Opinion Kamal Haasan, and the Tamil vs Kannada over-reaction

The cacophony of outrage over Kamal Haasan’s remark that Kannada was “born out of Tamil” has reached an unseemly but not unexpected crescendo — it follows a pattern seen whenever the politics of language and the language of hurt sentiments are invoked. It has gone all the way to the Karnataka High Court, which advised Haasan to apologise and questioned his credentials to make such a statement, asking, “Are you a historian, linguist?” But there are other pertinent questions, which the Court didn’t ask: Is such escalation over a misinformed comment proportionate or justified? Does one need to be an expert, or even correct, to exercise the right to free speech? Is this an appropriate use of the state’s time and resources?

The fallout of Haasan’s remark saw apologies demanded, protests held, effigies burnt, a police complaint filed, a state minister calling for a ban on screening the actor-politician’s film Thug Life in Karnataka and the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce promptly obliging him. There is a history and a context to this mobilisation of linguistic grievance: In the present, it is exacerbated by growing resentment over the presence of people from other states, particularly Hindi speakers. Alongside this is an older anxiety over the dominance of Tamil speakers in Bengaluru, in the backdrop of the regional rivalry between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Looming over it all, but sometimes unmentioned in the context of North-South and South-South tussles, is the shadow of English. All this — with parallels across multiple states, for instance in neighbouring Maharashtra — creates fertile ground for a politics of relentless prickliness that makes mountains out of molehills. It can lead to violence, and often has.

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Haasan is wrong about Kannada and Tamil, and appears to be ill-informed about the history of the Dravidian languages. One did not come from the other — the two are better characterised as sisters. He has refused to apologise. The question is not whether or not he’s been wise. What’s questionable is the clamour for an apology — it comes from a place of parochialism. What is needed, instead, is an imagination that is broad enough to accommodate the aspirations of regional and linguistic subnationalism and address people’s legitimate concerns about the future of their mother tongues. Also needed is a self-confidence to engage fruitfully with an increasingly cosmopolitan reality. Political leaders could do worse than take a leaf out of Karnataka Deputy CM D K Shivakumar’s book. In one of the most sensible responses to this controversy, he said, “We are not enemies; we are all friends. I don’t want to comment on it because I don’t know the history of that issue.”