Education ministry clears five centres for Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Pali and Prakrit
A Department of Higher Education office memorandum dated 1 October assigns the centres to Tezpur University, Visva-Bharati, Deccan College in Pune, the Central University of Odisha at Sunabeda, and the Central University of Gujarat at Kundhela. The brief is research, digitisation and preservation.
New Delhi2 min read
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The Ministry of Education has approved five Centres of Excellence for classical languages, covering Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Pali and Prakrit, in an office memorandum issued by the Language Division of the Department of Higher Education on 1 October.
The centres are assigned to named institutions, not to a new national body. Classical Assamese goes to Tezpur University in Assam. Classical Bengali goes to Visva-Bharati in West Bengal. Classical Marathi goes to the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute in Pune. Classical Pali goes to the Central University of Odisha at Sunabeda. Classical Prakrit goes to the Central University of Gujarat at Kundhela, near Vadodara. The brief in the memorandum is academic research, digitisation, preservation and dissemination of the languages and the material tied to them.
The list is the second wave of classical-language status, not the first. Tamil, Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Odia were already on the classical list. Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Pali and Prakrit were added later, after state campaigns and expert reports. A centre of excellence is the institutional follow-up: a budget line, a host university, and a mandate to collect manuscripts rather than only to print the notification again.
Each host already has a reason to be the address. Deccan College in Pune has the longest continuous association with Marathi philology and with the study of Prakrit inscriptions among Indian research institutes, which is why the Marathi centre sits there rather than at a newer state university. Visva-Bharati, founded by Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan, is the obvious Bengali house even though the university is central. Tezpur has the Assamese faculty and the regional manuscript access. Sunabeda's central university is being given Pali, a language of the Buddhist canon with a living monastic readership in Odisha. Kundhela is being given Prakrit, the Middle Indo-Aryan language of Jain texts and of a large share of early inscriptions.
Digitisation is the part that changes what a student in another state can read. Palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in these languages sit in mutts, sattras, Jain bhandars and state archives. A centre with a scanner and a cataloguing grant can put a page online. A centre without one reprints a known grammar. The memorandum names preservation and dissemination together, which is the difference between a chair and an archive. The first year will show which of the five behaves like an archive.
Pali and Prakrit are the two without a large modern speech community. A centre for them is a centre for texts, not for a state language lobby. That makes Sunabeda and Kundhela the test of whether the scheme is about scholarship or about balancing a political map. Assamese, Bengali and Marathi already have state boards, newspapers and universities teaching them as modern languages. The classical tag adds a research duty those states asked for. Pali and Prakrit have the duty without the lobby.
The memorandum does not, in the public summary, publish the rupee allocation or the staffing. Universities will now have to open the posts and name the directors. Until those names appear, the 1 October note is a map: five languages, five campuses, and a job of scanning what the mutts and the bhandars still hold.
