I sometimes wonder what language we Indians will be speaking fifty years from now. One possibility is that the status quo will continuea small elite will be comfortable in English while the masses converse in the vernaculars. A second prospect is that almost half the population might speak English to varying degrees of comfort. A third option is that there will be a linguistic renaissance of the vernaculars and we might have a bilingual middle class. A fourth possibility is the sangh parivar's dream of a Hindi rashtra.

If I were a gambler I would bet on the second scenario. For every Indian mother knows that English is the passport to her child's futureto a job, to entry into the middle classand this is why English schools are mushrooming in city slums and villages across the country, and English has quietly become an Indian language fifty years after the British left our shores. David Dalby, who measures these things in Linguasphere, predicts that by 2010 India will have the largest number of English speakers in the world.

This may well be what will happen, but is this what we would want to happen? If there were a poll, I suspect most of us would vote for option three for none of us relishes the idea of forgetting our vernacular literary cultures and traditions. I have recently read a wonderful essay, 'Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History' by Sheldon Pollock, a professor of Sanskrit at the University of Chicago, and he sheds new light on the debate. He writes that the vernacularisation of the Sanskrit world began in the 9^th century as Kannada and Telugu became the languages of literary and political expression in the courts of the Rashtrakutas and Chalukyas. About the same time or soon after, Sinhala (9^th c.), Javanese (10^th), Marathi (13^th), Thai (14^th), Oriya (15^th) began to produce literatures. Tamil, our oldest literary vernacular, also began to express courtly ideas under the imperial Cholas in the 11^th c., and Hindi was similarly fashioned by Sufi poets in principalities like Orcha and Gwalior (15^th c).

Pollock teaches us that our vernaculars were 'created' and are not primordial, as many vernacular nationalists would like to think. Also, the bearers of these languages were the elite and not the people, as Gramschi and Bakhtin had made us believe. Neither is the spread of our vernaculars related to the popularity of bhakti as many historians have told us; finally, we were always relaxed about our languages and the consciousness of a 'mother tongue' did not even appear until the Europeans arrived. Interestingly, in Europe, vernacularization of Latin happened at the same time, but there it led to the nation-state.

Prior to our vernacular millennium, for a thousand years or more our literary world was cosmopolitan as Sanskrit held sway over South Asia, and as Latin did in Europe. Pollock says, 'there was nothing unusual about finding a Chinese traveller studying Sanskrit grammar in Sumatra in the 7^th century, an intellectual from Sri Lanka writing Sanskrit literary theory in the northern Deccan in the tenth, or Khymer princes composing Sanskrit poetry for the magnificent pillars of Mebon and Pre Rup in Ankor in the twelfth.' Again, unlike Europe where Latin was the language of power and the Roman state, the Sanskrit cosmopolis was dharmic and voluntaristic--the Shakas and Kushanas, for example, as they migrated into India adopted Sanskrit and its culture.

This brief history lesson makes one realise that the sangh parivar's project of linking power with language is so un-Indian. Language for us has always been a vehicle of aesthetic distinction and not of power. While I regret the loss of tradition, I also think that languages and cultures are evolving things and we ought not to do too much social engineering. Hence, vernacular nationalism is also unhealthy. Let's think of the global ascent of English as another cosmopolitan phase in our history, and perhaps not worry too much about the language we will speak fifty years hence.