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afair with a limited and selected vocabulary, divested of all optional and out-of-the-way paradigms, possessing a simplified syntax and a definite teadcncy towards participial construction, thereby eliminating the use of too many verbs. It was, in other words and on the analogy of the modern Basic English, a "Basic" Sanskrit specially designed to facilitate intercomunication and 80 ayoding all parade of learning as such. And there were specially prepared conpersational grammars in existence-like the GirvanapadamanJari of Dhundsrāja-which made the acquisition of average facility in the 1986 of the language not a very difficult job for men and women of average intelligeoce. The beginnings of this attempt to provide India with an adequate inter-provincial means of communication belong to an age much tarlier than that of the advent of the Urdu and the English , and our language possessed this great advantage over the Latin in Mediaeval Europe that there was no disharmony between the religious and mythological background of the proposed Lingia Franca and of the contemporary Vernaculars of the land, as there was between Latin and the growing Vernaculars of Christian Europe. The need of special State patronage for the proper development of such a "Sarvabhāsā " was realised and fully acted upon, of which the Dakshina Fund of the Peshwas 18 only one of the latest and most widely known example. History, unfortunately, stepped in and intercepted the further progress of the experiment and the consequent attainment by Sanskrit of its legitimate position as a common All-India language.
There were of course two inevitable dangers against which the experimeat had to be carefully guarded. The first of these is the natural vanity of the learners wbich, unless severely and systematically checked, delights in parading one's scanty and newly acquired learning thereby defeating the very life purpose of a "Sarvabhasā"'3 The second and the more real danger lay in the imposing and inculcating, along with the Lingua Franca, of certain socia-religious standards once formulated and preached by the original literature of that language, which, however, might not be exactly suited to the standards and requirements of the current times When, for instance, the Christian Schoolmen of Mediaeval Europe, in their Latin perorations, occasionally brought in the Classical Digidities, that was understood as merely a stylistic flourish intending no harm to the established dogma. But if, with the introduction of Sanskrit as India's Lingua Franca, there were to follow an atteropt to reintroduce, without an antecedent rigorous examination of their suitability to the changed conditions of
2 See P K Gode's paper ja the Tanjore S M Library Journal for 1946-47
3 This can happen and has happened in the case of the too much Sanskritised Hindi, just as much as in the case of the too much Persianised Hindustani.
