People have thundered that the Sanskrit decision
is preventing Indian students from aspiring to go to German
universities, which is not true – most university education in Germany
is conducted in the medium of English. Besides, if you want to learn
German, you can still opt for it: it is not banished from the KVs.
Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani. Image courtesy PIB
Others
have suggested that German is a global language, and therefore – they
implied – Sanskrit is inferior to German. Which is not quite true: only a
fraction of the people even in Europe speak German, and almost all
large German companies conduct business in English. I used to work for
Siemens in California, and not knowing German was not a big handicap in
communicating with my colleagues, even when I traveled to Germany.
Others
complained that this is a burden on students who have already opted for
German, which is true. But then it is only since 2011 that German has
been made available in all Kendriya Vidyalayas, replacing Sanskrit.
That
is the crux of the matter: German replaced Sanskrit in the entire KV
system recently. And why was that? Where was the uproar when, apparently
on a whim, the previous UPA government decided to replace Sanskrit in
mid-stream with German? And why German? Why not Japanese, or Chinese, or
Arabic or Spanish, all of which have more commercial and job
opportunities for young people? What was the rationale in choosing
German?
The KV system, let us remember, has to be uniform all over
the country: you cannot have a different curriculum in different
states. Thus, if you switch languages, it apparently has to be a toggle
effect, and teachers who teach X have to switch to teaching Y.
This
is precisely what happened under UPA to Sanskrit. Why is nobody asking
why the Kabil Sibal-led UPA ministry surreptitiously swapped Sanskrit
out and swapped German in to the curriculum in 2011? Did that not do
much damage to the students desirous of studying Sanskrit? Did it not
force Sanskrit teachers to suddenly become German teachers?
Furthermore,
did the Sibal coup, of the KVs signing an MoU with the Goethe Institute
of the Max Mueller Bhavan in 2011, violate the hitherto sacrosanct
Three Language Formula, which many of us have been forced into? Growing
up in Kerala, according to this formula, my first language (yes, first!)
language was mandated to be Hindi, my second language was English, and
my third was Malayalam.
In fact, I could have avoided learning
Malayalam altogether, because we had a choice of French, Tamil, Sanskrit
and so on as optional third languages. So why is it not acceptable if
the KVs now offer German as an optional, not a compulsory language? If
there is enough demand, the schools will find enough German teachers:
that is called the free market, supply /demand, Economics 101.
The
Three Language Formula suggested Hindi, English and (preferably) a
South Indian language for Hindi speaking students, and Hindi, English,
and the regional language for non-Hindi speaking students. The whole
idea was to force ‘national integration’, Congress-style. Whether that
did so is questionable, but certainly introducing German (or French or
Chinese or Japanese) would be unlikely to do any ‘national integration’.
So ipso facto the idea of bringing in German is against the law,
because German is not a regional language in India.
Now, I am
quite a fan of the Germans, because of their diligence and methodical
nature, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a fondness for
German, which is a bit difficult. I had to study technical German at IIT
Madras, and all I remember now is ‘The chemische industrie produziert
synthetische stoffe’. German and Sanskrit for Indians are like apples
and oranges.
I contended elsewhere in 2000 that a language has five possible reasons for it to be valuable to a populace:
• A transactional language
• A literary language
• A liturgical language
• A cultural language
• A conquering language
German
would be a transactional language or lingua franca with only a limited
set of people: Germans, some Swiss, some Dutch, I believe. It is a good
literary language, but it does not jell greatly with the Indian ethos.
It is clearly not a liturgical language.
A cultural language is
one that resonates with the culture of the people: for instance, if you
read Guenter Grass’s magnificent works such as
The Tin Drum and
The Flounder,
you can see it is replete with details of the history, the cuisine, and
even the crops and fish of Kashubia (a land I have never read about
elsewhere) and specifically of Danzig, now Gdansk.
English is the
typical conquering language, which is imposed on (and eventually, as is
evident, internalized by) the conquered – as in India, Ireland,
Scotland, and elsewhere. Germans didn’t conquer India, so it is not a
conquering language either.
If you look at Sanskrit carefully, you
can see that it is many of the above: a lingua franca for most of
India’s history, undoubtedly the greatest literary language of India and
almost certainly of the entire classical world, the liturgical language
of Hindus, and the cultural language that links the conceptual entity
of Bharat.
Was Sanskrit also a conquering language? Some, still
harboring notions about the Aryan Invasion Fantasy, would say so, but it
is increasingly evident that it was the language of the natives, not
imported by some "Aryans thundering down the Khyber Pass in their
horse-drawn chariots" in the bizarre imaginations of certain "eminent
historians" who are past their shelf-lives. One of the (intentional)
mistakes people make is in imagining that Sanskrit was only a Hindu
liturgical language. Far from it. As this tweet suggests, the body of
non-religious literature in Sanskrit, including everything from texts
for metallurgy to off-color jokes about bodily functions, is immense.
For instance there was the beautiful erotic poetry written by one
Dharmakirti; it turned out the same Dharmakirti was a severe Buddhist
logician!
1. संस्कृतसंवर्धनम् retweeted
Hashmi Shams Tabreed @hstabreed
Critics of Sanskrit hate it for its religious association not realizing
its richness. Music, Science, Arts Sanskrit Literature has it all
Sanskrit’s
other claim to fame is that it is the most scientific human language of
all time. I will have to delve into my computer science background and
formal language theory to explain this. I have heard people say, "XYZ
says Sanskrit is the best language to do Artificial Intelligence with"
or words to that effect. This is not strictly speaking true: for AI, you
need logic-based languages such as LISP or Prolog.
Paninian or
Classical Sanskrit (as contrasted with Vedic Sanskrit) is the most
refined and precise human language ever invented. It has an astonishing
property known as a "context-free grammar", and so far as I know, it is
the only human language that has ever had this. Context-free means that
the language is utterly unambiguous, and every sentence in it can be
derived precisely from a set of rules. In Paninian Sanskrit, as embodied
in the Ashtadhyayi, there are 3959 rules.
Its context-free nature
comes from an audacious attempt by Panini to encapsulate the infinite
variety of expression in language in a finite number of rules. Even now,
it is difficult to imagine that somebody, 2,500 years ago, had the
chutzpah to attempt to condense infinity into a finite set of rules.
This idea could have only arisen in ancient India, with its familiarity
with the mathematical notion of infinity.
This idea, that Panini
codified, was independently re-discovered in the 1950s by IBM engineers,
as they tried to figure out a way to communicate with computers. What
they needed was to find a way to instruct computers in totally
unambiguous fashion. So Backus and Naur came up with context-free
grammars (there was some work by Noam Chomsky at MIT in this area), and
lo and behold, they were astonished to find out Panini had anticipated
them by two and a half millennia!
The human-programmable computer
languages that exist today, say C++ or Java or Ruby, can be described
precisely in a few hundred rules. This precision allows these languages
(and Paninian Sanskrit) to be lexically analyzed by a parser, which can
then create a semantic tree structure that encodes the underlying
'meaning' of the statement (or program). That semantic tree than then be
translated precisely into machine code (binary, ie 0 and 1, or
hexadecimal, ie 16 characters, 0123456789ABCDEF) which will then run on
the machine.The above is what compilers do – the programs that translate
human-readable languages into the incomprehensible machine code (or
slightly less obscure Assembly Language) that machines can understand. I
worked on compiler construction for several years, and they are among
the most sophisticated software in regular use.
So what exactly
does "context-free" mean? It means that the meaning doesn’t depend on
contextual knowledge or common sense. Obviously human languages are
context-sensitive: you just have to know certain things as a user of the
language or else you will be confused. Here is an example of two
sentences in English:
1. Fruit flies like an apple
2. Time flies like an arrow
The
two sentences are lexically identical, but to the human reader, based
on contextual knowledge, they are vastly different. But to a computer,
which has no context, they are identical. If the computer is fed the
first and told that fruit flies are a kind of fly and that apples are
fruits, it will create certain semantic model. Then, when given the
second sentence, it will conclude that 'time flies' are a kind of fly
and that arrows are fruits!
It is essentially impossible to write
such ambiguous sentences in Paninian Sanskrit. That is one of the
reasons why word order doesn't matter in Paninian Sanskrit, as it does
in English (imagine "Rama killed Ravana" and "Ravana killed Rama" as
examples).
That someone millennia ago was able to conceptualize,
and even more astonishingly, create a Grand Unified Theory of Language
is simply stunning. Let us note that even a widely acknowledged genius
like Albert Einsten failed to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of
Physics, even though he tried hard. Arguably, Panini’s successful effort
then was the greatest accomplishment of a single mind in all of
recorded history: creating something so advanced that it took 2500 years
to figure out how to use it!
There is another reason for the
perfection of Sanskrit, and that is the logical nature of Devanagari.
There is no other alphabet that so scientifically orders different sound
families horizontally, and the associated types (dental, retroflex
etc.) horizontally. Just consider the Roman script – it has a randomly
assembled set of sounds, in no particular order, in stark contrast to
the rigorous order of Devanagari.
Many of us have studied another
rigorously ordered scientific table that has horizontal families and
vertical variants or types: that is the Periodic Table of Elements of
Mendeleev, which was also so advanced that he was able to group the
elements and suggest that there were gaps where new elements, yet to be
discovered, belonged. The resemblance is no coincidence: Mendeelev was
strongly influenced by Devanagari, and he acknowledged as much in his
terminology.
Where there were gaps, he would call the missing,
to-be-discovered elements eka-boron, or dvi-silicon or tria-carbon,
consciously using the Sanskrit words for one, two, three etc. Later,
these anticipated elements were indeed discovered and given new names.
So here’s an example of what Rajiv Malhotra might call "digestion" of
Indic ideas into western memes, although, to be fair, there is indirect
credit.
From several points of view, thus, Sanskrit is not only
the one candidate that deserves to be the national language – much as
Israelis resurrected the once-moribund Hebrew – but it is by many
measures the most perfect language ever invented: truly samskrt or
civilized. There should be no reason to fuss even if it is imposed; much
less when it is merely being put back into the syllabus where it used
to be.
