In a democracy, preserving heterogeneousness must be a top priority, but at the same time checks and balances must be maintained.
I am writing in English to tell the English (speakers of India) that I am not English.1
There are Kannadigas in Tamil Nadu. There are Telugus in Tamil Nadu. There are Marathis in Tamil Nadu. There are plenty of Malayalis in Tamil Nadu. Sowkarpet in Chennai is full of Marwaris who speak Marwari but they are called Hindikaaran (Hindi speakers). There are Kutchi speakers from Saurashtra in Tamil Nadu. There are a sizeable number of Sindhis and Gujaratis in Tamil Nadu. There are Jains, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and a large number of Hindus. The neighbouring state (UT of Pondicherry), a former French colony, has generously accommodated Orissans and Bengalis along with Malayalis, Telugus and of course Tamils. If this is not unity then what is? Let us not confuse unity with uniformity. Schools have uniforms because all children are equal in the eyes of the educators and the learners. These young minds should be trained to respect and treat everyone equally. But it is not advisable to build a nation with the aim to integrate uniformly. But interestingly, people in Tamil Nadu seem to have united under the magic tag called Tamil or Tamilian. A word of caution. In India, if one says one is a Tamilian, it doesn’t necessarily mean one is from Tamil Nadu. It would more or less mean that one is a Tamil speaker living in a place outside Tamil Nadu. Analogically speaking, “…if someone asks an Indian in London her country of origin, she would say that she is from India. If someone asks the same person in Delhi her state of domicile then she would say that she is from Bengaluru. And if someone asks her where in Bengaluru, she would happily say that she is from Bellary. Here comes the suspense. But no one would ever ask her where in Bellary because the residents of Bellary not only know where she is living in Bellary but also to which caste and sub-caste she belongs.2”
Similarly, no one in Kerala would ask if his fellow-Keralite is a Malayali. It is taken for granted all residents of Kerala are Malayalis and hence Malayalam-speaking Indians. This linguistic discourse is peculiar to India. It happens only in India.
UNIFORMITY/UNITY
It is in this context that unity must not be set against uniformity. India is made of several socio-linguistic groups. Every social category has its distinct character in terms of culture, language, food, dress, rituals, etc. In Tamil Nadu alone 113 social groups/categories have been identified. Each social group maintains its identity by claiming its differences. For example, the thaali (mangalsutra) used in Naidu (one of the Telugu-speaking dominant castes) marriages is different from the one that is used in Gounder marriages. In a Brahmin marriage the thaali will have its own design and pride (maybe prejudice too). As the saying goes, “united we stand, divided we expand”, we, in India, continue to live united but with internal contradictions—social, cultural, linguistic, ethnically, historical and geopolitical.
Despite an attempt to impose administrative and cultural uniformity in the form of Hindi imposition, India has dramatically survived with her diversities. Hindi is a politically created language. It has been successfully experimented with in the last 75 years. It is there to stay for another 100 years at least as the largest spoken Indian language. Tamil pulavars (pundits) have to realise is that Hindi has acquired a powerful status administratively, but certainly not culturally. As far as my knowledge goes, Hindi is nobody’s mother/father tongue. Every Hindi speaker in India is bilingual. According to Prof Apoorvanand, professor of Hindi literature at Delhi University, Hindi has swallowed 50 Indian languages/dialects. Language experts say Tamil has swallowed six major tribal languages of South India. M.K. Gandhi (Gujarati), V.D. Savarkar (Marathi) had been vital campaigners of Hindi. C.N. Annadurai (Telugu), E.V. Ramasamy Naicker (Kannadiga) were political stalwarts who were among those who first entered Tamil Nadu to popularise Tamil, thus opening it for occupation and development by others. It is interesting to note that the propagators of Hindi and Tamil were non-natives of these two respective “problematic” languages. The former claims majority and dominance and the latter claims antiqueness and purity. The majority of Indians speak Hindi. The majority of Tamil speakers oppose Hindi. In both cases it is a majoritarian tyranny. Hindi speakers think that Hindi has to be promoted to unite India, whereas Tamils assume that their language would lose its cultural and linguistic purity. In other words Tamils are of the opinion that accepting Hindi as the official language would be a cultural invasion. Does that mean if Tamil is declared as an official language of India it would not invade Hindi and other regional languages? Paradoxically speaking, torchbearers of both Tamil and Hindi languages consider that Tamil and/or Hindi may bring homogeneity.
Bridging the gap
In a democracy, preserving heterogeneousness, which is the specialty of Indianness, must be a top priority but at the same time checks and balances must be maintained. Democracy without consent is not a democracy. How does one really get the consent?
“After the French Revolution, when legitimacy shifted from the divine to the people, what the new ruling class did was that they started a ministry, an institutional process and mechanism where consent could be manufactured. It was all because of the imperatives of the political and legal notion of the nation state. The process was very simple, the state engaged people through various ways in the process of manufacturing consent. The whole process proved detrimental to justice or to the social contract aspects of the nation state. Meaning thereby, democracy becomes a misnomer unless one works towards democratizing the knowledge system itself, the basic social unit, i.e., the families, the classrooms, the political parties, even the entire system of socialization.3”
So far there is no consent when it comes to having a national/official language for India. It’s my gut feeling that the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru did try to manufacture consent among Members of Parliament. Nehru &Co., and particularly the State (India) did not take enough stock of anti-Hindi movements/agitations in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. In Tamil Nadu, famous anti-Hindi agitations began way back in the 1930s. It became a successful political tool in the 1960s, which ended in self-immolations and mass arrests of the protestors. Finally the idea of imposing Hindi in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry was withdrawn. As the Tamil saying goes, “thooral vittum thoovaanam vidalai (even though the rain stopped the drizzling has not yet stopped)”: though Hindi is not taught in Tamil Nadu to Tamil-speaking students the debate on imposition of Hindi continues to haunt the people of India in general and of Tamil Nadu in general.
To strike a truce, leaders/ringleaders of Tamil and Hindi would have to re-strategise their approach to such a complex issue. As far as Hindi promoters are concerned they should trust their fellow-Indians and refrain from imposing a particular language. For example, Sanskrit Week in Kendriya Vidyalayas may be avoided. Remember people in Tamil Nadu are averse not only to Hindi but also to Sanskrit. The reason to oppose Hindi is politically motivated animosity and the resentment to Sanskrit is caste-based antagonism. Everyone knows that Tamil Nadu has the highest number of Hindi Prachar Sabhas. As a schoolboy I vividly remember having heard conversations quite frequently between friends about doing Prathamik, Madhyama, Rashtrabhasha. We would frown as we heard that so and so was doing Prathamik or Rashtrabhasha. None of us knew that these were levels of Hindi language. But these Hindi words excited us (at least me).
To draw a parallel, learning French, when I was in college, was considered to be a fashion and a question of prestige—Pré-Diplôme (Pre-Diploma), Diplôme (Diploma) and Diplôme Supérieur (Advanced Diploma). Nothing was imposed.
In other words, nothing was forced down the throat. Let us understand the solid difference between the diversity of life and unity of life. The diversity of life is the tolerance and the unity of life is sharing. The term “unity in diversity” refers to the state of togetherness or oneness in spite of the presence of immense diversity. Hence it is the need of the hour to stay united to celebrate India’s multiple diversities. Diversity is a truth. And so is unity. Therefore, truths are multiple. Multiple truths are neither a lie nor a contradiction.
We have various reports, books and essays on language issues/wars in pre/post-Independent India. What we need to do is to improve and engage in the way of handling the impasse and the facts that are built around the language policy.
FOOTNOTES
- Paraphrased from Yacine Kateb’s statement in French: J’écris en français pour dire aux Français que je ne suis pas Français (I write in French to tell the French that I am not French). The author has added “speakers of India”.
- Paraphrased from U.R. Ananthamurthy’s poem.
- Balbir Butola, Crisis of Indian Nationalism, The JNU Nationalism Lectures, Harper Collins, 2016, p. 297.
Dr Ajith Kanna is Professor of French, Centre of French & Francophone Studies, School of Language, Literature & Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University