In a now viral video from April, an auto driver in Bangalore can be heard arguing with a female passenger to speak in Kannada. His tone is almost menacing and he eventually explodes and screeches, “Bengaluru belongs to Kannadigas!” Sure enough, the simmering anger against outsiders flourishing in the Silicon Valley of India found echo elsewhere: At a DMart in Mumbai’s Versova, a staffer very politely told a customer that he could speak in Hindi, not Marathi. At which point, members of the MNS roughed him up. In the disturbing clip, the young man is seen cowering, holding his ears. This is how easy it is to sow discontent. And then, all you need to do is slyly record some obnoxious people raving and ranting at other angry people, demanding they learn the local language (or else). Next step, post it online. And voila! Just like that, a cleverly spun political narrative has regions waging a manufactured war against each others’ languages, the debate spreading dangerously, on LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube.
A puzzling binary is at play: To defend your language, you must reject all others. The irony is, for all this posturing on linguistic pride, if somebody were to offer these injured regional patriots a magic potion of immediate English fluency, it wouldn’t take them a microsecond to kiss their mother tongue goodbye. And for good reason. Since Independence, English has been the language of progress, sidelining those who don’t have access to it. Official government business, court work, billings and transactions would be very difficult, if not impossible, without English. Instinctively, every Indian toiling away in the most far-flung corner of this country knows the way out of grinding obscurity is learning English. It’s been said repeatedly, lately, that India doesn’t have a “connecting language”. Realistically, English is the pan-Indian language that some dream, wrongly, that Hindi might become. Because, everyone is in full agreement that to improve one’s prospects, you’re better off speaking it than not.
When it’s so evident that upward mobility depends on English proficiency, it was deeply unsettling to hear the Home Minister declare recently that a day will come when Indians who speak English will feel “ashamed” to do so. That’s simply not true. The founder of PayTM has said in interviews what a disadvantage he was at, having gone to a Hindi-medium school, because he couldn’t understand the lectures at the Delhi College of Engineering. He had to teach himself the language of instruction one word at a time, but most of us aren’t Vijay Shekhar Sharma. We wouldn’t be able to manage it even if we tried because learning any new language is painstakingly difficult. Besides, Sharma upped his prospects by learning English but the reverse isn’t true. Unless someone’s working in regional cinema, there are questionable benefits to learning Marathi or Tamil (other than the fact that disgruntled locals won’t get aggressive with you). The expectation, that busy adults caught up with eking out a living and the hundred other mundane chores we have to perform, must now also learn the language of the city we work in, is unfair, and frankly, impossible.
Of course it’s painfully obvious this isn’t actually about Marathi versus Hindi versus Tamil. It’s the old tactic of provoking conflict where none exists, to distract the public from other serious economic problems plaguing this country: Prop up Hindi as a link language; create an irrational fear that repeated attempts to promote Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking states will finish off the mother tongue. But languages only fade away when people stop speaking in them voluntarily. For that to happen, it takes decades, if not centuries. Even then they don’t vanish. All that happens is that the mother tongue becomes a second language, for the most pragmatic of reasons: Progress. People want money. They want to do better. A local dialect restricts work life to a 50 km radius. Cross the state border, the script changes. To expand one’s opportunities, there’s really no choice but to move way beyond one’s own history.
It doesn’t need to be said that when living in a different state or country, one should pick up common courtesies in the local language. It wasn’t just Walt Whitman who contained multitudes, most of us do. Indians reach adulthood proud of their multilingual backgrounds. Delhiites move easily between using English at work, Hindi with friends and Punjabi with a grandparent. Personally, I love Urdu. Its poetic and musical qualities transport one into a different realm. Learning it is an absorbing hobby, but it serves no practical purpose. Our ancestral glories and interests must be explored in a private capacity. Any imposition of a language on a 10-hour shift worker is unfair because that precious time could be used skilling up in some other way. As citizens and professionals, we need to worry about the kind of issues that dominate public discourse. These linguistic divisions have got an alarming amount of air time and newsprint, while our garbage-laden streets are sinking in the monsoon.
The writer is director, Hutkay Films
