Half way through the battle,
Arjuna had doubts about the morality of war he was engaged
in. Half way through the battle, when his chariot weels had
been immobilized, Karna wondered where he went wrong. tting
under the tree where he would die a few moments later, half-way
rough his life, Krishna began pondering over the meaning of
all that he did said, or those that he didn't.
These dilemmas and doubts
are a part of our heritage of scholarship d valor. The questions
that Rama Kant Agnihotri raises here can be possibly raised
only after a lifetime of experience of working in different
ids of language sciences that he has been engaged in.
Some of the profound issues
which Rama Kant has sensitized us about in these lectures
and which have set me into thinking more and more about them,
include the following:
- What would
have happened to modern linguistics if its proponents and
practitioners, like their counterparts in Comparative Philology
tradition, were multilinguals?
- Is speech community
a mere cultural construct -insulated from socio-political
changes and upheaval ? Does it have a fixed or a flexible
border?
- Must linguistic
analysis be based on simple and innocent constructs or could
modern linguistics be loaded with biases of all kinds? Language-bias,
for instance! (It cannot be summarized better than in Rama
Kant's own words: ". ..it was not particularly useful to
continue working in an ideologically neutral space if one
were to seriously explore the relationship between language
and society".)
In one of my earlier pieces
-while introducing Rajendra Singh' s work, I had said -a speech
community often gets the grammars it deserves. From , what
I read in Rama Kant's texts, many of these ideas seem to reverberate.
The author himself talks about the derivative nature of work
Indian researchers engage in -merely replicating ideas of
the western scholars, ough Rama Kant is also aware of the
importance of theoretical positions that are valid universally,
or are, at least, typologically important. A lot of what he
did during his doctoral days had to do with finding out where
the meeting point was between two positions -one, which believed
that no two individuals speak alike, and hence it is the linguistic
diffusion that must receive our attention, and the other,
which believed that irrespective of how much we differed and
the ways we might do so, we essentially speak the same language.
A very important point
which emerges from the author's observation of his own recent
collaborative studies, and one which we must not miss is that
in exploring relationship between Language and Society, 'use'
may be more important than 'attitude' -social variable over
social-psychological variable. The concern for language ecology,
or the human condition of deprivation and suffering -much
of man' s own making, have occupied important place for him
here. "In the management of hunger, illiteracy and poverty",
does the ruling elite use (or, misuse) language to maintain
status quo, or can it be used as an instrument of change?
It is in this context that his discussion on the theory of
relativity should be understood. How 'free' is the so-called
'free variation' in phonology and morphology has also occupied
his time. How our engagement with idealized structural systems
has kept us away from the specificities of power and language
relations in society can be very well seen in Rama Kant's
lectures.
I am confident that the
Foundation Day Lectures 2001 published now will fire a lot
of heated debate among Asian and western linguists alike,
particularly among the members of the sociolinguistic community.
We publish it both virtually and actually for wider dissemination
of this important work.
