An inspector at Delhi’s Lodhi Colony police station has caused a stir by requesting the West Bengal state guest house in the national capital to provide a translator for “texts written in Bangladeshi”. In a more harmonious era, the matter could have been set aside with a guffaw over the inspector’s own linguistic limitations. But at a time Bangla speakers are being rounded up in various BJP-ruled states and deported on mere suspicion of being illegal immigrants, calling Bangla the “Bangladeshi national language” in an official letter cuts deeply. The case for which a translator’s services were sought is itself about eight people suspected of being illegal immigrants.
It’s a travesty that someone writing an official letter does not know the name of the country’s second largest language. Bangla is not only one of the 22 official languages enshrined in the Constitution’s Eighth Schedule; last year, the Union government also listed it as one of the country’s 11 classical languages, whose criteria include high antiquity, textual heritage and original tradition. Rabindranath Tagore not only wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh, but he also inspired Sri Lanka’s.
The graver concern is over weaponisation of language in a country where most states were delineated by them. In June, Delhi University clarified that the listing of ‘Muslim’ as a language in place of Urdu in an admission form was a clerical error. Even if we consider the university clerk and police inspector’s characterisations as slips of the tongue, they betray a malaise being fomented in society. Illegal immigration across India’s longest international border is not new—some scholars have termed it the result of a ‘partition that never ended’. The issue has also been politicised for decades. But it’s the conflation of Bangla with illegal immigration across the country that makes it harmful in the current context. The government has had to repatriate families forcibly pushed into Bangladesh after they were proven to be Indian nationals.
In an essay written in 1883, the year after he published Anandamath—the novel that includes ‘Vande Mataram’, India’s national song—Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay strongly advised against politicising language and its usage. We would do well to heed the advice that, unfortunately, becomes relevant every now and then in a nation that claims to be ‘one family’.