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Journalism of Courage
The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena8217;s recent activities centre interestingly around the language question. Pizza delivery units, bars and other eateries in Mumbai were forced to have boards up in Marathi, and in a crucial differentiator from his uncle8217;s mother organisation, the Shiv Sena, Raj Thackeray is able to use language as the reason for violence and not just other cultural markers of one8217;s ethnicity.
In Shiv Sena8217;s earlier days, 8220;outsiders8221; weren8217;t attacked in a focused way by being marked out as non-Marathi speakers. Sure, the results may be the same, the targeting of migrants from the rest of India especially north India which imparts, in a large measure, vibrancy to a fascinating city like Mumbai. But the fact that Raj Thackeray has cleverly chosen Marathi, the language, as what needs to be uniformly imposed, has also resulted in the silence of several persons in Maharashtra who would otherwise have spoken out on such an issue.
Thackeray8217;s calibrated use of Marathi as a weapon is not a new idea, but the reinvention of a very old one. Even in recent times, the Kannada Cheluvi, for example, has used it to target non-Kannadigas in Bangalore, another rapidly expanding metropolis, where local rage at the sense of not being able to grab all the high-paying jobs in one8217;s 8220;own8221; city and state is expressed as championing of the language of the area. In this context it might be useful to look back at one of the oldest ideas that eventually went into the shaping of India, and in defining nationhood.
At Partition, most of the 600-odd princely states were left to choose between India and Pakistan. Most chose India. Jawaharlal Nehru therefore had three kinds of administrative units, the A, B and C states. A units were 8220;provinces8221; of British India, B units the 8220;princely states8221;, and C units some states ruled by a chief commissioner appointed by the Government of India. On the face of it, to Nehru at least, there appeared to be no earthly reason why all states should be simply one kind of state. Till of course events forced his hand.
Language8217;s power as a deep divider and unifier must have been evident to a student of European history, as nation states emerged in large part on the basis of languages spoken. But in India, with perhaps so many other dividers, like religion, caste, region, ethnicity and sheer distance from the geographical centre, even in a divided subcontinent, the fact of language8217;s great emotive power sunk in only later.
The functionality of the A, B and C states was first challenged by the 16 Telugu-speaking districts of the state of Madras. Potti Sriramulu also known as 8220;Amarjeevi8221;, a former railway employee and Gandhian, led what was to become a very significant struggle for language identity in India. His fast first met with resistance, then acceptance by the government, but it was only four days after his death in December 1952, that Nehru announced the formation of a Telugu-speakers8217; state, away from Madras.
The agitation for a separate state of Andhra heralded the need for a very distinct way to view administrative units. Soon voices in Kerala with the Ayikya Kerala movement arguing for unifying Malayalam speakers from the four provinces they were then divided into also grew louder, and the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti arguing for the separation of Gujarati speakers from Marathi speakers, and unifying them into Maharashtra, with Bombay as the capital further strengthened the need for a re-look at states reorganisation. The Fazal Ali Commission was appointed in 1953, and three years later in the month of November, the Union of India was divided on the basis of languages spoken. As some scholars point out, it was the single point of reference within which you could find a variety of group identities 8212; religion, caste, class and region.
It was only when the next set of states were formed, that language was not a factor or divider. In the cases of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, it was development, a sense of functional distance from the state8217;s centre, that went into deciding what portions would be carved out, not language.
Of the many insightful points historian Ramachandra Guha makes in the context of the history of post-Independence India 8212; India, After Gandhi 8212; is that the most overwhelming thing about the emergence of India is how someone in Bihar, on getting a job offer from Karnataka, can pack his/her bags and head off, without bothering at all about language, food habits and any other issues that, say, a person in another part of the world travelling thousands of kilometres for a job may have.
Love for one8217;s language, bitterness about what is seen as the domination of another language, appears tempered also by the silent acknowledgement of the role that English could play. A language not exactly Indian, but now more Indian than British may have played a significant role as a bridge, as something Indians adopted once the shadow of the colonial exploitations it signified was shed, at least substantially, making it possible for vast distances to be traversed, and the edge taken off chauvinisms of various sorts.
There was a wonderful story of how a UP chief minister, in his first stint in the job, was very agitated and confused when a Kerala CM sent him a letter in Malayalam. While UP bureaucrats had discussed this, they forgot to add that the communication their CM had initiated had been shot off in Hindi, and so it was only appropriate that the response, the southern CM thought, should have been in his mother tongue. The beauty of the state of the language divide in India was that it passed off as a joke less than 30 years after the times when the hatred against the moves to 8220;force8221; Hindi there had caused several suicides.
Language facilitates dialogue, in fact at an elemental level makes dialogue possible. But it can sometimes destroy the possibility of a conversation.
seema.chishtiexpressindia.com
