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Updated: June 10, 2025
Such subjects were congenial to the later Jain writers and they not only cultivated both Sanskrit and Prakrit but also had a vivifying effect on the vernaculars of southern India.
Everybody has seen how important it is, not merely as resisting the general delusion of contemporary scholars that the vernaculars were things unsafe, "like to play the bankrupt with books," but as protesting by anticipation against the continuance of this error which affected Bacon and Hobbes, and was not entirely without hold even on such a magician in English as Browne.
If during the last fifty years we had been educated through the vernaculars, our elders and our servants and our neighbours would have partaken of our knowledge; the discoveries of a Bose or a Ray would have been household treasures as are the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. As it is, so far as the masses are concerned, those great discoveries might as well have been made by foreigners.
So, gradually, without our intending to establish it, a family vernacular has grown up in the paper which our people understand, but which like all other family vernaculars is Greek to those outside the circle. Thus we say: "Bill Parker is making his eighth biennial distribution of cigars to-day for a boy." City papers would print it: "Born to Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Parker, a baby boy."
To review all the leading writers who employed the various vernaculars in the sixteenth century would encroach too much upon the province of professed histories of comparative literature, but a few references to certain figures that tower head and shoulders above all others in their respective countries may serve to call vividly to mind the importance of the period for national literatures.
Whilst His Excellency is unable to offer a solution, he is keenly alive to the necessity of imparting instruction in our schools through the vernaculars.
Had not the British themselves removed one of the greatest barriers to India's national unity the multiplicity of her vernaculars by giving English to the Western-educated classes as a common language, without which, indeed, Indian Nationalism could never have found expression, and such an assembly of Indians from all parts of India to discuss their common aspirations as the Indian National Congress itself would have been an impossibility?
Most of those English who served their term in India contented themselves, when they troubled themselves at all about the matter, with learning as much of the native vernaculars with which they were brought into contact as was necessary for the carrying on of a conversation and the giving of an order. With such a measure of knowledge Warren Hastings was not content.
The Bible in his own vernacular lies open, inviting every native of India to-day; and in many vernaculars the translation has been revised more than once. This stands as a notable triumph of Protestantism during these two centuries in India. The writer has a copy of one of the earliest Tamil books prepared by these pioneers of our faith.
If we have lost faith in our vernaculars, it is a sign of want of faith in ourselves; it is the surest sign of decay. And no scheme of self-government, however benevolently or generously it may be bestowed upon us, will ever make us a self-governing nation, if we have no respect for the languages our mothers speak. Mehta's "Self-Government Series".
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