The Perils of Insularity

MK STALIN repeated the century-old Dravidian rhetoric of ‘Hindi imposition’ in his renewed attack against the National Education Policy (NEP). But in a welcome rebuttal, N Chandrababu Naidu hinted at reviving a time-honoured system of language education when he proclaimed that he was “going to promote 10 languages, including international languages, in every university.” Naidu deserves applause for making this statement of intent, and one hopes that his lead would be followed by other states.

At the heart of Stalin’s outburst lies the familiar ideological discourse of Tamil linguistic separatism dating back to EV Ramaswami Naicker, the Justice Party and its offshoots, which yielded political harvest for the Dravidian parties. While this was largely limited to Tamil Nadu, a parallel development was occurring. In 1928, the Motilal Nehru Report, for the first time, tabled the proposal of the reorganisation of India on a linguistic basis after independence. That became a reality with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 against nationwide opposition. The Act was entirely the product of Nehru’s propensity to succumb to organised blackmail.

With it, linguistic chauvinism, which had been confined only to Tamil Nadu, became pan-Indian. But it was (undivided) Andhra Pradesh which became the first state to be created on a linguistic basis thanks to the outrage that followed Potti Sriramulu’s fast and his death.

In retrospect, two factors have caused the most havoc to the unity and integrity of India after Independence: Nehruvian secularism and the linguistic reorganisation of the country. In reality, it was not reorganisation but linguistic division. It gave a new map to India which did not exist even at the apex of British colonial rule—a map that ignored and violated our civilisational history.

The denouement of all these is the fact that after 75-plus years, there seems to be no strand unifying Bharatavarsha. It is astounding how almost every element that had harmonised our society has been weaponised against itself and others in order to break this harmony.

At no point in our history was language a divisive factor.

Why, for example, do we find Kannada inscriptions in Jabalpur dating back 1,500 years? Or Chola-era Tamil inscriptions in Kashi? Or Pandyan copperplate grants in Ujjayini? Or Prakrit inscriptions of the Satavahana period authored in Mathura but found in Maharashtra?

What impelled the Kalyana Chalukya emperor, Vikramaditya VI (1076-1126 CE), to bestow such munificence upon the talented Kashmiri poet Bilhana? What motivated Sri Krishnadevaraya to extend unbounded patronage to poets and men of letters hailing from Vanga Desha (Bengal), Odhra Desha (Odisha), Karnata Desha (Karnataka), Telinga- Andhra Desha (Telangana and Andhra), and Dravida Desha (Tamil Nadu)?

These innumerable precedents were largely maintained even during colonial British rule, notwithstanding Macaulay’s fatal disruption of our educational system.

One can cite the example of the (formerly) illustrious Mysore University which used to offer a high standard of education in most Indian languages for more than half-a-century. For instance, Rallapalli Anantakrishna Sarma decorated its portals as a renowned Telugu pandit. A healthy mastery of Sanskrit was mandatory for students who wished to specialise in Kannada language and literature. At least three generations of Kannada academics and writers became proficient in Bangla solely to savour the works of masters like Bankim, Tagore, et al.

The same holds true for Andhra Pradesh. For more than a decade, TV Venkatachala Sastry (who is still with us) served as a distinguished Kannada professor at Osmania University. To date, Telugu people show great respect to a person who is learned in Samskrtandhramu (Sanskrit and Telugu). Andhra had “adopted” Sarojini Naidu as its own daughter, a human expression conveying the deep bond that its people had forged with Bengal. Like Karnataka, it too made valuable contributions in popularising Bangla literature and culture via translations, plays, anthologies and biographies.

The luminaries who sustained and nurtured this healthy tradition of linguistic and cultural exchange were endowed with open-mindedness. Their ancestry and mother tongues were purely incidental. Thus, some of the revered names in Kannada literature hailed from non-Kannada ancestry. DV Gundappa, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, PT Narasimhachar, and TP Kailasam hailed from Tamil ancestry; Devudu Narasimha Sastry, TS Venkannayya, and TR Subba Rao from Telugu; and DR Bendre from Marathi.

Which brings us to the question of Hindi. The efforts to propagate Hindi as a national language arose in the specific context of the freedom struggle. It was devised as a vehicle to forge national unity under trying circumstances and was not envisaged as a conspiracy to impose linguistic hegemony on the whole country. Gandhi was its foremost proponent.

However, this spirit originally motivated by nationalist sentiments was derailed after Independence by the Nehru government which went with zealous haste to propagate Hindi nationwide. The move expectedly backfired; spectacularly in Tamil Nadu, where Dravidian ideologues seized the issue in their bid to capture political power. The fire they lit spread to Karnataka and Maharashtra as well. It was further exacerbated by the linguistic division of India. To cite only one appalling consequence of this ill-informed policy, we can visit Maharashtra. In January 1974, 50 women were stripped and driven out of the state simply because they couldn’t speak Marathi.

Just as it is foolish to legislate morality, it is disastrous to legislate language, especially in a civilisational nation like Bharatavarsha. Our linguistic legislators after Independence would have done well to study the manner in which our languages have evolved and spread over thousands of years.

The disaster is evident. Without exception, all Indian languages are hurtling towards extinction. More than two decades ago, a venerable Tamil scholar told me that Tamil universities had not a single Tamil-language scholar who could read classical Tamil. The same is true of classical Kannada as well.

This state of affairs is the outcome of parochial politics, which shows no signs of abating. A recent strand of this politics has recast the function of language as merely a medium of communication. To this another ingredient has been added. We are asked to believe in something called the “language of food”, meaning that which earns us a living. Both these ingredients represent reductionism and regression.

Multiplicity of languages is the sign of a country’s cultural health. Historically, all languages evolved and flourished through robust mutual interchange. English, for example, shows a propensity to accommodate words from all languages and make them its own. Throughout the colonial period, it was a practice of many Indian and British universities to publish exhaustive lists of words from Indian languages newly added to the English dictionary in their official journals. This open-minded receptiveness is what makes English still the global lingua franca.

In contrast, our languages are dying because they have stagnated and the stagnation has occurred due to, among other things, forced linguistic insularity. The current purveyors of this discourse, most notably MK Stalin, will find some other pretext to agitate even if their demands were met. In reality, it is not their love for their mother tongue or hatred for Hindi that is at work—it is their politics that they perceive as endangered.

Andhra PradeshChandrababu Naidulanguage politicsMK StalinTamil NaduTelanganathree language formula