Some days after this press conference I was invited to an official lunch that Dr Manmohan Singh, then finance minister, was giving for some visiting dignitary. I managed a few moments alone with the minister and brought up the subject of making primary education compulsory. I pointed out that it was compulsory across South East Asia and literacy rates in those countries were now in the eighties and nineties. At Independence these countries were all as illiterate as India. Surely compulsory primary education was what made the difference? Before the minister could answer, an evil bureaucrat who lurked behind him said with absolute certainty and a smug sneer, ‘Don’t you know that India is a democracy? It cannot be compulsory here.’

Well, it is now. And, if the new HRD minister can handle the infinitely more complicated process of implementation, it is possible that India becomes fully literate by the middle of this century. This is good. But, when are we going to start aspiring to more than basic literacy? When are we going to understand how much India has lost in the past 60 years because of our contempt for education? And, our unforgivable contempt for our magnificent classical heritage.

Last week I read a report by my friend Sheldon Pollock, who teaches Sanskrit at Columbia University, and it made me weep. Listen to the report’s first paragraph. ‘As recently as 50 years ago, India could boast of a cadre of scholars in classical studies (defined here as research based on textual materials—literary, philosophical, religious, historical, etc. — produced prior to 1800) who were as skilled as any in the world. In the time since, this class has diminished to the point of extinction.’

The report predicts that in less than ten years, classical studies will have died in all Indian languages unless the HRD minister initiates a move to set up at least one Indian Institute of Classical Studies. The report makes the point that if we can invest in IITs and IIMs by the dozen, then we can surely fund one Institute of Classical Studies. This report was prepared for a Mumbai industrialist who is trying to set up such an institute with private funding. But, in the end, if government and universities do not make a concerted effort, nothing will change. There will be no Indian scholars of classical studies left in India. Those that there are will be in foreign universities.

Already, as I have mentioned before in this column, the best translations of classical Sanskrit texts are those that have been done by foreigners. I am at the moment reading Sheldon Pollock’s translation of the Ramayana and have no hesitation in admitting that I have not read a single Indian translation that comes anywhere close. Thanks to the American billionaire who funded the creation of the Clay Sanskrit Library, nearly a hundred classical Sanskrit texts are available in excellent English.

If Kapil Sibal wants his name written in letters of gold in the history of Indian education, he should just make the Clay Sanskrit Library’s books available in all our universities. Then, since higher education comes entirely under his Ministry, he needs to find out why our universities are not producing scholars of classical studies. Why do none of Delhi’s universities have a single professor of classical Hindi literature? Why was it impossible for the University of Chicago to find a single scholar of Telugu literature in ten years of trying? Why do Maharashtra’s universities not have a single serious scholar of classical Marathi?

The most important question of all is why has the HRD Ministry not invested in an Indian Institute of Classical Studies? The state of classical scholarship is so dismal that we need such institutes in every state if we are not to end up as a country that loses all sense of its past.