State and Government in Ancient India c24.28

c24.28

State jealousies, however, can creep up owing to linguistic differences and conflicting economic interests. There were several languages in ancient India, but Sanskrit was cultivated as the official *lingua franca* even by the states of the south, whose regional languages were of Dravidian stock. Vijayanagara issued its official charters not in Canarese, but in Sanskrit. There is therefore nothing wrong in the effort to have a national language. We should however not forget that Sanskrit did not stand in the way of free development of the different vernaculars like Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, etc. The development of Hindi as a national language should not in the same way be an impediment to the full and free development of the regional languages.