tongue, and schools and our homes would be the best possible place to start.
