It is strange that Chandigarh Newsline has chosen to start a debate on an issue on which full facts are not yet available to the general public. Whatever has been reported in the press in the name of Hindutva concept of education is, at best, based upon the press note released after the high-level meeting of the state education ministers held in Delhi recently.

What is bizarre is that half-baked opinions are already being expressed on an issue, that too, by responsible intellectuals in the press on the desirability or otherwise of introducing Sanskrit without going into the merits or demerits of the original proposal stated in the document. Once the document becomes public, we certainly need to have a thorough debate on it. But at this stage, if anyone chooses to take either pro-Sanskrit or anti-Sanskrit position he will do it only to expose either his bias or ignorance about the matter. While grading knowledge, Plato had described `opinion' as the lowest, most vulgar form of knowledge which has its instinctive appeal only for those minds which have already given up pursuit of `truth' or `reality'.

One is at a loss of words when our `intellectuals' begin to trade in half-truths, without being able to see the issues as they intrinsically are. One can very well understand the compulsion of the media to generate public opinion without going into the debate on a particular issue but one cannot understand, and much less sympathise, with a thinking being who trots off an opinion without having looked into the minuteness of a problem. If such is the fate of our intellectuals, the less said about them the better.

While the desirability of introducing Sanskrit in the curriculum certainly should become a subject of a full-scale debate, my objection is to the way in which the whole issue is sought to be given a slant, and therefore, also prejudged, through an irresponsible use of the language in which it is couched. The reintroduction of Sanskrit is too serious an issue to be casually lumped together with housekeeping. Whatever our religious or political persuasions, we cannot deny that Sanskrit is one of the classical languages. It is not being suggested that a classical language be popularised with the same fervour as the modern languages are.

But is it not our duty to preserve this classical language and also the rich tradition it represents? Now in what form or manner it should be done is an altogether different question. Sanskrit is the only source of our ancient history. To neglect Sanskrit would be to neglect history. I have no hesitation in saying that it is ignorance of Sanskrit that is largely responsible for a series of contentious debates in history in which historians often fight pro-or anti-tradition battles. And one wonders how tradition has come to acquire a disreputable, pejorative meaning.

What is needed is not a blind rejection or acceptance of tradition but an enlightened questioning or reinterpretation of it. Unless we approach our past, examine it and try and understand what tradition could mean, all our efforts to define our position as the modern would, at best, be non-starters, totally unproductive. The news item also mentions how the introduction of some of the proposed ideas would amount to `dragging India back to the dark ages'. If going into one's own past, one's history is a retreat into the dark ages, then perhaps one needs to understand the whole mechanism of personal, social or national growth afresh. A nation that does not peep into its past remains, at best, a blindfolded nation.

Those who make the mistake of disowning or discrediting their own past only succeed in falsifying their present existence and the future possibilities. Be it Sanskrit or tradition or past, these shall continue to be points of reference for all our intellectual debates on language and culture, and to dismiss them off...hand is to amputate ourselves, to wailfully draw blinkers on our eyes, a refusal to see what we have a responsibility to see and cannot escape seeing, whichever way we may choose to think about the problem.

It is a strange irony of history that we lost contact with our own past about the same time as the Orientals began to discover its richness for themselves. Perhaps, it's the colonised mind in us that continues to treat everything Indian with contempt and derision, extolling the West for the values it never had. The question is certainly political and it is: do we want to perpetuate neo-colonialism or finally start the process of decolonisation? If I have to make a choice, I'm, unequivocally, for decolonisation.

The writer is a retired professor of Sanskrit, Punjab University, Chandigarh.