In a country of nearly 138 crores, under 25,000 people consider Sanskrit as their mother tongue. According to the data from the latest Census, less than 0.002 percent of the Indian population spoke the ancient language. The information came from the Union Home Ministry’s Registrar General and Census Commissioner's office in response to an RTI application from Agra-based Dr Devashish Bhattacharya, reported India Today. Bhattacharya, who is a surgeon and social activist, said that despite being one of the Scheduled languages in the Indian Constitution, the ancient script is not considered a minority language.
Despite the dismal-looking numbers, the number of Sanskrit speakers has been on an upward trend. According to data from the 2001 decennial Census, Sanskrit had 14,135 people who considered it their mother tongue. The number nearly doubled to 24,821 individuals by the 2011 Census. The number of people considering Sanskrit as their mother tongue is the second-highest today since 1881, the date of the first Census.
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India had seen the most number of people with Sanskrit as their mother tongue in 1991 when 49,736 called it their mother tongue. It was a marked jump from the 1981 Census which just counted 6,106 people who considered it their mother tongue.
The latest Census showed that the highest number of Sanskrit speakers were found in the states of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. While most states saw a marked increase in the number of native-Sanskrit speakers, Uttar Pradesh saw a dramatic 57 percent decline between 2001 to 2011.
While many have been advocating awarding Sanskrit greater importance in the country, the language had mostly been relegated as the second language as early as 500 CE as it was constructed specifically for religious practices. Prakrit, the vernacular sibling of Sanskrit, gave rise to most of the Indo-Aryan languages that exist today. Prakrit, and later Pali, were the commonly used languages across much of India.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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