When a US historian Will Durant said, “India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages; she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.”, we just lapped it up and a sense of superiority gushed through our blood vessels down from neurons to toes. If the same statement had been delivered by even one of Shamkaracharya-s, it would have been lampooned and brushed aside contemptuously. That is probably the most eloquent manifest of our slavish mind-set on a mass scale wherein a 35 crore strong Hindu community flatly rejected to recognise their own mother-tongue that had been in practice for thousands of years. The ‘Brown-Sahib’ phenomenon involving English language elitism successfully obnubilated mass perception so terribly that we could not recognise our own mother-tongue !! We must confess shamelessly, “‘Lord’ TB McCaulay executed most powerful ‘education reform’ in our country for his own country ever known in recorded world history to deny us opportunities to study and own our own glorious past.” By the way, Aryana-Invasion Theory was targeted to convince us, this nation is not ours at all !! Mercifully, there they failed.
When Law Minister Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar proposed an amendment declaring Samskrita as official language of the Union, he was supported by Dr. BV Keskar, Dy. Minister of External Affairs and Naziruddin Ahmad, member of the Constituent Assembly. Out of thirteen other signatories supporting the amendment, eleven were from southern Bharata and out of those eleven, nine were from Madras state alone !! The historic feat was miserably averted as the only obstacle was Nehru himself.
Almost all Universities had Samskrita Departments during Nehruvian era, hundreds graduated in Samskrita from these institutions yet not one of them was an original thinker or critique of Samskrita texts. They used to be encouraged to go abroad for higher studies in Samskrita for some mystical reasons best known to the last Mughal Jawaharlal Nehru alone. Innumerable original manuscripts and texts plundered by British-intruders were available abroad in libraries while Nehru did precious little to recover our lost national treasure, an asset of tremendous prestige and may be, some sense of superiority too. Nehrus pathological contempt for anything Hindu was well established and well known to all. Even six decades after his demise in 1964, we are still struggling with proceeds and consequences of his despising Samskrita in the form of venomous anti-Samskrita pseudo-intellectuals like Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock, Devdutt Patnaik etc. uninterruptedly spewing venomous literature berating Samskritic traditions. Some of them have been financed by businessmen too opening more avenues for mis-interpretation and maligning of the ancient language now recognised by NASA as best suited for studying Artificial Intelligence and advanced software.
If the last Mughal Nehru had really been a visionary, he would have adopted Samskrita as national language as Constituent Assembly supported the move, ordered its teaching in all schools along with English across the nation, then contours of the nation would have been very different today. Samskrita had been the language of Karmakanda, Darshana, Mathematics, Astronomy, Science, Law, Sahitya etc. for thousands of years. Samskrita words and phrases pervade all dialects and languages and no region or community can lay claim over it. It would have been comfortably established all over the nation and all language disputes would have been buried deep in the ‘holy’ ground of Shantivana !! The historic opportunity was completely destroyed by him unfortunately for the nation to pay a heavy price for decades to come and the sole reason was Nehrus contempt for Samskrita.
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