A Panoramic View of the Language Narrative in India: Times Ancient, Colonial and Present

Abstract

Language of a nation or a community is highly instrumental in preserving its heritage and individuality through written and spoken discourses. India is a land of multitudes of not only religions, festivals, communities and ethnicities; it harbours hundreds of languages too. This has been described using many terms such as melting pot, salad bowl etc. But none of these can capture the essence of Indian multilingualism which is unique, with no parallel anywhere in the world. Over the past one thousand years, India as a nation has gone through a lot of linguistic overhauling. The language system in India has witnessed huge transformation owing to numerous invaders, rulers and travellers rummaging the nation inside out. Vedic period saw Sanskrit language flourishing and enriching the nation; the Mughal rulers brought Persian to the Indian subcontinent; the British infiltrated our system with their native language and wanted us to learn just enough English so as to facilitate them in the administration of the country. But in the current scenario, the reverberations of English being primarily a language of colonial rule have long vanished and it has now assumed the reputation of a viable lingua franca, a haven for those aspiring for visible growth in the social, financial as well as professional arena. English continues to be the associate official language of the country along with Hindi and forms a unifying strand sweeping across our multilingual population. In this paper I have tried to trace the linguistic history of India with special reference to Indias pre and post independence language policy and the current language situation. We have come a long way from Sanskrit to English. In one way it is good that we have adapted change and progressed but on the other hand, it can be only ruefully stated that our indigenous languages are rapidly denigrating and demand urgent attention.