Justice G.R. Swaminathan of the Madras High Court said recently that B.R. Ambedkar wanted to make Sanskrit the official language of the Indian Union. He is not the first person to say so. Some time ago, the former Chief Justice of India, Sharad Arvind Bobde, had expressed the same view. Predictably, the ecosystem of the current ruling establishment has latched on to these statements to further its appropriation of B.R. Ambedkar.
It is true that on September 10, 1949, B.R. Ambedkar submitted an amendment in the Constituent Assembly that proposed Sanskrit as ‘the official language on the Union’. There were 16 signatories who included, apart from B.R. Ambedkar himself, T.T. Krishnamachari, Dr. P. Subbarayan, G. Durgabai, and Dakshayani Velayudhan. All signatories were from non-Hindi speaking provinces.
Many newspapers of September 11, 1949 published news of this amendment. They also reported B.R. Ambedkar testily saying, “What is wrong with Sanskrit”, when questioned by the PTI the previous evening about his initiative. This remark suggests something to the amendment other than what Justices Bobde and Swaminathan are implying.
Finding some answers
The answers are to be found in two books, both of which are considered authoritative as far as describing the process of Constitution-making was concerned. The first is Granville Austin’s classic, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, which first appeared in 1966. And the second is B. Shiva Rao’s magisterial The Framing of India’s Constitution that was published in 1968. Every student of law has read these books. Both had unprecedented access to public and private archives: in Austin’s case to the collection of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, and in Rao’s case to the papers of his elder brother, B.N. Rau, who, as constitutional adviser, had prepared the working draft for the Drafting Committee to consider and take forward.
Rao writes that B.R. Ambedkar thought ‘Hindustani should be the language of the Union and of the units’. He goes on to say that Rau’s working draft had used the term ‘Hindustani’ but that the Drafting Committee had made an important change in keeping with the decision reached in the Congress Party’s deliberations and used, instead, the term ‘Hindi’. This was the only thing said on the issue of official language in the draft Constitution that was put up for debate in the Constituent Assembly.
Debate and compromise
The discussions in the Congress Party itself were highly acrimonious. On the one side were Hindi champions such as Purushottam Das Tandon, Govind Das and Raghu Vira. On the other side were members who were mostly from outside the Hindi heartland who resisted the imposition of Hindi. In this category fell not only Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and Azad but also Syama Prasad Mukherjee who argued that ‘unity in diversity is India’s keynote and must be achieved by a process of understanding and consent and for that a proper atmosphere has to be created’.
Shankarrao Deo spoke for many in the Constituent Assembly when he said, ‘I am an Indian but my language is Marathi. If having Hindi as the official language means one language for the whole country then I am against it.’ It was not just language but, more importantly, the issue of numerals that was to be contentious with the Hindi champions insisting on Devanagari numerals. Ultimately, a compromise formula was worked out within the Congress Party. This was called the Munshi-Ayyangar formula named after K.M. Munshi and N. Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, who had worked the most to bring about a consensus. Interestingly, listed as its sponsors in the Constituent Assembly when it was debated were not only Ayyangar and Munshi but also B.R. Ambedkar. This itself is enough to knock the wind out of the Bobde-Swaminathan view.
The formula provided that ‘the official language of the Union was to be Hindi with the Nagari script but that International numerals would be used. Notwithstanding this, English was to be used for Union affairs for fifteen years and Parliament could extend this period’. There were many other elements to the formula such as the enrichment of Hindi through expressions used in Hindustani and the expansion of its library drawing upon Sanskrit and 13 other living Indian languages.
Austin writes that the fact that amendments were submitted for Sanskrit as an official language by members knowing full well that it stood no chance of passage reflected the ‘disgust and dismay which many Assembly members by this time looked on the controversy’. It is extreme frustration and despair at the obduracy of the Hindi-only brigade that had driven B.R. Ambedkar and others to embrace the idea of Sanskrit as the official language. It was, in fact, put forward just two days before the debate on the language issue was to take place in the Constituent Assembly. As far as I have been able to unearth, Dr. Ambedkar did not even move the amendment when called upon to do so.
Jairam Ramesh, Member of Parliament (Congress), is a student of Indian political history
