WHITHER
INDIAN LANGUAGES ?
Language is so familiar to us that it is difficult
to take stock of it systematically and objectively. Most of the time
we look upon language merely as an instrument, something to be used
and left alone, so to say. It is only when we become conscious of
difficulty either in the course of using it in order to make ourselves
understood or in the course of selecting a language for a given situation
that we take notice of it—only to lose sight of it again once the
difficulty is removed. In a way this casualness about language is
man’s glorious asset—consider the ease with which any child, born
rich or poor, in cultured or primitive surroundings, can learn at
least one language unless it is totally deaf or dumb or with a serious
mental handicap and consider also he ease with which that child once
it masters it by the age of seven can unthinkingly think and feel
his way through life in the medium of language. But when serious problems
arise with language this same casualness gives people a dangerous
sense of confidence; everybody considers himself an expert and offers
solutions that either don’t work or work only with deleterious effects.
Thus anybody who let’s say speaks Spanish natively considers himself
qualified to teach the language to a non-Spanish-speaking person;
even selection committees that ought to know better concur in this
mistaken view. By the same token every Indian who considers himself
educated has his pet solution to the problem posed by the diversity
of languages in India.
INDIA’S
LANGUAGE DIVERSITY:
A
HANDICAP ?
Looking a little more closely at this
problem is perhaps a useful point of departure when one tries to arrive
at the language picture of India at the start of the 21st
century of the Common Era. In what sense is India’s language diversity
a problem? (How is it that nobody thought it was a problem, say, in
the year 1501? How is it that nobody thinks of the language diversity
of Europe as anything more serious than a nuisance for travelers and
advertisers?) Now the fact that India has many languages is neither
good or bad: it is simply the legacy of history just as Europe’s many
one-language nation-states is a legacy of history. What is good or
bad is what we make of this fact. Indians have tended so far to leap
to one of two extremes. They either decide that the multiplicity of
languages is a silly nuisance all the way, that the linguistic states
was a serious mistake, and that whatever pet union language one espouses,
Hindi or pet English or even Sanskrit, should take over all the fields
of communication that matter. Better each of them young and make it
the medium of instruction at all stages of education. A place to the
local lingo may grudgingly be conceded in the kitchen council or the
neighbourhood chat. Alternatively,
they decide that pride in one’s own language is not complete without
an obstinate refusal to adjust or compromise with other languages
or accept the need for certain all-India communication networks. Adopting
either of these two extremes, namely, the suppression of regional
languages or intolerant pride in regional languages amounts to a misuse
of national linguistic resources. Nobody in this right mind would
suggest that airplanes alone or bullock carts alone ought to be the
means of transport in a huge and highly populous country like India.
We need airplanes AND bullock carts AND a variety of other vehicles
to fulfil the country’s needs. Decisions about language should be
taken in a level headed manner after a through analysis of costs and
benefits. There are some signs that forces of common sense and good
will are slowly reasserting themselves in decisions about language
in today’s India. One only hopes that by the turn job in making people
at large and decision-makers in particular realize the folly of these
two extremes.
LANGUAGE
DIVERSITY: A POSITIVE VIEW
To put the matter positive terms, EVERY
language in India (English included) is a link language for SOME purpose.
Thus standard Marathi is simply the link language between different
regional and social dialects of Maharashtra, some being varieties
of Marathi, others being linguistically more or less distant from
Marathi. If a young Tamilian from Pondicherry can specialize in French,
there is no reason why he shouldn’t be given the opportunity to learn
the Marathi language and literature within the school and college
system if he wants to. After all the union languages need not be the
only channel between the regional languages--- shouldn’t there be
somebody to translate directly from Marathi to Tamil or the other
way round? (This is of course especially true of neighbouring regional
languages like Telugu and Oriya.) Instead of making a bugbear or a
fetish of learning additional languages, we should amplify, improve,
and diversify language-learning facilities in a planned manner. Language-planning
does not spell language compulsion, but language freedom. To learn
a new language is to gain the membership of a new community, a new
freedom. The so-called three-language formula, it is hoped, will be
called upon as a broad aim, a direction, and not as a straitjacket
for imposing equal ‘suffering’ on Indians from different language
regions. (Thus, the so-called argument that EVERY Hindi speaker must
learn one of the four Dravidian languages even in the absence of any
practical or cultural motivation just because the speakers of Dravidian
languages are expected to:’suffer’ learning Hindi as a union language
is little better than a piece of silly churlishness.) Again, if the
educators of Maharashtra need all help and encouragement to improve
the quality of teaching English as a second or third language in Marathi-medium
schools, it is also important that they be given help and encouragement
to improve the quality of teaching Marathi as a first or second or
third language in English-medium or Hindi-medium schools in Maharashtra.
(After all, isn’t Marathi the link language of the region?:) If the
present drift and lack of will in this area allowed to continue, we
shall by the end of this century have on our hands a generation of
Indians who are not articulate in ANY language at the formal or informal
levels of communication. The deceptive Phrase ‘working knowledge’
can pave the way to an inarticulate and therefore eminently manageable
multitude--- a prospect welcome only to totalitarian governments or
business monopolies.
LANGUAGE
SLAVERY
A
BORROWED CONSCIOUSNESS
I have so far that equality and fraternity
are ideals that are as much valid in the field of languages as they
are in the fields of polity and economy. I shall now go on to show
that if we purse and practise linguistic equality and linguistic fraternity
in the next fifteen years we should win linguistic liberty as well.
Unfortunately, in our obsessive preoccupation with India’s language
diversity. We tend to overlook the more important problem of India’s
language slavery. The crucial point is briefly this—if we learn another
language like English or Sanskrit or Hindi or Arabic to gain a fresh
mode of thinking or feeling our way through life, to gain a supplementary
or even a complementary view of life, we have added to ‘our’ freedom;
on the other hand if we learn the other language like English or Sanskrit
or Hindi or Arabic so that it supplies our only view of life or even
supplants our native wisdom, then our freedom stands abridged and
our capacity for self-reliance gets eroded. Whether we become slaves
of an indigenous tradition (witness the barrenness in respect of the
prose of ideas in Medieval and post-Medieval India) or of an imposed
or imported tradition makes no difference. Language is not merely
a means of conveying thought and feeling, it can also be the means
of concealing the absence of any true thought or feeling. (Witness
the turgid prose that many Indians claiming some eminence write.)
When the proposal to introduce Marathi
as a medium for college-level lectures was being mooted in the 1950s,
a colleague of mine at the time cynically observed that English is
the best since one can merrily bluff away without our students getting
wise to our bluff it will be only a mild exaggeration to say that
Indians have been bluffing like this for the last ten centuries at
least --- the channel of bluffing may be a classical language like
Sanskrit or Persian or a foreign language like English. If our regional
languages come into their own, the bluff will be called in no time,
as a college lecturer trying to bluff in Marathi quickly finds out
to his cost.
LANGUAGE AND DEVELOPMENT
A
POSITIVE VIEW
Until recently we were called an under
developed country. But of course, as history tells us, we were once
one of the economically and culturally more developed societies in
the world of those times. When we stopped developing economically
and culturally, we became an under developed country. Now we are being
called a developing country? Is this merely a euphemism, a slave to
our hurt feelings? Not quite. We can certainly observe the slow transformation
of an agricultural, feudal, rural, traditional society with poor communications
into a more industrial, egalitarian, urbanized, innovative society
with better communications. Our languages nurtured in the older way
of life have not fully kept pace with the development. Instead of
becoming a vehicle of development language becomes a drag as when
an Indian patient gives a verbose, imprecise, erratically selected
and organized life story to his physician who has to piece together
from this rigmarole the semblance of a crisp, fairly accurate, relevant
statement of the complaint in preparing the case paper.
If the regional languages have to come
into their own, they should become capable of coping with the triple
communication needs of a modern society. Even if India were a largely
monolingual developing country, it would still face this problem.
The needs are the following:
i) the need for impersonal, standardized
suitably technical expressions of science, administration, and other
routinized content:
ii) the need for a richly personal,
non standardized, creative expression of novel ideas and feelings
in literature and thought:
iii) the need for a public vehicle
of shared ideas and feelings in journalism, corporate life, politics---
a vehicle of wide access and appeal and yet free from either bombast
or staleness.
The triple instrument will be forged
by our writers and speakers. What terminology committees or literary
workshops or debating competitions can do is merely to assist this
activity. Our educators can train our readers and listeners to be
more discriminatingly and more open-mindedly receptive to communication.
The linguistic path to the 21st
century is both a matter of avoiding pitfalls and temptations and
a matter of clear-eyed, vigorous, deeply cooperative communicative
activity. It is not a ready path waiting for us to follow but a new
path for us to beat and occasionally blaze into existence.
Ashok R. kelkar
A-2, parimal
1239-A, Apte
Road
PUNE-411994
COLOPHON
This was published in: Indian 2001,
ed. Ratanlal surana. Kolkata: Mitra parishad, 1987.
