We arrive at Madrassa Anwarul-Islam Salfia at 12.45 pm, a little before namaaz. As the students gather around the row of taps to wash their hands and feet and line up for prayers, this modest building in the dusty, narrow bylanes of Chauri in Jalalpur, in eastern UP’s Jaunpur district, looks exactly how we expect a madrassa to be: a place for rigorous study of Islam, Urdu, Arabic.
What we encounter instead is a complete contradiction.
“It’s ironical that madrassas should be nursing Sanskrit when it’s vanishing elsewhere,” says Salfia’s R.K. Mishra.
The bare, red brick walls of the Standard 7 classroom are yet to be plastered, the window frames still to be fitted. Here, 12-year-old Nadima Bano and Hishamuddin are reciting, their pronunciation perfect and elocution chaste, this ode to India, “Yasyottarasyamdishibhati bhumao Himalayah parvatraj eshah…” It’s a sloka in Sanskrit that translated means ‘the land shielded by the Himalayas in the north’. “Sanskrit padhne se zubaan saaf ho jaati hai (the diction becomes clear by learning Sanskrit),” Hishamuddin tells us. “Sanskrit is considered the mother of all languages,” says their teacher Rabindra Kumar Mishra. “It’s ironical that institutions like this madrassa should be nursing it while it’s vanishing elsewhere.”