Integrity Score 240
No Records Found
No Records Found
The Fifth Fundamental:
6.
Sanskrit as Link Language and Devanagiri as Common Script
A society within a well defined territory is a nation only if it possesses the sentiment of nationality. Such a sentiment obtains only when there is a sense of shared historical memories and an intense longing amongst its members to live and die together. Such a sentiment can be fostered only by a factual and comprehensive understanding of history. But what is the medium for communicating these shared memories? While the authority of the State can provide the administrative cohesion for actualizing the nation, it is only when the people are able to mingle freely and communicate effortlessly with one another that the nation achieves its full bloom. This is not so today in India.
Nothing divides our nation today more than linguistic and caste differences, which over the years since independence have become more accentuated. What is more ridiculous to witness than the struggle for the city of Chandigarh, or of Belgaum on the issue of language?
The Indian people are across the regions communicating with one another today in a foreign language, which is English. This has not come to be by accident, but by a deliberate decision of Lord Macaulay in 1835. In his now famous Minute he stated: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, morals and in intellect”. For this to happen Macaulay advocated that the English language should be foisted and fostered amongst this class of Indians. Although English is a language worth knowing today because the United States has made it an international language, especially for scholars, diplomats, and businessmen in the export-import & outsourcing trade, it is nevertheless not a live language for us. The nuances, the idioms, and metaphors of this language are made abroad. We have to accept these without question. If we improvise these locally, they are made fun of, and derided.
to be continued....