Languages have no borders. They travel where armies cannot, survive empires that imagined themselves eternal and preserve memories long after kingdoms have dissolved into history. They carry the accumulated wisdom of civilisations, absorbing influences across nations, refusing to recognise the political boundaries that later generations draw on maps.

Yet, paradoxically, few things have become as fiercely contested in the modern world as language. What ought to be a bridge between peoples is repeatedly morphed into a wall separating them.

In South Asia, languages that once coexisted in a shared civilisational landscape now arrive burdened with political identities.

Sanskrit is often reduced to a Hindu language, Urdu to a Muslim one, Hindi to an emblem of nationalism, while English continues to bear the weight of colonial past. Languages that once wafted freely across kingdoms are now expected to carry passports.

It is this paradox that triggered a conversation with Shahid Rasheed, associate professor of sociology at Forman Christian College, Lahore, who has spearheaded the reintroduction of Sanskrit to a Pakistani university classroom for the first time since Partition.

The initiative has attracted attention because it appears, at first instance, to unsettle established notions of Pakistan’s very identity. But as our conversation for The Wire unfolded, it became clear that Sanskrit was merely the point of departure. The real subject was the relationship between language, civilisation and the modern nation-state.

For Rasheed, the question is larger than Pakistan and larger even than South Asia. It concerns the tendency of human societies to convert cultural inheritances into exclusive identities.

“Languages are vehicles for expressing human thoughts, emotions, and experience,” he said. “Classical languages such as Arabic, Persian, Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit have produced some of humanity’s richest literary and intellectual traditions. They are like great rivers or mountain ranges – part of the shared heritage of mankind.”

“The problem,” he scorned, “begins when languages are transformed into rigid social and political identities.”

That distinction between language as inheritance and language as identity runs through his entire argument.

Human beings, he said, possess an almost instinctive tendency to create identities. There is nothing unusual about loving one’s mother tongue or taking pride in one’s linguistic heritage. The difficulty begins when affection becomes exclusion.

“It is natural to love one’s own language,” he reflected, “but loving my language does not require me to dislike another. Appreciating the beauty of my homeland does not mean denying the beauty of other lands. Identity becomes problematic only when cultural symbols are excessively politicised and turned into instruments of exclusion.”

On dealing with criticism over a language

It is a deceptively simple proposition, yet one that challenges much of South Asia’s linguistic politics. Over the past century, languages have increasingly been recruited into projects of nation-building. They have become symbols of sovereignty, markers of communal belonging and, at times, tools of political mobilisation.

Rasheed’s intervention questions that very premise. Languages, he insists, belong first to civilisation and only incidentally to states.

This perspective explains why he rejects the assumption that Pakistan’s cultural history begins exclusively with Islam. Such an interpretation, he believes, not only impoverishes Pakistan’s understanding of itself but also misunderstands the universal character of religious and linguistic traditions.

“Islam is part of Pakistan’s heritage,” he acknowledged, “but it is also an important element in the history and culture of the entire South Asia.”

“Islam is a universal religious tradition that addresses the deepest questions of human existence and has enriched civilisations across the world, including Indian civilisation,” he argues. “It is modern........

© The Wire