Guwahati (The Stellar News): Welcoming a recent petition filed in the Supreme Court demanding to declare Sanskrit as the national language, an Assam based forum of nationalists today argues that the initiative would help promoting India’s national integration in a distinctive way. Patriotic People’s Front Assam (PPFA), in a statement, avowed that it would be a logical expectation to have Sanskrit as India’s national language.
Taking queue from the petition in the apex court by a former bureaucrat turned advocate KC Vanzara to direct the Union government in New Delhi to notify Sanskrit as the national language keeping Hindi as its official language, the forum cites the example of many European nations to have shown interests in nurturing the mother of all Indian languages and some even offering educational courses on the sacred Sanskrit literature.
“Only a few people in the country may know that Devabhasa was the official language in northeast India too since the days of majestic Kamrup kingdom till the Ahom era,” said a PPFA statement adding that various written documents from the days of great Ahom king Rudra Singha and other rulers in Assam undoubtedly proves the royal recognition to the sacred language that continue to exist for thousands of years.
Mentionable is that India-based senior French journalist and scholar Francois Gautier, recently participating at a video-conference chat with city scribes, argued that Sanskrit be revived as the Israelis had done with their Hebrew language, as it could revitalize the whole Indian culture and unify the country like never before. Israel in 1948 made its ancient language Hebrew, then considered as a dead entity for the last 2000 years, their official language.
He pointed out that Israeli people after getting a part of their holy land started welcoming Jews from different parts of the world. As they came back to live in Israel a major problem was aroused because they spoke different languages and hence the Israeli authorities asked their scholars to revive the Hebrew language. Gautier also urged New Delhi to engage a group of Sanskrit scholars and linguists to derive a modern and simplified Sanskrit that should be useful for everyone.
