New lingua franca?

I have just been chatting with a young couple of Pondicherrian origin in Paris’ Parc de Montsouris, where Len-in, Trotsky, Kam-enev and other Bolsheviks used to meet on Sundays. The couple spoke French and Tamil. My languages are English and Bengali. We managed somehow but the problem of communication won’t be solved if Sanskrit becomes India’s lingua franca, as a letter to the editor in the International New York Times suggests.
Sanskrit enshrines the soul of India and must be studied widely and well. But it cannot facilitate conversation between a Naga and a Rajasthani.
Sadly, communication between two Indians can’t be taken for granted even 67 years after Indepen-dence. It’s simpler at home because most Indians now have a modicum of Hindi. But Indians abroad are sometimes caught in a parochial time warp. Imagine a Gujarati visiting a plantation in Malaysia and meeting an aged labourer. The chances are the labourer won’t know any English while Hindi will be totally alien unless, of course, he is a Bollywood fan. Otherwise, the resident Tamil and the visiting Gujarati would have no means of exchanging the time of day.
The first time it happened to me was when enthusiastic Israeli frie-nds wanted me to meet some “Indian Jews” working in the flower industry. The Indians were Mala-yalis who had been employed by Cochin’s Paradesi Jews and spoke only Malayalam until they migrated to Israel and learnt Hebrew. I didn’t have a word of either. Presumably, it would be the same if I visited Israel again and met those Mizos who are now called one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.
The second occasion was in a Munich discotheque. The only Indian language the obviously Indian young man who generously offered to buy me a drink spoke was village Punjabi. As a factory hand he had had to pick up German but that was as foreign to me as Malayalam or Hebrew.
A lingua franca that is easily understood from Kashmir to Kanyakumari would certainly eliminate awkwardness and further national integration. Even expatriate Indians would find an indigenous tongue useful. But can Sanskrit ever be that lingua franca as Professor Arvind Sharma, who teaches Comparative Religion at McGill University in Canada, proposes?
I haven’t seen the full correspondence for the learned professor was responding to an earlier column titled “Hope rises for language long slighted”. But his views, published under the heading “A common language for India,” makes out a complete case for Sanskrit without needing any context.
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister, would have snorted in derision at this. His objection would be that you can’t teach nuclear physics in a dead language. Lee feels Jawaharlal Nehru did India an injustice by not making English the national language as in tiny Singapore. It would have established a common platform, he thinks, and given India access to the field of scientific knowledge. In time to come, Lee told me, the world would accept Indian English as a viable language like American English.
The INYT writer argues, however, with dangerous plausibility that “the case for Sanskrit lies precisely in the fact that it is not the mother tongue of any linguistic community, and therefore can serve as a neutral language among the various linguistic communities inhabiting India, as it once did 1,500 years ago, before its place was taken, first by Persian and then English.”
He is thinking of South Indians objecting strenuously to Hindi because it is a North Indian language, especially identified with Uttar Pradesh and the Congress Party’s political domination. But, surprisingly, he forgets that Sanskrit has an even more particular identification: it is the Hindu liturgical language. It is not the language of 140 million Muslims comprising 13 per cent of the population. It is not the language of 105 million Adivasis from Orissa to Gujarat and Kumaon to the Nilgiris.
If India were Hindutva where faith and polity are in harmonious union, Sanskrit might in theory have been ideal. But it would mean large areas of exclusion (and consequent dissatisfaction) in a multipolar country.
This is also why Professor Sharma’s Israel analogy is quite irrelevant. “The case of Israel presents an interesting parallel” he says. “When formed in 1948, it could have adopted one of the many European languages. But it chose the neutral and culturally rooted Hebrew.”
Hebrew was selected for political reasons. It invests Zionism with the sanction of an ancient faith. It provides a common bond between Sephardic and Ashkenazi, Beni Israel and Falashi, Asian and European. It allows the humble Arabic/Yiddish-speaking shopkeeper in a Yemen ghetto to identify with a titled Rockefeller grandee in London.
As the native language of only 14,135 people according to the 2001 Census, Sanskrit can’t serve those functions. Even if it is popularised, it will remain the “refined speech” of a few. It was always so. Sanskrit was not regarded as separate from the other languages of ancient India so much as a perfected manner of speaking that denoted class and education. It co-existed with the Prakrits or vernaculars though, eventually, both changed so much that the Prakrits and Sanskrit began to be regarded as different languages.
By definition, therefore, Sanskrit can’t be the lingua franca or language of the masses. It’s the elite language. The gulf between rulers and ruled would widen even more, reducing democracy to a still greater farce, if Sanskrit becomes the national language.
Mercifully, even Hindu revivalist politicians know too well which side their bread is buttered to encourage any such idealistic nonsense. It is far more in the country’s interest to concentrate on schools and teaching while promoting Sanskrit scholarship without making a fetish of it.

The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author