The one nation, one language fallacy

(My conviction is so strong that I do not fear the blaze of others, but indeed I dread the flame of a flower (of my own garden) lest it should not set ablaze the garden (itself)).

In the past few days, I have often found myself reciting, in my head, the above lines by the poet Shakeel Badayuni. If there’s a Bharat Mata (Mother India), she is likely to agree with the sentiment expressed in these lines. Her adamant and unruly children have been innocently robbing her of her multifaceted glory by imposing a certain uninformed and ridiculous linguistic monism. A mammoth is being reduced to a mink.

We never really think beyond the political maps of South Asian countries. We never really imagine or explore the linguistic or cultural maps of South Asia and misinterpret the political as cultural. It is really hard to kill a language. But cultural maps in South Asia are fading to a monocolour and the linguistic maps are shrinking too. Just imagine a multilingual landscape as variegated as South Asia becoming monolingual one fine morning. Think of a time when everyone will speak and understand only one language — Hindi, English or Urdu.

I grew up speaking Kashmiri. I think in Kashmiri because that is how I grew up. I have Kashmiri friends and relatives who speak better Kashmiri than I do and others speak terrible Kashmiri. I do not know when I picked up Urdu while growing up in the Kashmir Valley. When I came outside the Valley as a child for the first time, I realised I was speaking to people around me in Urdu though they called it Hindi. However, when I came across people from the Hindi belt, I initially kept wondering why they spoke like characters we saw on television in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan or B R Chopra’s Mahabharat. I used to laugh at some of my friends and ask why they couldn’t talk in a normal language, not realising that this was probably normal for them. And they, in turn, kept taunting me that my language sounded like Farsi (Persian) and thus very foreign to theirs. It was all linguistic fun and we enjoyed it.

In a few years, I was to be trained as a Sanskritist, and began dealing with the idea of languages professionally. I was gradually unfolding the power dynamics and identity issues related to languages. I do recall a couple of times I felt severely discriminated against, along with a few other friends, while walking at Connaught Place in New Delhi at the hands of a few street vendors because we were talking in Kashmiri. I also gradually became aware of how the Kashmiri language had suffered in its land of birth by the dominance of Urdu (the state language) in the way that so many other South Asian languages are dominated by Hindi. The problem is not Hindi or Urdu or their marvellous literary traditions or the native speakers of these languages. The problem lies with the romantic notion of “one nation, one language” — the power that is being exercised through the imposition of a language of a large geographic zone of South Asia onto the length and the breadth of this multi-lingual landmass.

The line between love and hate is usually very subtle, but it could be rather simple as well. I love languages out of my absolute free will and according to my taste, but I would begin detesting them if they are imposed on me. I love my Urdu, but I do not like the Urdu that has been made to kill my mother tongue. One of the main reasons for the partition between Western Pakistan and Eastern Pakistan — later Bangladesh — was that the former was imposing Urdu on the latter. The former was predominantly a Punjabi-speaking area and the latter was a Bengali-speaking territory. Urdu as a concocted Islamic category was made to mediate between the two distinct cultural zones and unify them under a single imaginary Islamic linguistic umbrella. It had to be a miserable failure. In other words, the idea of a national language sounds wonderful, but only on a Wikipedia page. Language is not a representational symbol like a flag; it is a dynamic reality. Even if a multilingual nation like India becomes monolingual, over a course of time it will gradually create many distinct dialects. This is linguistic reality. Funnily India could end up with hundreds of Hindis, but all unique in themselves.

India should have a robust language policy that emphasises on the quality of language learning rather than running language departments, both classical and modern, in almost all its public universities. A large number of these departments do not make any contribution to scholarship anyhow. Issues related to learning languages are always hijacked by facile questions: How many languages or which language should be taught. There is never a sound focus on how to study language structurally and systematically. There can be no bigger irony than this for a multilingual landscape like South Asia.

I must confess that I would still not mind the jokes we used to crack about languages as children, but I have problems with linguistic hegemony — my mother tongue has succumbed to it.

The writer teaches philosophy at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Mumbai.