The Language Trap

AS AN AMERICAN STUDENT of Indian history and politics, I have often wondered why English-language journalists—and the Anglophone Indians who inform, and are informed by, their books and articles—seem not to see what is before their eyes. It is easy to attribute their misreadings and elisions to malice, to the propagandist’s creation of slanted narratives. And we would be unwise to rule this out, since American journalism frequently functions as an arm of government, no less than Pravda did in the Soviet Union. The bright-eyed, Ivy-educated foreigners who staff the ‘India desk’ may suffer from partisanship, ignorance, and being too lazy to read up on 3,500 years of religion and history. But there is a fourth, equally important factor: Language. Often, they speak not a word of any Indian language, and they do all of their writing, reading, and discussing in English.

This is a bigger problem than never hearing from the “man on the street” or hearing perspectives that may not make it into India’s English-language newspapers. The disconnect is deeper than that because of language’s relationship to thought and being. India understood its importance very early. The Vedic tradition evolved an intricate system of memorisa­tion, metre, and recitation because even slight alterations or corruptions in a verse line could alter the meaning and destroy sacred efficacy. The Sanskrit tradition, from Panini on, elaborated grammar in a doomed quest for permanent precision. Tellingly, the supreme servant of the divine, Hanuman, was known as a master grammarian: linguistic fidelity is an act of faith.

Western philosophy has put forward the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which proposes that different cultures think differently because of their different languages. If true, this would imply that adopting a foreign language results in adopting foreign ways of thinking. India is a perfect illustration in support of it. ‘Dravidian’ was a neologism coined by a British Christian missionary, but it is now the name of a divisive ideology that enjoys great traction in India’s south. The words ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’ ‘Jainism’, and ‘Sikhism’ have, over time, caused these religions to dissociate from one another in a way that would have baffled or perhaps even horrified their earliest adherents. Every last one of those words, as the suffix -ism reveals, is an English one.

In the social and political spheres, too, Indians use English-language words to refer to themselves and their country. Leaving aside for now the ways that these terms obscure reality, the use of English leads to immense confusion in the descriptions and analy­ses of India because the same words have drastically different meanings and real-world models in the West.

Consider the word ‘secular’. What kind of society did Nehruvian ‘secularism’ establish in India? The houses of worship of one religion only, and no others, are under state government control and subject to taxation. One religion alone has a real-estate acquisi­tion board, capable of claiming and retaining any piece of land in perpetuity. Secularism has different meanings within the West itself, which is why French laïcité bans religious head coverings in public schools, but American individualism does not. Yet the principle is identical in both contexts: the establishment of one-rule-for-all parties, the sine qua non of fairness. The state does not play favourites. India’s asymmetric treatment of religious groups goes against this.

This relates directly to how India has inverted the meaning of ‘liberal’. American liberals speak highly of plant-based diets; they deplore factory farming and the environmental impact of beef and other meats. Indian liberals mock—and sometimes demonise as rightwing or Hindutva—the personal dietary preferences of millions of vegetarian Hindus and Jains. This is not the only inversion of Western liberal ideals by India’s self-proclaimed left. When American liberals insist on “protecting the rights of religious minorities”, they stand by the principle that all religions should be treated equally under law. This is why America’s Hindu temples have the same tax-exempt status as the Christian majority’s churches. Indian liberals, by contrast, wish to preserve the current asymmetries of the Indian status quo, some of which date back to imperial British rule—whether this means parallel law codes for different religious groups, or state control and exploitation of Hindu temples. This favourit­ism culminates in the pernicious claim that Hinduism is not a re­ligion at all but a “way of life”, a phrase that excuses, retrospective­ly and prospectively, differential treatment under law. (If it were not a religion, missionaries would not try to convert people out of it.) The phrase originated in India’s Supreme Court—which conducts its business, as mandated in India’s English-language Constitution, in English. Incidentally, the American ‘right’, if it actually knew anything about the Indian ‘right’, would loathe its socialist measures and advocacy of India’s equivalent of affirma­tive action. Commonplace terms like these invert their meanings when transposed from one political context to the other.

The bright-eyed, Ivy-educated foreigners who staff the ‘India desk’ may suffer from partisanship, ignorance, and being too lazy to read up on 3,500 years of religion and history. But there is a fourth, equally important factor: language. Often, they speak not a word of any Indian language, and they do all of their writing, reading, and discussing in English

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Terms related to Indian social structures are also uncoupled from reality. In America, the term ‘Brahmin’ or ‘Boston Brahmin’ denotes someone, usually a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) from New England, with immense wealth and power. The English word does not encompass India’s poorer and powerless Brahmins, much less Brahmins who have taken a religious vow of poverty. New England’s elites do not devote themselves to memorising ancient chants. Besides remaining unaware of the wide variety of actual Indian Brahmins, Western journalists seem not to understand that modern India’s reservation system makes that status a disad­vantage. Yet the term ‘Brahmin’, or even ‘upper caste’, in English discourse (and Indian languages as well, at this point) has become synonymous with wealth, power, and privilege in all contexts.

Even the terms ‘upper’ and ‘lower’, in relation to caste, carry connotations that apply less and less in the age of mass politics. Democracy ensures that numerically predominant caste groups produce powerful individuals—like the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) that have produced a prime minister. For an English speaker who has a vague and misguided pyramid-image of India’s social structure, Shudras constitute the ‘lowest’ of the four castes—always poor, oppressed, and unrepresented. Yet it is pos­sible for a ‘lowest caste’ subgroup to own land and exert massive political power, like the Reddys of Andhra Pradesh. Because the English word ‘caste’ elides the granularity of varna and jati, it elides, accordingly, the granularity of India.

The constant focus on India’s “Hindu majority” is another misleading term. India is majority Hindu the way the ocean is majority krill. Easily exploited divisions of caste and language, the lack of unified political organisation, and simple religious indifference create a curious phenomenon: states with the most Hindus have the least Hindu identitarianism in their politics. Hindu identitarians, apparently in power for a decade now in the Central government, have had almost no real-world effect on the map, and have overseen a demographic diminishment of their own group. The religious nationalism that has changed the map and demographics in its favour is Islamic nationalism, but this is never mentioned, much less criticised; in India, as Mountbat­ten reflected before his death, Jinnah himself has been largely written out of the Partition story. Hinduism, by contrast, has only contracted geographically since the British departed: India’s largest internally displaced refugee group is the Kashmiri Pandit population—Hindu refugees in Hindu-majority India. Again, such larger phenomena get missed in hysteria over saffron flag-waving or sloganeering. In South Asia, Buddhists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka have enshrined Buddhism’s special status in law; the Muslims of Pakistan and Bangladesh have done the same for Islam. Only the two Hindu-majority countries, India and Nepal, lack any state religion. Yet it is “Hindu nationalism”, inert in real­ity, that remains the bogeyman.

It may be too late to eschew English. Yet a renewed focus on the actual meanings of India’s English words—examining how they entered the lexicon, how they diverge from their originals, and how they diverge from reality—will go a long way towards renewing India’s understanding of itself

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Above all, Americans and other Westerners misunderstand the nature of Indian states. An American’s idea of divergent states is, say, a liberal state like California and a “red state” like Texas. By Indian standards, not that much distinguishes these states. The lack of a state income tax in Texas has seen thousands of Californians migrate there, many of them Indian-Americans; they are instant­ly at home in the hills around Austin or the suburbs of Dallas. In both states, the two main languages are the same; the majority re­ligion is the same; the degree of law and order is roughly the same; and both have mixes of politicians from the same two political parties, though different parties dominate in each state.

There is no major Western democracy in which state-specific populations speak languages from completely different lan­guage families, nor any country where the majority of citizens do not speak a national language. America’s idea of a religiously skewed state is Utah, whose population is 60 per cent Mormon. (The total population of that state is a little over three million Americans—roughly the population of a moderate-sized Indian city, like Vadodara.) In India, meanwhile, Meghalaya, Kashmir, and Karnataka each has a supermajority of a different religion.

By the same token, the term ‘state’ makes Westerners think of states or provinces in their own countries. Based on that, they make assumptions about the state government’s relationship with the national government. The United States of America has not had self-contained and independently minded states since its 1861-65 Civil War, when Virginia set up its own rival capital in Richmond. So, contemporary Americans have no mental model for Indian states. Nor do any other Westerners. Alberta’s relationship to Ottawa, or Ohio’s relationship to Wash­ington DC, or Normandy’s relationship to the government in Paris—these are no guide to understanding TMC’s Bengal or DMK’s Tamil Nadu. In fact, a discussion of American national politics need not focus too closely on the state-level nitty-gritty of South Dakota or Massachusetts. In India, states are precisely where focus needs to be directed. That is where local population dynamics result in local conditions that contradict low-resolu­tion descriptions and English-language misnomers.

As Sapir and Whorf might have predicted, the biggest problem with the misuse of English in Indian political discourse is that the language has warped the way Indians see their own society. Foreign misunderstandings are to be expected—and are, ultimately, an irritation. When Indians misunderstand their own country and society, led astray by foreign words and foreign narratives, the result can be catastrophic. Words, as Vedic rishis knew, are spells, and just as their correct use can be beneficial, their misuse can be dangerous. Division, inertia, delusion, and denial of reality follow from the reckless adoption of words. They are shape-shifters that change their own shape and the shape of those who speak them; they change what they mean in Indian mouths while changing what is thought in Indian minds. There can be no problem-solving where the tool of problem-solving is corrupt, where the language used to describe reality is itself the lie.

I am aware of the irony that I am writing, and you are reading, this warning in the very language I am warning you against. It may be too late to eschew English, as it is entrenched every­where, from India’s Constitution and judiciary to the ‘Hinglish’ spoken by its elites; above all, Indians themselves will never agree on one language to supplant it. Yet a renewed focus on the actual meanings of India’s English words—examining how they entered the lexicon, how they diverge from their originals, and how they diverge from reality—will go a long way towards renewing India’s understanding of itself. If this self-examination and purgation is not carried out, the future may require a rever­sion to ancient Sanskrit words: moha, adharma, satyanasha.

About The Author

Amit Majmudar

Amit Majmudar is a novelist and poet based in Ohio. He is the author of The Map and the Scissors. His forthcoming books include the first volume of his Mahabharata retelling, The Book of Vows, as well as an original cycle of mythological stories, The Later Adventures of Hanuman

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