Sainath

1/5. Never mind the entries thrown up on google search, please stop calling Indian languages ‘vernacular.’ There’s a colonial context to the use of the word in the British Raj – from the older Latin origin: tongues of the home-born slave.
#britishraj #language #psainath

2/5. The colonial context of ‘vernacular’ came from Thomas Babbington Macaulay who despised all things Indian. He called for creating ‘a class of persons Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’
#britishraj #language #psainath

3/5. Macaulay who could read Virgil in the original Latin, used the term in a particular old Latin sense, derived from vernaculus and verna (slave born in master’s house). To be found only in older English dictionaries.
#britishraj #language #psainath

4/5. Lord Macaulay – in his February 2, 1835 Minute on English Education – famously declared that  ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’
#britishraj #language #psainath

5/5. Could we please NOT refer to our hundreds of beautiful languages as ‘vernacular’ and simply call them Indian languages where we refer to them as a group – or simply by their names Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Punjabi or any others?
#britishraj #language #psainath