English, Sanskrit, and Nationalism in India

India's new, Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, took his oath of office in Sanskrit last week. This might strike outsiders as a little odd, since Sanskrit is the Latin of classical Indian culture, a language that nobody but scholarly priests has spoken in more than a thousand years. But this choice points to the trouble that language presents for India. India has dozens of native languages. Across the center of the country many people speak one of a small group of related languages descended from Sanskrit -- Hindi, Gujarati, Bihari, Bengali. When India became independent there was a move among nationalists to discard English and rely entirely on Indian languages, or perhaps to make Hindi the national tongue; after all, anyone who speaks any of the Sanskrit-descended tongues can learn Hindi without too much trouble. But the languages of India's south are not descended from Sanskrit and are radically different in structure and vocabulary, and Hindi is not widely studied there. In the south many more people speak English than any language of the north. Southerners therefore insisted that English remain an official tongue. (The same is true for some Himalayan areas, where the languages are related to Tibetan.) Most educated Indians are bilingual in English and the languages of their home regions; some also speak one or more other Indian languages, but since there are so many languages people from different parts of India commonly converse in English. Nationalists like Modi hate this.

So of course the new PM wanted to take his oath of office in a native Indian language; but which one? There is none that more than a third or so of Indians can understand. Plus, even modern Hindi and Gujarati are dissatisfying to some Hindu purists, since they have absorbed numerous words from the languages of Persian and British invaders. Hence the fascination with Sanskrit, which is not only the language of Hinduism's oldest religious texts but, nationalists think, a purely Indian creation, and one that is studied wherever there are Hindus. Some Hindu nationalists would like to do what Israelis did with Hebrew and bring back Sanskrit as a spoken tongue; I have read about people raising their children in Sanskrit-speaking households. Thus the oath of office in Sanskrit, a statement of Hindu faith, Indian nationalism, anti-westernism, anti-Islam, and, perhaps, the hope that one day India might have a common language other than English.