While thinking about the People's Linguistic Survey of India, it suddenly struck me that the W Indian Constitution opens with the words, "We the people of India is the context of the debate about the supremacy of the Parliament and the Supreme Court, we have forgotten de people of India. Although people have the supremacy, they are not contestants of Parliament or the Supreme Court. Similarly, PL.SI is neither a contestant of Grierson's survey of the survey conducted by De Registrar General of India. It is an independent, autonomous, people oriented and people motivated kurry, trying to capture the perception of the people about the languages they speak. The FLSI aims at motoring the self-confidence of the people that their languages are good for education, administration and mass communication. They are good for development and for intimate communication. Once their self-confidence is restored, they will know that the mother tongue is the best foundation for learning more languages and subjects. Mother tongue helps in sharing as well as caring Indian intellectuals have contributed a word, mainstreaming', to the English dictionary Mamstreaming is excluding, marginalising and demolishing smaller languages and cultures. It is another name for genocide. The tribals in particular, who are displaced from their habitat in the forests and mountains, are wrenched from their languages and cultures are forced to adopt the dominant regional language as their mother tongue. Hindi is considered the mainstream for many Indian Languages and English is the mainstream for all Indian languages including Hindi. All binaries such as primitive-civilised, simple-advanced, low-high, concrete-abstract, pre-logical-analytical, utterance- text, are manipulated to defend dominance and subjugation. They are "socialisation into mainstream ways of using language in speech and print, mainstream ways of making meaning, of making sense of experience. From the mainstream point of view orality is an evil which needs determined eradication. Indian society is a relation based society, clearly different from the binary and contract based society of the West. This is what explains the extended family, the extended society and the language and culture area.
In the other volumes of the PLSI series, the introduction to the volume is contributed by I editor In the case of this volume, however, we had to make the volume an exception due to the untimely demise of the volume editor, Professor Avadhesh K Singh. Though trained in English Literature, Professor Singh had acquired extensive in-depth knowledge of literature in Hindi and other Indian languages as well, and had intellectually equipped himself well enough to comment on literary theory in Sanskrit radition. My familiarity with these highly specialised areas of learning is based entirely on self-study. 1 cannot claim to be an expert. However, as a friendly obligation toward Professor Singh and as the Chief Editor of the PLSI series, I humbly offer the following.
The case of Sanskrit cannot be equated with the case of indigenous languages or minor languages. Sanskrit is spoken in India by a very small number 24,800 as per the 2011 Census yet its importance cannot be emphasised enough. It is one of the twenty-two languages included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Besides, along with Tamil, it is one of the ancient languages of India. The government of India celebrates Sanskrit Day every year, in 2020, it was celebrated on 3 August. On this occasion, I was interviewed by Anant Goenka, Executive Director, and Adrija Roychowdhury, senior sub-editor, Indian Express. The following text is extracted from the transcript of the interview, and provides the context that Professor Singh's introduction to this volume would have provided, to the origin, influences and relevance of Sanskrit:
HISTORICAL AND LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF SANSKRIT
It is one of the languages which have great longevity, along with Latin and Greek which emerged in history more or less around the same time, and survived for about the same length of time. Like Latin and Greek, Sanskrit was an empire-building language but there are other languages with the same kind of ingenuity for instance, Tamil, which has been around since about six centuries before Christ till our time. Sanskrit managed to survive because of its linguistic flexibility and empire-building tendencies. It has the remarkable ability to generate compound words and form new words. After India's independence, when the question of translation of the Constitution from English to Hindi came up in the Constituent Assembly, K. M. Munshi suggested that we take recourse to Sanskrit because, as he implied, Sanskrit allows us to mine for new word-formations.
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