Mamata Banerjee's purge of Sanskrit words makes her look ridiculous

I just read an amusing report stating that the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government has replaced certain "Hindu" words in school textbooks with more "syncretic" ones. Specifically, ramdhonu for rainbow has been replaced with rongdhonu and akash (ākāśa) for sky has been replaced with aasman.

Presumably, aasman is considered less Hindu since it is a common word for sky in Urdu. The Farsi root for this word is "asman" meaning “stone”, for the sky was viewed as a stone in the firmament.

But this is also one of the words for sky in Sanskrit where the word aśman means both stone and sky, exactly the same as in Farsi. This meaning is well recognised as in M Monier-William’s authoritative Sanskrit dictionary compiled more than a hundred years ago.

Mamata Banerjee has replaced one “Hindu” term “akash” with another, “aasman”. She would be horrified to know this.

I acknowledge that there is slight difference of emphasis in the words akash and aasman. The word akash from the root "kash" for light (as in Kashi, the City of Light) implies brightness, both literally and figuratively.

The sky is from where light and wisdom descend. Aasman as a stony firmament emphasises not the brightness or wisdom of the sky but rather just the physical appearance of it.

It reminds me of how at the end of the Kashmir War of 1947-1948, Pakistan decided to rename the Kishanganga river, which flows through the region of Kashmir under its control, to Neelum. The motivation was that Kishan in the name was associated with Krishna, the teacher of Arjuna, and therefore it was “Hindu”.

Had the Pakistanis been better informed they would have seen that Kishan in Kishanganga has nothing to do with Krishna and in fact means the “Black Ganga”.

This brings us to the other word that has been purged by Mamata's government: ramdhenu. The prefix “ram” in Bengali can also mean “big”; hence, ramchagol translates to a big-goat or a very stupid person.

The rainbow is indeed the big bow whereas rongdhenu only means coloured bow, which is not quite accurate for the rainbow as a coloured bow need not be large.

I think ramdhonu’s original meaning is big bow and not Ram’s bow since the Bengalis would have simply kept the common Sanskrit term for it, which is Indra-dhanuśa or Indra’s bow.

Somebody in the West Bengal government has acted like a ramchagol!

Also read: Mamata Banerjee's mind, it seems, is full of Tagore