Times of India
 
New Delhi, Apr 19: Would you believe that India has more than 50,000 people whose mother tongue is Arabic? Or that the largest chunk of these 'Arabs' is from Bihar? These are official figures from the 2001 census.

According to the census data on linguistic groups released recently, India had 51,728 people whose mother tongue was Arabic in 2001, a little over 18,000 of them living in Bihar and just under 8,500 living in Uttar Pradesh. There were nine other states with at least 1,000 Arabic-speaking people.

Since it is difficult to believe there are so many ethnic Arabs living in India, we can only presume they must be elite Muslims, many of whom proudly claim that they can trace their ancestry to the Arabs. The number of Arabic-speakers more than doubled from under 22,000 in the 1991 census.

India isn't just a land with a significant Arabic-speaking population, but also one with close to 12,000 people whose mother tongue is Persian.

The number of Persian speakers is highest in West Bengal, followed by Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Bihar.

With the Tibetans too, there is a surprise in the census data, but of a different kind.

The size of the Tibetan diaspora in India is estimated at anything between 120,000 and 200,000. However, only 85,000 people reported Tibetan as their mother tongue in the 2001 census.

Also, contrary to the popular image of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh as having the largest concentration of Tibetans, Karnataka actually had about one-and-a-half times the number of Tibetans that Himachal had.
The fact that almost 2.3 lakh Indians reported

English as their mother tongue might also seem a bit of a surprise at first glance, but this corresponds fairly well with the estimated size of the Anglo-Indian community.

Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and West Bengal, in that order, having the largest number of people with English as their mother tongue also seems to suggest that these are mainly Anglo-Indians.

Another language of foreign origin that has struck some roots in India is Afghani, Pushto, Kabuli. At the 2001 count, there were about 11,000 native speakers of this language in India, which is not unexpected given the fact that so many migrated from Afghanistan to India through the decades of turmoil in their country.

The overwhelming bulk of this linguistic group — about 7,400 of them — lived in Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi being the only other state or union territory with more than a thousand.

Apart from these 'foreign' languages, Sanskrit threw up some interesting numbers as well, with over 14,000 people claiming it was their mother tongue. About half of them were from Uttar Pradesh, while Andhra Pradesh was the only other state with over a thousand native Sanskrit speakers.

It seems safe to presume that most of these 14,000-odd are Brahmins and perhaps, those performing priestly duties in particular.