The Uses of Babel

WHAT IS FREEDOM, FOR A LINGUIST who works on the languages of India and how they have evolved over thousands of years? Well, the beauty of studying evolution, of languages or any other living system, is that you see the future as something emergent, born of a huge number of things acting in concert. The future, in this way of thinking, is something organic, not something imagined by one person and unleashed upon the rest of the society.

India is a land of diversity. The earliest humans to leave Africa came to South Asia about 65,000 years ago during an Ice Age, crossing from what is now Somalia to present-day Yemen when sea levels were much lower and it was possible to see land, vegetation, and herds of animals on the other side. They must have been attracted to the idea of an open road, and the chance to explore new places and live life on their own terms. Over many millennia they spread out over all of South Asia, and their genetic heritage is still present in almost every modern Indian. Other groups of migrants followed, starting many thou­sands of years later, mostly groups of men entering the subcontinent from the northwest, then the northeast, and even later by sea, mix­ing their genes with local people and creating new hybrid groups. Each of these migrations has left its mark on how we think and the languages we speak.

Evolution is deeply tied to the idea of adaptation, of people taking their cue from the living environment as they go about their lives. We went from being tiny, isolated groups to chains of settlements in contact with each other, where we could un­derstand the languages spoken in neighbouring villages. We could retrace our steps when we made wrong choices, and seek out a better path. It was a long journey, one step at a time, as we stopped and backtracked whenever we needed to, small viable groups free to change our minds, and no destination that we absolutely had to reach.

This is an idealised picture. It was often not like that. From time to time groups would appear on the scene and take over, depriving local people of the power to shape their future. And within small groups there would often be conflict. Freedom has always been, here and everywhere, a fragile thing, in a tense relationship with forces of control.

A MAJOR HICCUP ALONG OUR WAY WAS THE colonial era. India was turned into something ‘useful’ for an occupying power, and even when that era end­ed, we and the other ex-colonies were made to view ourselves only in comparison with the ‘developed’ West. Implicit in the very word ‘development’ was a sense of someone outside India setting the agenda.

This explains why the idea of freedom has resurfaced in our thoughts at this moment. We live in a grim age of late-stage capitalism, where a tiny elite owns more and more of the resourc­es of the planet, while ordinary people see their standard of living declining and their choices about their future more and more constricted. Words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, which had a sheen at the start of this age, suggesting an important role for ordinary citizens in how our land is governed, have begun to ring hollow. They are like the bodies of drowned swimmers, dead but looking outwardly as they did in life, while on the inside they crawl with a new reptilian life form, eels, which fill them up even as they eat away the dead swimmer’s flesh and internal organs. Someone is trying to reach inside and tamper with meaning.

Decentralisation would at once remove the demand for uniformity, the simplistic Western model. All of a sudden we would be free to be the people we always were, with stronger local linkages but a sense of larger connection if required. Diversity has too often been seen as a flaw by our governments. But it is just the honest reflection of a society where people’s horizons vary

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‘Freedom’ is a strange thing for a linguist to think about in the context of language. ‘Free’ is a word that calls to mind a brand-new computer where no software has yet been installed. Far from being free to imagine new things, it cannot work at all! Language is, after all, the quintessential operating system which allows us to make sense of the outside world. It is extremely biased. Think about it: all languages have vowels and consonants, nouns and verbs and grammar rules, sentences with clauses. Why should this be? Past, present, future (and what do we really mean by ‘present’?). Concepts (when is an animal not a dog but a wolf, or a fox, or even a bear?). Phonemes (when is p no longer p, but suddenly ph?). This is how languages carve up external reality. In all the sorting and classification, information is lost so that we can see patterns better. There is a certain human-friendly bias to how we reshape the world to be able to think about it. A totally ‘free’ language would be de-linked from a universe of meaning. It would not be language any more. It would simply be… noise.

So instead of the absolute freedom to spout meaninglessly, we speak of choices between systems that represent reality in slightly different ways. Different languages. You need a language in order to think and communicate with others in your group. In fact, the very word ‘community’ is built on the idea of ‘communication’, and this means that all of us in the group share a language, a way of comprehending the world. There is nothing solitary about language. Freedom exists only in the infinite combinations we can put together using the finite elements of our language, coming up with new insights, beautiful expressions and sen­tences that have never been uttered before.

The other sense of language is the system taken as a whole. Not its sounds, concepts and words, but a single ‘living’ entity with a host community. In India we see clearly that language is about groups, some of them tiny and isolated and others larger, covering entire regions and one language, English, in prime position as it belongs to the ones who have to think of India as a whole. This is where the struggle for ‘freedom’ takes place.

What we are faced with at the moment is a conflict: between an age-old model of language where meaning is something arrived at by a nebulous consensus among speakers over a span of generations, and a different view of language where new words and meanings can be imposed by forces with the power to control the narrative. Language, in the earlier model, is something alive, free to find its way, to evolve in concert with its environment, words and grammar incorporating new influences from new users or even falling out of use as times change. The other view of language, robotic and full of ruler-drawn straight lines, is the brainchild of a group in power with a chilling certainty about what it wants, a certainty with no room for course-correction. One side of this dichotomy represents the world of homogeneity and an unnatural uniformity, while the other side is something older and more flexible which has grown with us over millennia, and leans towards diversity.

My own view of language is as a living system, like the child we ‘make’ which looks like us, but not exactly in the way we imagined, and which will grow up under our influence but not our control. Like a species, it can survive a very long time when it is supported by a nurturing environment, but it can also go extinct if that en­vironment changes too quickly for it to adapt. Natural language, like freedom, is vulnerable, and when its environment changes it can be lost, when ordinary people decide that the only way their children can survive in a homogeneous modern world is if they are schooled in an elite language that will get them jobs when they grow up. There is an epic battle going on, one in which we are forced to take sides. What definition of ‘freedom’ are we going to choose?

The biggest source of conflict between the natural language of ordinary people and the carefully tuned language of a controlling State is their different views of diversity. To the modern Indian State diversity has always been seen as a ‘problem’, something standing in the way of centralisation and ‘modernity’ (though it does acknowledge that precious heritage is lost every day when our languages die). We have been trained to think that India has a ‘language problem’ when people from different parts of India who do not speak English are unable to communicate di­rectly. But our polyglot identities are older than the modern Indian State, and a sign of our history: small groups coming together to make larger viable re­gions. Must there really be a contradiction between a modern State and this sort of diversity? Could decentralisation give us a more organic type of unity, regions pull­ing together in an elastic web without the brittle rigidity and one-way-ness of a government obsessed with control?

In India we see clearly that language is about groups, some of them tiny and isolated and others larger, covering entire regions and one language, English, in prime position as it belongs to the ones who have to think of India as a whole. This is where the struggle for ‘freedom’ takes place

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I think it could. Decentralisation would at once remove the demand for uniformity, ‘one nation, one religion, one language’, the simplistic Western model. All of a sudden we would be free to be the people we always were, with stronger local linkages but a sense of larger connection if required. Diversity has too often been seen as a flaw by our governments. But, in truth, it is just the honest reflection of a society like ours where people’s hori­zons vary. Some of us live very locally. Others are able to take in all of India at a glance. But people who are not in daily contact do not actually need to speak the same language. It is, conversely, the need for daily communication that drives the growth and spread of language. If we as a nation lived closer to human-scale it would remove a crushing burden on families that feel impelled to ‘migrate’ to more empowered languages, like English, and leave their languages to die, just to give their children a better chance at jobs in the modern sector. Decentralisation would allow creative spirits who do not know English, like traditional artisans and craftsmen, to be part of the modern world of science and technol­ogy (as they already are in most other countries).

DIVERSITY IS NOT A LIMITATION: IT IS A gene-bank of options for when we need to stop and think again. We are blessed, as a nation, in not having lost all the options the Western world has managed to extinguish in its relentless rush towards uniformity. The greater our diversity the more options it will give us. The people most on the fringes, the least changed by the modern world, are also the ones who have lived in harmony with their environment for the longest time and with the gentlest ecological footprint. The rest of us have much to learn from them.

The issue of defining freedom is not trivial. There are all sorts of signs that people in India have been dissatisfied, casting about for ways of expressing who we really are, wondering where we made a wrong turn and how to retrace our steps to ‘the way we were’. Many have been feeling excluded by a modernity that seems to have no place for them, demanding that they change, asking them to as­sume what feels like an alien identity. Their quest for answers has led them to reprise religious identities, reach out to old notions of caste, ethnicity, and the language they think and feel in. In a way, this was to be expected. But there was no public discussion about this, no way to question the route itself, and the way we were all being made to… conform. And with no sense of a shared angst, it was easy for feelings to go sour, and erupt into sectarian conflict.

The language that surrounds us is almost a metaphor of our larger quest for freedom. Could 15 August be the right day to sit back and reflect again on who we are, how we think, and where we are headed?

About The Author

Peggy Mohan

Peggy Mohan is a linguist and author. Her most recent book is Wanderers, Kings, Merchants; The Story of India through Its Languages