Urdu,Hindi,and Sanskrit

[Arun Gupta]

Re: Stephen Hodge's comment :

 Imagine what the level of religious understanding and knoweldge would
 be in India now of all the religious and philosophical classics if the
 British, for example, had outlawed devanagari and other traditional
 scripts in  favour of total romanization !

The knowledge of the classics would be much higher, because a ban on
devanagari and traditional scripts would have triggered a revolt besides
which 1857 would have seemed tame, and the British would have been thrown out
of India in short order, and anglicization would be much less.  The British
were by policy very careful not to step on these kinds of toes.

Re : script -- Mahatma Gandhi was in favor of everyone learning the Urdu
script, learned it himself, and would have probably been in favor of Rohan
Oberoi's solution.  When Lord Mountbatten had Jinnah and Gandhi sign a
statement calling on people to refrain from violence, Gandhi signed in
Devanagari, Urdu and Roman.

-Arun Gupta