Language Phobia and Unity of India

Dr. C. D. DESHMUKH
Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University

What sort of danger linguistic problems hold to the unity of? It is abundantly clear that by the unity of India one means, not so much a sense of emotional integration about which one hears so much, as the political integrity, i.e., wholeness of India as a nation. In other words, one thinks of the possibility of an area or a State with a separate language working up an agitation for secession from the nation that is India, in order to form a separate nation that would gain recognition by international bodies like the United Nations.

It is well known that before the completion of the process of independence and the integration of the States, this was indeed a very dubious and complicated issue. Apart from the general problem posed by the 560 and odd former princely States, there were the special problems created often by the statesmen in charge there, by the demand that the States be recognized as distinct nations. It is strange to recall that even the old Travancore State was one of these, apart from the two other classical examples of Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad. However, it may safely be said now, as a result of monumental statesmanship, all these dangers are well behind us now, except for the loss of portions of Jammu and Kashmir first to Pakistan and now to China as a result of very special factors. Although from one State one hears occasional reports of a demand for secession, there is reason to believe that this is a result of no more than political slogans and that, in practice, in any case, there would be very stern counter measures taken by the Centre and indeed by the country as a whole to prevent any such political slogans from developing into any active attempts to separate from the rest of India.

So far as the north of the country is concerned not only are there linguistic States but also in several States, superficially at least, only one language is the official language. These States are U. P. Bihar, M. P. and Rajasthan making up a total population of 175 millions. He would be a bold man who ‘would argue per contra that these 175 million people have learnt to live in amity with a full sense of emotional integration, merely because the official language of the States concerned is Hindi. Indeed some of the most virulent political struggles for leadership have been staged in these very States, and although at one time there was a proposal, based on a great deal of common sense argumentation, that the State of U. P. be split up into two with consequential peripheral rearrangements, one of the most important politicians of the country is reported to have declared that the partition of the U. P. could only take place over his dead body. This clearly proves that the real culprit in the lack of this unity is not the linguistic States but something else, and unless this ‘something else’ is carefully traced out and diagnosed, there is an imminent danger of a false prognosis and a great deal of ineffective and possibly mischievous action.

It is not clear how the ‘one language–one State’ arrangement that is now in existence holds any kind of threat to the unity of India. Language is essentially a vehicle for cultural patterns and for inter-communication in regard to current affairs. Since, with the advent of Independence, and the conferment of adult franchise as a concommitant of the western parliamentary form of democracy, it is very essential that the link between the voters and their representatives, in the legislatures and in the governments at various levels, should have the closest possible intimacy, this would have its maximum strength in uni-lingual states.

Problem of Sophisticated People

The fact that the literacy percentage in India is now round about 30 and that the truly literate percentage of the population would be hardly half of this, even linguistic sentiments would dimensionally be so small as to be easily outweighed in the balance by more natural aggregations of interests, such as regional, political, religious or economic. In other words, linguistic problems largely exist in the minds of only the more sophisticated section of the community and these have been using language as a peg on which to hang other ulterior motives. I do not believe that the man in the street or the peasant thinks of language with any kind of sentiment. All he is concerned with is that he should not be inconvenienced in the conduct of his day-to-day affairs, and even in this he is prepared to be surprisingly tolerant.

My view therefore is that the perils of linguism are artificial of a creation of a very small sophisticated minority and that it is almost the red herring trailed across the path by interested groups which have other aims and objects, more material than linguistic sentiment, in view. Of all the so-called dangerous issues, at present the subject of pejoration in India, linguism is the most innocuous, for it means the desire to separate in arrangements which would make for the maximum understanding and the readiest communication in regard to everyday affairs. To cite one example applicable to the sophisticated minority, the current controversy over Hindi is to my mind really a struggle for a somewhat unrestricted market for publications. If Hindi were to be more prevalent than is warranted by, say, merely its being an official language or as a lingua franca, obviously the reading public and of publications in Hindi would be increasingly large at the expense of the reading public in the other languages which might be destined to be neglected from a base commercial motive. In other words, if an option were to lie before an author capable of expressing himself in, shall I say, Gujarati and Hindi, it might very well be that he would prefer to write in Hindi because of the far wider reading public that he might have and therefore of the larger rewards that he might reap. It is here that a great deal of restraint is called for. Every language has a genius of its own and mirrors patterns of culture which do not conflict with but are complementary to the sister patterns of culture prevalent in India. It is therefore in the best interests of the country that all these vehicles of human transaction and communication should be given their maximum possible encouragement so that they might together contribute to the strength of the unity in diversity that is India.

The remedy for such false self-appraisals–whether of language or of national or communal character–is to mix freely and with-out inhibitions with others, and this implies means of communication in the shape of a common language. In other words, the more we acquire facility in another language than our own the wider is our horizon and the more the basis of a wider understanding. The academic bodies like the Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust are making systematic efforts to make the speakers of one language familiar with the cultures and ideas mirrored in the other languages of India mentioned in the Constitution, by the necessarily limited and unsatisfactory method of translation, and their efforts will bear fruit only if the study of languages becomes more systematic and purposeful in the school, the university and citizenhood (among citizens).

Fortunately, as Lancelot Hogben has claimed and tried to prove in his famous book ‘The Loom of Languages’, scarcely can anyone have any rational basis for the belief that he or she is congenitally incapable of becoming a linguist. If a language phobia exists, it must be a by-product of formal education or other agencies of social environment.

How true this is of India, with its post-Independence language phobias, which are the result of neglect of teaching languages to pupils no less than of the slogans of politicians or of vested interests! And yet how easy and how rewarding is the study of languages, especially in India, where they belong to two main language families, provided the aim is not perfect mastery but the more modest one of acquiring a small workmanlike vocabulary and getting a grasp of essential grammatical peculiarities.

But the private citizens’ efforts have to be reinforced by the purposeful efforts of the State. It is here that I see the greatest ambivalence of the Indian scene, a profession of deep concern the language and culture of minorities and a practice of direct but more often indirect, i.e., through official (myrmidous) denial of opportunities, of suppression and of compulsive use of the majority languages. It is principally this situation that has even created the antithesis of linguistic problems and national unity. Its remedy can only be in the rooting out of such fissiparous politics and vested interests by every citizen who has a concern not only for national unity but also for progress towards an international society in which India will be an honoured member.
Reprinted from Triveni, July 1963