Mumbai: This story of Maharashtra’s quest to get a classical language tag for the state’s official language Marathi, which began over ten years ago, has seen four governments, a unanimous resolution in the Maharashtra assembly, and multiple questions from MPs across parties in the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha. The politically sensitive issue had been the agenda of all major political parties in the state.
On Thursday, the Narendra Modi-led government accorded the classical language status to Marathi along with four other languages—Pali, Prakrit, Assamese, and Bengali.
An expert working with the Maharashtra government on the proposal said, “There were multiple challenges but this took long mainly because the Union government was not as convinced about Marathi as Pali and Prakrit. There were arguments that Marathi is a language influenced by Prakrit. The state government, however, argued that Marathi fits all the stated criteria of the Union government for a classical language status.”
The decision comes more than ten years after the Maharashtra government sent a proposal requesting the Union government to grant the classical language status to Marathi.
Assembly polls are expected to be held in Maharashtra next month and the ruling Mahayuti—comprised of the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)—is still smarting from its poor performance in the Lok Sabha election earlier this year.
The Shinde-led state cabinet passed a resolution Friday to thank PM Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Union Minister of Culture and Tourism. It also decided to observe 3 October, the day the Union Cabinet decided to accord Marathi a classical language status, as ‘Marathi Abhijaat Bhasha Divas’ (Marathi classical language day).
In a video statement released Friday, Fadnavis said, “The Maharashtra government, when I was CM as well as now under the leadership of Eknath Shinde, constantly followed up on the proposal, procured evidence. Today, all of this evidence has been accepted. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to PM Modi ji on behalf of Maharashtra’s 12 crore people and on behalf of all those who speak the Marathi language across the world.”
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A rush to take credit
Tamil was the first language that was accorded classical language status after the Union government created the category in October 2004, followed by Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Odia, among others, over the years.
The categorisation helps boost academics and research in the language and puts greater emphasis on preserving, documenting, and digitising ancient texts in the language.
In Maharashtra, the Congress has claimed credit for the Marathi’s inclusion under the category with the proposal first having originated under former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan.
In a post on social media platform X, Thursday, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh listed out the instances in the past year when the party had followed up on the proposal with the Modi government.
“On 3 October, just weeks before his certain defeat in the upcoming Maharashtra Assembly elections, the non-biological PM finally woke up from his long slumber. Why did it take so long non-biological Prime Minister?” he asked.
नॉन-बायोलॉजिकल प्रधानमंत्री की सरकार ने आख़िरकार मराठी को शास्त्रीय भाषा का दर्ज़ा दे दिया है। आप क्रोनोलॉजी समझिए:
5 मई, 2024 को, हमने नॉन-बायोलॉजिकल प्रधानमंत्री को वर्ष 2014 के जुलाई में तत्कालीन मुख्यमंत्री पृथ्वीराज चव्हाण (@prithvrj द्वारा केंद्र सरकार को सौंपी गई पठारे…
— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) October 3, 2024
In another post on X, Sanjay Raut, Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) Rajya Sabha MP, attributed the Centre’s decision to Mahayuti’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha polls and highlighted his party’s role in pursuing this issue with the Centre.
The proposal and the challenges
In January 2012, the Prithviraj Chavan-led government and the undivided Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) first set up a 15-member committee under contemporary Marathi writer Rangnath Pathare to create a comprehensive proposal arguing for the classical language status to be accorded to Marathi language. The committee submitted its report to the Centre in Marathi in July 2013 and in English in November 2013.
In 2014, the Modi government came to power.
Since then multiple MPs from Maharashtra have raised the question of granting a classical language status to Marathi in both houses of the Parliament.
For instance, Shivaji Adhalrao Patil, then a Lok Sabha MP from the undivided Shiv Sena, had raised the issue during the zero hour in the Lok Sabha in December 2014. According to Lok Sabha records, while making a case for Marathi to be declared as a classical language, Patil said Marathi, which was spoken in 72 countries and by 11.5 crore people, was the tenth most spoken among 20,000 languages in the world in terms of the number of people who speak the language.
“In my constituency, at Naneghat, there is a stone carving, which is 2,200 years old, and in this carving, a Marathi word ‘Maharathinno’ is written. Even during the Satvahan era Prakrit Maharashtri language existed and it was very prominent,” he said.
Around the same time, other MPs of the undivided Shiv Sena, including Rahul Shewale and Arvind Sawant, also separately raised the issue in the Lok Sabha.
While he was still CM, Chavan too followed up with the Modi government, writing a letter to the then Union Minister of State for Culture Sripad Naik in July 2014. In the letter, a copy of which ThePrint has seen, Chavan spoke about the four tests that the Union government applies to accord classical language status—antiquity of the language over a period of 1,500 years, preciousness and persistence, originality in linguistic and literary tradition, and the bond between the classical language and its later forms.
In the letter, he said, “The report of the committee (headed by Rangnath Pathare) is based on elaborate and intensive historical research of old references, ancient books, copper plates, inscriptions etc. The committee has recorded the classical status of Marathi language as axiomatic and intrinsic, based on sound proofs and evidences.”
However, in its responses to the MPs and the state government, the Union government said a clutch of writ petitions filed by advocate R. Gandhi in the Madras High Court in 2008 and 2015 were a major obstacle in considering the proposal and it had decided to wait for the outcome of the cases.
Gandhi’s contention in the court was that only Tamil and Sanskrit fulfilled the Centre’s tests to qualify as classical languages. He said the Union government’s declaration of other languages, such as Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, and Odia, as classical languages was illegal and diluted the status of Tamil as a classical language.
While dismissing the petitions in 2016, the court quoted American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes—“Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.”
Push by successive governments
After 2016, the Union government blamed Gandhi’s petitions for the delay while providing assurances that the matter was back under the government’s active consideration.
For instance, to then Rajya Sabha MP Narayan Rane’s question in 2019, Prahlad Singh Patel, the then minister of state for culture and tourism, said the proposal had been placed before the committee of linguistic experts for consideration, but the government had decided to hold it in light of Gandhi’s petitions. But since dismissal of the petitions, it was “back in consideration in consultation with other ministries and the committee of linguistic experts through Sahitya Akademi”.
He talked about how two vacancies on the committee of linguistic experts had been filled recently and, so, the committee would meet soon to discuss the proposal.
In February 2020, when the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government was in power, the Maharashtra Assembly unanimously passed a resolution to push the proposal made to the Centre to accord Marathi with the classical language tag.
Two years later, Subhash Desai, an MVA minister who held the Marathi language portfolio, and a senior leader of the Shiv Sena (UBT), met the former minister for culture and tourism G Kishan Reddy over the issue.
After the meeting, Desai told reporters that the Sahitya Akademi’s linguistic experts committee had, after examining Maharashtra’s proposal, found it appropriate to grant classical language status to Marathi and that Reddy was in support too.
However, this did not translate into a formal government decision.
In June 2022, after Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the BJP government came to power, the state continued to pursue the issue with the Centre and formed another committee for it under a retired IAS officer in February 2024.
Sanjay Nahar, founder of Pune-based NGO Sarhad, who was a member of the new committee told ThePrint that since the compilation of the Pathare committee report, more research had been done on the subject.
“But, we soon realised that this was an issue that needed more of a political push than convincing on merits. So, we got in touch with politicians across parties right from Vinod Tawde to Jairam Ramesh to Rajni Patil and asked them to take up the matter with the Union government,” Nahar said, adding he used to often joke with CM Shinde that what the proposal now required was not more experts, but politicians picking up the phone daily and asking where the file has reached.
“The decision has come close to elections, but there is really no one party or politician that can take credit for it. Right from Sharad Pawar to Raj Thackeray, every politician and party has done its bit,” he added.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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