CULTURE AS BATTLE OF WORDS :SURVIVAL OF MULTILINGUALISM
A human child is born into three spheres of inter-connectedness, the social, the environmental, and the cosmic. It learns its relationship with the environment and the cosmos. All these relationship are rule governed. Learning the rules underlying the relationship and activities around it is a time consuming matter. No wonder that the human child has longest period of socialisation among the living belongs.
The inter-connectedness finds expression in different ways in the monolingual and multilingual words. In the former, it is seen as an adversary relation with nature and a relation of domination and subordination in society. It is based on the affirmation of ego. In the multicultural, multilingual world the relationship with nature is one of balanced coexistence. Both the hymns of the Rig Vedic Aryan and the earliest black men, dedicated to the elements, speak of living in their terms. These societies through extended families, kinship and putative extension of these ties have a relationship of interdependence and complementation. This is based on the sublimation of the ego.
A human child is born with genetic memory. The child also is born with a learnt memory which is intra-somatic, and externally stored memory which is extra-somatic. The child's capacity to learn, coupled with what it learns from sensory encounter with the immediate eco-culture, propel the learning child to go to the outside world and learn from the library and the external world.
The interconnectedness and the memories form the cultural matrix of a child. Naming or labelling is the first expression of cognition. Through labelling, one not only shares experiences with some, but also separates from others. This is an act of identity. Through this, the world becomes a lived experience, and a constant comparison is effected with what is observed in oneself with what is observed in others. The philosophico-religious social traditions are modified and reinterpreted in the light of one's lived experience and one grows up as a well rounded social being. If, however, the tradition is at variance with the lived experience, cognitive imbalance takes place. Take, for example, the use of English as the language of primary socialisation and primary learning for a non-English mother tongue child in India. The home language has words for trees and creepers, grasses and greens, fruits and flowers, shades of colour, birds and beasts, and the ever changing moods of nature. None of these are available in English either at home or in school. Therefore, this acts as the first base of cultural alienation. The Indian kinship terms are three dimensional and they, being expressive of extended relations, build a sense of inter-connectedness in the social network which are neutralised by the English kinship terms. This leads to cultural anomie. The myths and symbolisms of a culture cannot be transmitted through the norms of another language. Painting, Dancing, Architecture and such other forms of cultural expressions become alien to the growing child and it develops cultural perception blind spots. All these transmit a value which pushes the child towards a metropolis outside immediate culture and as one grows in "sophistication", one tends to accept a metropolis outside the country, in an English mother tongue region. Thus it will be seen that it is the higher level competence in the second/foreign language which substitutes initial mother tongue education that results in semilingualism and semiculturalism.
The representation of the world at any historical time may be regarded as consisting of not only layers of geological ages, but layers of ideas leading to contemporary culture. Its apprehension are articulated in languages. It is this articulation which makes the animal human. Only the homo loquen becomes homo sapien. The homo sapien is born into a tower of babel, where a language binds and many language free from the confines of social groups and indicate the universality of humanity. If the home language is muted by suppression or formation, creativity and innovativeness suffer and the universality expressed through many realities remains a distorted vision.
Affirmation, denial or disputation, culture is a battle of words. Unlike the animal kingdom where physical strength determines the survival of the fittest, culture is being and becoming. The western culture emphasizes the manipulation of being "est etre qui engendre especes" (the world is what you make it is - Jeures) and seeks the affirmation of being in the duality of I and you, right and wrong, here and hereafter. The Indian philosophers have emphasized the transcendence of being and the unity of being and becoming. Thus the metaphysical and physical merge into a single quest. If the western culture speaks of man is, Indian culture speaks of is man, according a priority to is, etre, as prior to the coming of man there was being. It is in this fundamental sense that culture is a battle of words.
That man is born equal has become a cliche. Man is born equal only in the meta-physical sense of undifferentiated being preceding. Once man is born into the world of memories and inter-connectedness, he is born inequal. Establishment of egalitarianism in an essentially unequal world is the second sense in which cultures represent battles of words. All theories, whether of physical sciences, or of social sciences, thus become instruments of such battles and have enabling qualities for the proponents and disabling effect on the opponents. For example, when Herodotus identified ethnic groups in the Near East almost 2500 years ago, by implication the referred to groups in the fringe of Byzantine or Near Eastern empires. By definition, the ruling majority was not ethnic. Only minorities, refugees, manual guest workers, people coming in train of conquests were marked as ethnic groups. The contemporary world having converted socially neutral categories into socially marked groups is enmeshed in the same conflict.
Language, being fundamental to human existence, is a fundamental human right. Every human being has the right to have free access to the languages which transmit accumulated human knowledge and experience. To control and dictate the language of access is an act of positive discrimination and positive suppression of human talent. It deprives individuals and societies of free choice, curbs creativity and innovativeness and restricts freedom. Imposing restrictions of language choice is a dictatorial act which threatens the very being of a pluralistic world. The sense of belonging world are related. Full realisation of one is impossible without the other. Any manipulation of language which restricts participation or potential participation in all the three spheres imposes limits on freedom and threatens not only the existence of a pluralist nation, but the humanity itself which is plural in its manifestation.
War and conversion are two mechanisms used to consolidate power, and create larger aggregates to affirm collective ego. Both aim at repainting the past, annihilating cultures, capturing and reshaping the inner minds of peoples in their own image and destroying their souls. There rarely comes a moment in history when violence of war is sought to be resisted by non-violence of the spirit and conversion is sought to be resisted by affirming the respect for the different. The Kalinga war in India, where a people resisted an empire builder, leading to the death of a million people and detention and destitution of one and a half million, resulted in the light of the Buddha spreading all over the world. The Gandhian non-violence movement challenging another empire has been a source of strength for the struggles of the Blacks and the Browns, the tribals, and the socially and culturally underprivileged all around the world. Thus it will be seen that there are those who propagate a single path to human salvation, be it Communism or Capitalism, Christianity or Islam, English or Chinese. There are thousands of small groups, less organized, less visible but equally numerous believing in the freedom of each culture pursuing its own path, but under constant threat of loss of identity.
War and conversion are justified in the name of one world. The picture of such a world was predicted by Orwell in his Brave New World in 1984 where under unassailable status quo only one standard in behaviour, attitude, activity and thought was permitted, uniformly were the slogans under which the haves seek to convert the have-nots into never-to haves, and those dissenting marginalised and kept below the line of subsistence. It is under these circumstances that battle of words have substituted wars and so much energy and effort is spent to control human communication. Since different languages are different ways of perceiving and expressing reality, it is important for those believing in war and conversion to destroy many languages and many cultures whose existence fundamentally question their ideology.