Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has unwittingly awoken Marathi asmita (pride) by first introducing and then withdrawing a plan to include Hindi as the third language in the state’s primary schools. In the process, he has achieved what months of private parleys could not—bringing together the estranged and politically weakened Thackeray cousins, Uddhav and Raj. The dithering has also given the new state Congress chief, Harshwardhan Sapkal, the rare opportunity to board a bogey his party has hardly ever ridden. And it has boxed in Eknath Shinde, the partner-in-governance whose Shiv Sena faction’s minister heads school education. The electricity crackling in the air—which has sparked hooliganism on ground—is changing the calculus for the upcoming civic polls.
The 2020 National Education Policy’s insistence on teaching at least two languages in school is based on sound science. Research shows that learning multiple languages before adulthood improves crucial skills such as cognition, hand-eye coordination and memory. However, it’s the BJP-Sena government’s bid to introduce it in primary schools that drew the ire of parents, teachers, language activists and opposition politicians. To Fadnavis’s attempts of propping the Union government’s policy in his defence, Marathi language activists posit the NEP’s advice for instruction only in the local or home language till class 8. The boon and bane of having the same script, Devanagari, is back in intellectual discourse. Such a tangle of livewires has tripped the ambitious chief minister’s stride towards Hindi.
It’s indeed a sensitive issue in a state where people still honour the ‘106 martyrs’ who died in the late 1950s agitating for a separate Marathi speakers’ province. Yet ironically, like dominant tongues in several other states, Marathi too flexes muscle for what scholar Prachi Deshpande calls the ‘bear hug’ of language. Konkani speakers on the state’s southern borders have resisted Marathi’s sway for decades, while Dangi speakers on its northern fringes are still contending with its peremptory ways. The abiding paradox is that though most Indian states were demarcated linguistically, language itself brooks no border. In a country with 22 constitutionally scheduled languages and hundreds of others thriving, we have to accept lingual influences across and within state lines. Despite the heat of politics, culture shrivels in the cold confines of hard borders.