WI: Sanskrit as India's official language

India has two offical languages, Hindi and English, and 22 regional languages, among them Hindu and Sankrit. Speaches in parliament are delivered either in English or in a regional language, federal courts use English, law requires administration to increase the use of Hindi, although the authoritative version of all laws is English. To conclude: a gigantic mess.

Granted, the Indian situation is a complicated one. Hindi is the prevelant language, but not spoken by the whole country. English is the lingua franca of India, but English is the language of the former colonial oppressor and of the little Anglo-British community.

So, with a POD of after 1900, what about reviving Sanskrit as language of India beside the individual regional languages? Each federal states would have its own language, but the language for the federal level and the relations between the states would be Sanskrit, a neutral language; neutral because it is spoken by no individual group.

And as a joke, you can try to make the Indians adopt Greek as their official language after 1947, just to remember the great days of the Indo-Greeks and Kushans...
 
It's like having the EU revive Latin as its official language.

Latin is more dead than Sanskrit however I could see a Latin revival being feasible if not advisable, had English not already been so ubiquitous or Esperanto
 
Sanskrit has something of a strong religious connection to it, which would be problematic, when dealing with the other non-Dharmic religions in India.
 
Latin is more dead than Sanskrit however I could see a Latin revival being feasible if not advisable, had English not already been so ubiquitous or Esperanto

Is it? It was used in Catholic masses until Vatican II.

And Israel reviving Hebrew.

...which every educated Jew already knew as a written liturgical language. My paternal grandfather's gymnasium used Hebrew as the language of instruction, in interwar Lithuania. They were Zionist, but still, it was Lithuania.
 
Sanskrit has something of a strong religious connection to it, which would be problematic, when dealing with the other non-Dharmic religions in India.

Agreed. It would be more feasible to use Urdu as an official language, with additional terminology from Sanskrit - which, albeit with a different orthography and some linguistic purism, is Hindi in a nutshell. There's a reason why linguists group both Hindi and Urdu together as a single pluricentric language, since both were derived from the same Khari-boli, a linguistic variety spoken in Delhi, particularly in its bazaars.

Having said that, I could probably see a way out for Sanskrit as a national language, but it would be in pre-1900, when the science of linguistics was still basically in its infancy and thus could be subject to nationalist prejudices. The basic idea would be to "secularize" the language by stripping it of religious connotations and thus holding it up as the Indian language par excellence, since every Indian language has some Sanskrit loanwords of some form. You wouldn't even need to displace Urdu - indeed, many of the Perso-Arabic loanwords in Hindi-Urdu are also found elsewhere in South Asia, and thus could be incorporated in a revived Sanskrit - and the Urdu alphabet has most of the elements needed for representing Sanskrit words. If one could interpret the major epics (I'm referring to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, particularly the former) in a secular context which could be applicable to all, that would be a big step - elements of the Mahabharata, in particular, could have some resonance to people of Abrahamic faiths, i.e. Muslims and Syriac Christians.
 
Sanskrit, if had been adopted as national language in the place of Hindi, would have been more successful. Hindi, is the language spoken by the largest group of people, though that group is a little more than one third of the total population. It is precisely the reason why the speakers of other major languages oppose its imposition. They fear that the dominance of Hindi will adversely affect them as Hindi speakers will have advantage over the speakers of other languages. Further languages like Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi etc. are more developed than Hindi.
But the Sanskrit need not cause such a fear of domination, as the number of native speakers of Sanskrit is negligible. Still Sanskrit is the mother of all North Indian languages and half the vocabulary of Southern languages except Tamil is borrowed from Sanskrit. Sanskrit is very rich in vocabulary and most suitable for technical purposes. The vast majority of India's ancient literature is written in Sanskrit. It was the lack of imagination and prejudice of the initial rulers of India that prevented them from considering Sanskrit for the national language.
 
Sanskrit, if had been adopted as national language in the place of Hindi, would have been more successful. Hindi, is the language spoken by the largest group of people, though that group is a little more than one third of the total population. It is precisely the reason why the speakers of other major languages oppose its imposition. They fear that the dominance of Hindi will adversely affect them as Hindi speakers will have advantage over the speakers of other languages. Further languages like Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi etc. are more developed than Hindi.
But the Sanskrit need not cause such a fear of domination, as the number of native speakers of Sanskrit is negligible. Still Sanskrit is the mother of all North Indian languages and half the vocabulary of Southern languages except Tamil is borrowed from Sanskrit. Sanskrit is very rich in vocabulary and most suitable for technical purposes. The vast majority of India's ancient literature is written in Sanskrit. It was the lack of imagination and prejudice of the initial rulers of India that prevented them from considering Sanskrit for the national language.

Sanskrit is much less practical than Hindi, since it is spoken with fluency even now by very few people. Successive Indian censuses have recorded the number of speakers as number in the low tens of thousands. What is the point of an official language that no one speaks?

Meanwhile, as noted by multiple news sources--here and here and here--the idea of Sanskrit is strongly opposed in many parts of India. In the northeast, and in the Dravidian-speaking states of the south, Sanskrit has little to no presence. Anti-Sanskrit sentiment is particularly strong among the Tamils, who are especially resistant to anything that they perceive might weaken their distinctive culture and religion.
 
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