As the world cel­e­brates In­ter­na­tional Mother Lan­guage Day, Sikhs world­wide take pride in their mother tongue Pun­jabi and vow to up­hold the lan­guage meet­ing chal­lenges in their home­land Pun­jab. It is time to take the British gov­ern­ment to task for its sys­tem­atic de­struc­tion of Pun­jabi nearly two cen­turies ago on the line of the First Na­tions suit against the fed­eral gov­ern­ment of Canada, says WSN ed­i­tor Jag­mo­han Singh.

While we are le­git­i­mately con­cerned about the non-use of Pun­jabi by the Pun­jabis them­selves, those trac­ing the fall of the lan­guage can­not ig­nore the ne­far­i­ous role played by the British when they an­nexed the Pun­jab in 1849.

The law suit won by the First Na­tions stu­dents against the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment for its role in de­stroy­ing their tra­di­tional ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem by the Res­i­den­tial schools prompts us to think that the British gov­ern­ment must be held ac­count­able for the sit­u­a­tion to­day.

Cana­dian of­fi­cials an­nounced on 20 Jan­u­ary that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment and 325 First Na­tions have agreed to set­tle a class-ac­tion law­suit, seek­ing repa­ra­tions for the loss of lan­guage and cul­ture brought on by In­dian res­i­den­tial schools, for $2.8 bil­lion.

Af­ter thor­ough doc­u­men­ta­tion, the British must be asked how they de­stroyed the Qaida-e-Noor to obliv­ion and how the Macaulay ed­u­ca­tion model weaned the peo­ple of Pun­jab from in­dige­nous Pun­jabi. The price of a Sikh head was lower than that of Sikh Qaidas -lan­guage learn­ing primers, found in a Sikh house which were set ablaze in bon­fires to de­ter peo­ple from even dar­ing to study the Pun­jabi lan­guage.

The sad tale of how the British rulers smashed Pun­jabi out of Pun­jab and de­stroyed the tra­di­tional ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem has been ex­haus­tively chron­i­cled by British his­to­rian Dr W G Leit­ner -the founder of Gov­ern­ment Col­lege La­hore in his mag­num opus -His­tory of In­dige­nous Ed­u­ca­tion in The Pun­jab.

Dr Leit­ner has made shock­ing rev­e­la­tions about stu­dents be­fore 1857 and how things de­te­ri­o­rated in less than two decades. He un­flinch­ingly men­tions that the en­tire tra­di­tion of ed­u­ca­tion was far su­pe­rior to that in Eu­rope dur­ing those times.

We think that is time to take the British gov­ern­ment to court as the First Na­tions have done.