Economic and Political Weekly December 31, 2005 5537 BHUPENDRA YADAV T he meeting in June of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) won kudos because it did not defer business yet again. The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) was passed. The CABE assembly will also be remem- bered because the education ministers of BJP-ruled states (viz, Rajasthan, MP, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand) boycotted the meeting. When the NDA was in power (1998-2004), the education ministers of Congress and Left-ruled states were known to boycott CABE meetings over what was called “saffronisation of education”. Were the education ministers of BJP-ruled states only reciprocating an unkind gesture? Or were they repeating a regrettable political practice that the role of the opposition is to stall consensus by inventing errors in policy? The education ministers of BJP-ruled states said they had boycotted the CABE meeting because the NCF did not “appre- ciate India’s heritage adequately and did not give due importance to Sanskrit and yoga”. (‘BJP Ministers Walk Out, See Left Hand in NCF’, Indian Express, New Delhi, September 7, 2005.) Yoga, as we know, is thriving not because of BJP but despite it. Latest converts to yoga are the obese in urban India who have developed great faith (or ‘aastha’ as one spiritual channel devoted to yoga calls itself) in the thera- peutic uses of this ancient system. Hence, this write-up is not about yoga but about the trials and tribulations of Sanskrit. If Sanskritists made Sanskrit an “abstruse” language by inventing a difficult grammar, the Hindutva brigade allowed it to be eclipsed by ditching it on crucial occasions. It is wrong to argue that Sanskrit has lost importance because the new NCF does not give it “its due”. The decline of Sanskrit had set in much earlier. The intricacies of Sanskrit language have made it difficult to comprehend of most Indian languages though the rich literature in Sanskrit is the fount of our cultural heritage. Hindu re- ligious ceremonies are impossible without the recitation of mantras in Sanskrit. Yet, Sanskrit is not our link language. It is, however, listed as one of our 18 “national languages” in the Constitution’s eighth schedule. Sanskrit acquired a grammar even before classical literature (like the works of Kalidasa) and epics (like Ramayana and Mahabharata) were written in Sanskrit. Ancient Sanskritists made Sanskrit obscure more than two thousand years ago. Consequently, Sanskrit failed to be the mother tongue of any significant section of society with less than 50,000 people owning it as their mother tongue in 1991. 1 Sanskrit has been turned into a “heritage site” – and like all such items, Sanskrit has everyone’s respect but no one’s support on crucial occasions, like when the lingua franca was decided in the constituent assembly of India in 1949. Let the story of Sanskrit begin from its roots in the very ancient past. Ancient and Medieval Times The Vedas were composed in some early form of Sanskrit. After they were col- lected, the language had to be codified. This codification of Sanskrit had six an- cillaries, viz, phonetics (“siksa”), grammar (“vyakarana”), vocabulary (“nighantu”), metre (“chandas”), astronomy (“jyotisa”) and ceremonial (“kalpa”). For some strange reason, grammar became the most impor- tant of these ancillaries and this had re- semblance to a modern computer programme [Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat 2000:23-24]. Ancient Indian grammar was supposed to have been formulated by three thinkers, viz, Panini, Katyayana and Patanjali. They lived within six hundred years of each other. The first phase is related with Panini and it can be called the “constructive” stage. The next phases were called “supplemental” and “reconstruc- tive”. Katyayana and Patanjali wrote com- mentaries and re-formulated Sanskrit gram- mar in these stages [Mahulkar 1998:13]. Panini lived around 2,500 years ago and there is very little information on his life in his own Ashtadhyayi or in the works of other Sanskritists, like Katyayana, Patanjali or Bhartrhari. Ashtadhayi de- scribes the speech of north-west India in nearly 3,995 “sutras” (rules) spread over eight “adhyayas” (chapters) each of which was further divided into four “padas” (quarter chapters) [Saroja Bhate 2002:11- 12]. The content of the eight chapters was the treatment of (i) technical terms and rules of interpretation; (ii) nouns in com- position and case relations; (iii) the adding of suffixes to roots; (iv) and (v) the adding of suffixes to nouns; (vi) and (vii) accent and changes of sound in word formation; and (viii) the word in the sentence [Satya Vrat 1978: 313]. The object of this book was instructing users in correct speech forms. Its outstanding characteristic was “brevity of expression and economy of statement” [Ananthanarayana 1998:26- 27]. In a comparative sense, Panini was not only a pioneer linguist who beat com- petitors by several centuries but he was a conscientious scholar who did a remark- ably thorough job. Treatises on Marathi and Kashmiri grammars, for instance, were made in the 19th century, almost 2,400 years after Panini. Yet, the one in Marathi by Venkata Madhava had 227 sutras (or just about 6 per cent of the number of sutras Panini wrote) whereas the one in Kashmiri by Isvara Kaula had 778 sutras (or just about 20 per cent of what Panini wrote) [Hartmut Scharfe 1977:199]. A highly developed, rigid grammar was a typical characteristic of Sanskrit from the earliest times. Grammar was of more than linguistic importance to Sanskritists. Schol- ars like Patanjali associated grammar with spirituality and this may have been the main reason for Sanskrit to acquire sacrality Decline of Sanskrit The blame for Sanskrit’s decline lies not in the manner the new curricula framework has been drafted, but in its very “complexity” that for long made it inaccessible to a majority of the population.