Language remains an attractive business opportunity in Indian politics. Union Home Minister Amit Shah joined a long line of political entrepreneurs when he recently said, at the launch of a book by Hindi poet and administrator Ashutosh Agnihotri, that the days of English are numbered, and that English-speakers in India would soon “feel ashamed”. But what exactly was the venture about, and was it a losing proposition?
In the language business, north Indian politicians usually propose to replace English, the working language of the British Raj, with Hindi, the language in which governments after independence hoped to bind together the states, which were demarcated on linguistic basis. Indira Gandhi established the department of official language in the 1970s to give teeth to the Official Language Act, 1963. Its core project was to promote Hindi in the work of the Union government. The first step was to create vocabularies to describe the functions and processes of government.
Words like nyayalaya (court) were not in common use in the 1970s. The Urdu adalat prevailed. And newfangled terms like urja mantri (minister for energy) sounded unnatural. Delhi’s governments had always relied on English, Urdu and Persian to conduct affairs of the state. Now, a new Hindi vocabulary had to be assembled quickly―and awkwardly. The news on state-controlled media baffled millions. State-sanctioned school curriculums featured monstrosities like vismaya dibodhakchinh, Hindi for the exclamation mark. Only a language bureaucrat could have dreamed that one up.
But yesteryears’ monsters are now familiar friends. Across the land, we know what a nyayalaya is. Sporadically, political leaders from Devi Lal to members of the present government have even sought to make technical education accessible in Hindi, But the task of making up a fresh vocabulary is challenging. What’s the Hindi for albedo? For the sternocleidomastoid muscle? It’s better to teach children English, the language in which most of the world’s useful knowledge is encoded today. The children of so many people in government have been educated in precisely that language, often overseas, and they do not want to be ashamed.
In the English versus Hindi struggle, some states sensitive to cultural domination had caught on right away: their mother tongues would become collateral damage in any attempt to unify India through one Indian language, which would push down all others to a lower status. Now, Shah seems to have pitted English against the Indian languages; more recently, he has called Hindi a “sakhi” (companion) of all Indian languages. Nevertheless, linguistically sensitive states like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal would fear that Hindi is hiding in the shadow of the English bogey. The department of official language is today under Shah’s ministry. Setting aside the rhetoric, Shah’s main point concerns cultural authenticity. Ever since the rise of the right in the 1980s, we have been told that India can be authentically understood only by autochthonous Indians who spring directly from Mother Earth, like cabbages. Unfortunately, there is some truth in this.
A distressing example: bestselling anthologies of Indian literature mostly turn out, on closer inspection, to be collections of Indian writing in English. No Maithili or Malayalam, please, we’re Indian. It is also true that schooling has divided the nation into a tiny elite comfortable in English, and the majority which identifies with mother tongues. But a handful have also made the effort to cross this manmade border, to see how the other side thinks, and some have learned to settle comfortably in no man’s land.
In the world of Mumbai poetry, we could place Dom Moraes at one end of the cultural spectrum. He attended missionary school, went to Oxford, travelled the world and was steeped in the modern English poetic tradition. Reading his work, you could imagine the poet gazing upon the rolling downs from the window of a crofter’s cottage.
We could place Namdeo Dhasal at the other end of the spectrum―a Buddhist born in Pune, raised in poverty in Mumbai, a Dalit Panthers founder, poet of Kamathipura and other gritty realities―as very Marathi. He reached English-reading audiences via the bilingual poet Dilip Chitre’s translations.
Now, consider the man in the middle, Arun Kolatkar. He had common ground with his friend Chitre―both had translated Tukaram. But Kolatkar had attended a Marathi school in Kolhapur and went to college in Gulbarga, came to Mumbai dirtpoor but rose in advertising and graphic design, in the orbit of the legendary Kersy Katrak. Like Chitre, he led a bilingual creative life, writing in Marathi and English. And that made him the ideal poet to write, in English verse, of the road to Khandoba’s shrine in Jejuri, one of India’s most deeply layered folk pilgrimages.
People like Kolatkar and Chitre embodied the India that independence was supposed to create―multicultural, multilingual, progressive and not ashamed of any of it. It was expected that depressed communities would find liberation in English (the Dalit activist Chandrabhan Prasad still works tirelessly on the project), and the English-speaking minority would get over the colonial hangover and seek out their roots again. The language wars that pockmark our modern history were never supposed to happen—at all.
Pratik Kanjilal | Speakeasy | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)