There is a gene in animal brains that plays a radical role in language development. Speech scientists recently tweaked its human version in mouse brains. They were in for a successful surprise. The sound made by the implanted mice babies was different; louder, more insistent. When they grew up, they communicated differently and more compellingly to female mice. Now, as Robert Burns epiphanised, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” The rising octaves of language politics in India is forcing the social genetics of nationhood to go awry, raising the North-South hyperbole higher. The real ‘awry’ factor in this toe-to-toe eyeballing is technology. To be more precise, AI.
Tamil Nadu’s MK Stalin officially replaced the rupee sign with the Tamil ‘rupaai’. It is Dravidian nose-thumbing to the BJP’s Hindi harangue of unipolarity. The Indian Constitution recognises 22 official languages, and the country has 780 different spoken languages and 1,635 mother tongues. Which does make a case for Amit Shah’s pitch for unifying India using Hindi. Hindi is spoken by nearly half of India, and in certain states within the Hindi belt over 96 per cent of the population speaks Hindi. The South sees “Hurrah Hindi!” as an ethnic invasion by the North with which, it shares little cultural, religious and social values. The North-dominated BJP does not recognise religious regionalism and that Indians in different regions approach Hinduism differently. The BJP’s Hinduism template is designed by evangelistic monomania, which vibes variantly with the gestalt of the South and the East, which is more pluralistic in divine denominations. In Kerala, for example, many deities were originally pre-Hindu ethnic gods which were later absorbed into the generic pantheon. Kodungallur Amma is Bhadrakali, a version of Durga. Sree Vadakkumnathan of Thrissur is Lord Shiva. Odisha’s Lord Jagannath is Krishna. The god of Tirupati is Lord Venkateswara (Balaji, Srinivasa) who has no nomenclatural similarity with other gods. Such diversity of sacred identity unifies Hinduism and allows sanctification of different legends and gender evaluations. The goddess Kamakhya of Assam has powerfully occult sexual and feminine connotations even as she is considered an embodiment of Sati, the purest of the pure.
The BJP’s finite view of One Hinduism conflicts with the ancient Bharat narrative. It would do well to comprehend the ephemerality of all human endeavours; that decade or two is not even a speck of ideological dust in the primeval time line. Hinduism has survived challenges to its definition both by foreign invaders and home-grown cults to retain in its essential form of Many in One.
History keeps throwing up new faiths and new gods, nay, even prophets. Technology is the god of the 21st century and its preeminent deity is AI. No IT Bill, with its myopic political approach to controlling content will contain the wild horse of AI linguistics, which holds expanding brain power that can circumvent boundaries through creative responses. Recently a Grok 2 chatbot called a cocky user ‘Oi bh***iwala’: a vulgar Hindi swear word for showing attitude. A newly invented chatbot smart enough to adapt and abuse humans in multiple languages makes the concepts of national language and political imposition irrelevant. It is better to write new political code for identity than waste time with Gazette notifications and rhetoric. A new theory suggests our world is a computer simulation (by a super computer perhaps) while the scriptures insist that the world is an illusion, or Maya. The mouse, animal or computer, in the company of a keypad is an instrument to be feared in this simulacrum of ever-changing equations.