One of the worst, and the least commented upon, impact of the growing influence of the sangh parivar is its association with Sanskrit. The scriptures to which the parivar alludes to are all written in Sanskrit. Sanskrit was the lingua franca of the pre-Muslim golden age that they invoke and aspire to. Even though very few members of the parivar are actually learned in Sanskrit, the ideology of Hindutva has an immediate association with the language. The idealogues of the parivar have cleverly played on this association for their own political convenience. This has hampered the evaluation of Sanskrit as a language. All too often it is written off as a dead language that is not amenable to modern knowledge-systems. Under the circumstances, it is heartening to learn that the Left Front government has decided to take steps to revive the learning of Sanskrit and to promote it. It proposes to do this by upgrading the few hundred tols that exist in West Bengal. For centuries, the tols have been the traditional seats of Sanskrit learning. The government plans to reform the tol curriculum so that students there do not get isolated from mainstream education.

While the plan to modernize the tol syllabus is laudable, it needs to be emphasized that traditional Sanskrit learning, from at least the 17th century, had in it distinct modernist elements. The Sanskrit-based knowledge system had its own structure of logic and ratiocination which was sophisticated and in no way inferior to the epistemology developed by Western philosophers from Rene Descartes onwards. There could be nothing more simplistic than to see Sanskrit as a vehicle of pre-/anti-modernist learning. For the left, the encouragement of Sanskrit will also have an inevitable, if unintended, result. The development of Sanskrit will automatically nurture Bengali since Bengali and its enrichment are dependent on Sanskrit, which is the mother language. Politically, the left?s support of Sanskrit will break the monopoly that the sangh parivar tries to impose on Sanskrit and the rich corpus of learning and culture that goes with the classical language. From a very purist viewpoint, the knowledge of a classical language is as essential a component of learning and education as the knowledge of mathematics and a modern language. The encouragement to be provided to Sanskrit might be the first step towards such an education system.