Without knowing those details, one can read the contradictory life of Indian languages in that line. The currents of time have washed them along the banks of the present, but we do not know how modern they really are. What is the test of modernity for Indian languages? There has never been a barometer. Some might suggest that a quick adaptation to the world of gadgetry and new media may be a solution. But it is an uncertain test as technology is only a carrier. It is like Unicode for Indian languages, an information technology standard that ensures portability across all digital platforms of the 21st century, including social media. However, most of the business that is done on social media and through sophisticated smartphones is a thing of the past.
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The role of Indian languages has been confined to the Smritis; To play a fringe role in present-day economic activity, where the English have ruffled all their wings. In other words, Indian languages have mostly become the shelter of feelings, relations, local, kinship. On the contrary, the transactions of logic, science, business, diplomacy are done through English. The walls have become longer and thicker.
In a Kannada essay written in early 1993, linguist KV Narayana wrote: “Kannada has preserved its distinctive qualities while coexisting with Sanskrit, Prakrit, Persian and Arabic languages. But this cannot be said that it would be the same with English. No language that faced Kannada had modern and global interests like English. It would not destroy Kannada but cut off its wings. Its royal power to maintain the ethnic-specificity of the language Will try to keep it, but with an English face.” It resonates for every Indian language.
There is an additional burden for vernacular languages, which have to carry the underlying code of identity – caste, linguistic, geographic, tribal, ethnic or religious. It is not easy for them to pulverize the variety of cosmopolitanism displayed by the English.
How many Indian language dictionaries in recent decades have seen updated versions, capturing and adjusting to new realities that get updated faster than new versions of smartphones? Such vocabulary exercises should have been permanent and ongoing, but how many state governments or autonomous cultural bodies pursue it? The dictionaries we still rely on in many Indian languages are those put together by missionaries or Indologists in the 19th century. Between the 1950s and 1970s, linguistic states sparked some renewed enthusiasm about updating our languages, but after the 1980s it all began to fade.
For a short period in the 1990s, language universities revived the idea of pride. But they could not be scientific or technical centers anyway. Their operations were confined to the humanities and social sciences, and there methodology and work areas were being influenced by English and some other global languages. For Western intellectuals, local knowledge through Indian languages became a vast resource or raw material for anthropological, ethnographic and literary studies in English. Indian languages enriched the worldview of English.
At the same time, crude versions of language activism, which spoke of exclusion rather than reconciliation and dialogue with the world, took hold. One can classify it as Shiv Sena model.
As economic liberalization and migration became more pronounced over the past few decades, some of the exclusionary ideas of linguistic states suddenly became redundant. To address this crisis, Shiv Sena in Maharashtra combined speaking for Marathi identity with speaking against Muslim identity. Recent events in the party have brought this difference to life. Eknath Shinde faction said on record that Uddhav Thackeray faction is abandoning the Hindutva ideas of Balasaheb Thackeray. However, no one asked Shinde: What if the Hindutva and Hindi promoted by the BJP put the Marathi identity in jeopardy?
This notion of threat from Hindi and Hindutva hegemony has been eloquently presented by Tamil Dravidian parties. It is argued that the federal and economic autonomy of the linguistic state is a strong counter to the centralization impulse of the nationalist parties. But one cannot ignore the fact that the sub-nationalists of linguistic states also speak a language of exclusion and exclusiveness. They generalize hatred to some degree. They identify with each other to isolate and to blame. The pride in Indian languages is not in being modern but in reviving the glory of an imagined past.
Linguistic cultures were not exactly what they were or should have been. They have a nucleus that accommodates the universe. They have a nucleus that accommodates the universe—one that blends with the world, expands its attraction, yet remains independent. Many writers of Indian languages in the early 20th century provide evidence of this. Rabindranath Tagore remains the best symbol of this liberalism and implicit cosmopolitanism.
At the beginning of the new millennium, many Indian languages aspire to the status of a ‘classical language’ along with Sanskrit. They became more interested in displaying their antiquity. It was strange that the surviving languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution began to seek a grand mausoleum for themselves. It started with Tamil demand, then Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Odia followed. Soon, granting classical language status became a political task for the central government.
Nearly two decades later, if one surveys what these languages have practically achieved other than pride, the results are pathetic. For example, in March 2022, in the upper house of the Karnataka legislature, a question was asked on a central grant for the Center for Kannada Classical Languages at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore. The answer was that the state government had reminded the Center in January about this.
It appears that while the linguistic states have lost their pride, the Center does not want to disturb the hegemony of Hindi. According to the 2011 census data, the number of Hindi speakers has increased from 36.99% of the total population of India in 1971 to 43.63% in 2011. The migration of people from north to south has led to a greater presence of Hindi in the southern states. In Tamil Nadu, the size of Hindi speakers almost doubled between 2001 and 2011. Meanwhile, English registered a 15% increase in speakers across the country over the same period. People who are bilingual or trilingual have a boom in English being recorded as their first or second auxiliary language. If there was a census now, these tendencies would have established themselves further.
English is considered the highway of economic progress. Not surprisingly, in the last decade, influential sections of the Dalits and backward classes have demanded English-medium education over education in their mother tongue. When the National Education Policy in 2020 called for greater emphasis on Indian languages, author and activist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd argued that “the common argument that English-medium education will alienate people from Indian culture has proved to be misleading propaganda.” ”
Not surprisingly, many state governments revamped their policy in response to the demand. Andhra Pradesh government started English medium education in all government schools in 2019. Similarly, in 2018, Karnataka introduced English medium classes in government schools, arguing for 1,000 English medium schools in semi-urban and rural areas.
In this context, we return to the question of the modernity of Indian languages. What should it be? Perhaps, they must escape the trap of extroverted nationalism of linguistic states in order to be adopted by the wider world. To grow, Indian languages need to interact and borrow as much as they want to give. It may well work for him to think of cosmopolitanism as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appia put it: “There are two varieties which are intertwined in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that go beyond those to whom we belong and like relationships, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The second is that we take seriously the value of not only human life but of particular human life, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that value them.” Linguistic states often created conflict between the two aspects. Is.
The author is a senior journalist and author.
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