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Multilinguality for India

RAMA KANT AGNIHOTRI

I write this brief paper in response to the papers published in Seminar 11 (‘A Language for India’) which included contributions

among others from D.D. Kosambi, Punya Sloka Ray and Sardar Jafri. There appears to be almost an unquestioned belief that future India (the one in which we are living today) needs ‘a language’ and ‘a script’ and that the chosen language should be Hindustani and the shared script we need to adopt should be Devanagari, preferably Roman. The issue further examines in some detail the status of English, Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu. It also often assumes that a shared script

automatically makes learning another language easier. Several contributors refer to Hindi as our rashtrabhasha. I feel that while we need to re-examine our concept of ‘language’, we must appreciate the fundamental multilingual nature of India. We also need to revisit the Constituent Assembly debates and the Constitution of India itself.

We need to remind ourselves that the constitutive feature of India is heterogeneity of language, religion and culture and that it constitutes a linguistic

and a sociolinguistic area because and not in spite of that heterogeneity. P.B. Pandit often reminded us that variability in linguistic behaviour facilitates rather than obstructs communication. It seems it is axiomatic for most that to be a nation one needs symbols: a flag, a national anthem; also national animals, birds and fruit!

The concept of a nation state emerged very powerfully in the post 1940s world reconstructed by those who won the Second World War and by the colonial powers who were gradually forced to leave the countries they had ruled for centuries. It seemed obvious to the powers that be that there is no alternative to the equation: ‘one territorial space, one nation, one religion, one language and one script’.

That human societies are in essence defined by a multiplicity of often fluid symbols and that it is the multiplicity of voices and scripts, of religions and knowledge systems that is constitutive of being human, was lost sight of in planning the nation state.

In formal linguistic terms, the standard definition of language is conceptualised in terms of a pairing of a lexicon and a syntax in a rule governed fashion. Since Panini, linguists have been engaged in serious theoretical formulations and vetting their proposals through careful empirical verification, bringing us to a point where the blueprint of a Universal Grammar is beginning to emerge and where it is becoming increasingly clear that in the world of language, as Sapir told us long ago, Kings and the Macedonian swineherds, Confucius and the head-hunting savage of Assam walk together and if that’s not what we believe, something is wrong with us and not with languages.

Amitava Roy

Mantesear 3Circle

Fibron F.P School

Burdwan

Yet, what is constitutive of being human is not ‘a language’ but multilinguality. Once we accept that our linguistic behaviour is subject to the constraints of Universal Grammar, we are defined more by a ‘linguistic repertoire’ than by ‘a language’; in our day to day behaviour, we control a whole range of varieties and languages and we use or mix them with considerable subtlety consistently trying to modulate our behaviour to accommodate the needs and aspirations

of our interlocutors (who, of course, are themselves engaged in doing the same, if Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims are to make any sense).

My response to Seminar 11 is located in this concept of multilinguality as opposed to that of ‘a language’, a concept which we need to abandon except in a political or perhaps a pedagogical sense in some situations. I also feel that for most contributors (largely because they are looking for ‘a solution’ for a problem that perhaps

does not exist), language is just a means of communication, a tool. It is not. Language (as multilinguality, of course) is constitutive of us. I mean that it is the basis of our social identity; it is not only a medium through which we acquire knowledge but it also significantly structures our thoughts. Though in the political arena, the association of some prestigious varieties with social power is unmistakable, it is important to understand that in no sense language is monolithic. It always has traces of past borrowings and contacts

Arindam Basu

Jaguria Pry School

Burdwan

and convergence at all levels and very often its current use demonstrates trajectories that span across varieties and languages.

I am convinced that even some of our best scholars do not pay enough attention to the scholarship and depth of the linguistic debates of the Constituent Assembly. Statesmen and scholars who participated in these debates were no ordinary mortals. Several languages were proposed as the possible national languages of India, including English, Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu, Bengali, Telugu and Sanskrit and in each case the supporting group marshalled highly persuasive evidence.

Persons no less than Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Rajendra Prasad among others, were seriously engaged in resolving the various highly complex language issues of a country in the process of being born. It was not easy to finally agree at the formulation of Art. 343: ‘The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script’, perhaps the most reasonable solution to the complexity of the then historical and political situation.

It is important to remind ourselves and everybody we meet that India does not have a national language and for good reasons; that Hindi and English are our official languages.

There is no doubt that we are under a constitutional obligation to promote the cause of Hindi and try to make it the lingua franca of India. However, we need to do so with at least three riders: Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burman languages and other Indo-Aryan languages of the rest of the country are as systematic and dignified as Hindi; that Hindi is only the official language of India; and finally, it has the potential of becoming the lingua franca of this country if, and that is the third and the most important rider,

what is promoted is the common man’s Hindustani rather than the purified, sanitized and Sanskritised Hindi. Hindi needs to respect the multilingual ethos of India within its domain and in its coexistence with other Indian languages, including English and Urdu.

The Constitution is also sensitive to the needs of each individual and gives minorities the right to education in their mother tongues and the right to all citizens to appeal for justice in their language. The Constitution also has the 8th Schedule. It is not called ‘the National or Regional Languages of India’; it is just called ‘Languages’ and one should not be surprised that its number has increased from 14 to 22, with more to come soon.

It is an open schedule and in principle includes all the languages of the country. It is indeed a pity that no government has tried to follow the Constitution of India in letter or spirit. It was indeed a compromise and a consensus. But, as Granville Austin (The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1966) who subtitled his chapter on the issues of Language in the Indian Constitution as

‘The Half-hearted Compromise’ says: ‘Yet the language provisions are not just an unhappy compromise; they have a more positive side. They show that the large majority of the Assembly believed that the use of many Indian languages and of English was compatible with national unity and with the evolution of a national spirit’ (Austin, 1966/2000: 307).

I wish we could appreciate the fact that there is no inherent, sacred relationship between language and script; all the languages of the world can be written in one script with minor modifications,

Bankhim Karmakar

Sadar North Circle

Madiya S.C Pry School

Email-prasantakm5@gmail.com

Malda

just as one language can be written in all the scripts. Sanskrit in India is written in 14 different scripts; Panjabi was written in the Perso-Arabic script, then in the Devanagari and now in Gurumukhi. Why do we wish to lose that diversity? For those who use a particular script, it has great value in terms of ease and aesthetics. It is true that some communities may for certain specific purposes borrow other scripts such as Roman or Devanagari,

but I don’t think any community which respects its heritage would give up its script for ease. I don’t think China has done so.

We are also plagued by serious misconceptions about some scripts being more scientific than others. To me it seems common sense that any person who would sit down to develop a script for a language would start with a one to one correspondence between sound/idea and symbol in some way or the other which, unless it is systematic, will not work and may not even get initial acceptance.

It is equally true that over a period of time serious gaps emerge between the spoken and the written language. Once again, the reasons are simple.

The spoken language changes much faster than the written, and the written language fails to keep pace with the changes in the spoken; we have thus lost the vocalic ‘r’ and retro-flex ‘sh’ of rishi in Hindi (this is the way we speak it today) but we retain the traditional spellings! There is no doubt that the Quran, the Gita, the Granth Sahib and

Bireswar Mukharjee

Tarakeswar Circle

Kunjaban Pry School

Hooghly

the Bible can be written in the Devanagari, Roman or Perso-Arabic scripts and some people would indeed need that. But I don’t think that the millions who read these scriptures in specific scripts would like to see it happen to them.

The question of having a script for a nation logically drives one to the almost absurd position of having ‘a script’ for the whole world. If I know English,

I know the Roman script; it does enable me to ‘recognize’ the German alphabet but it does not automatically help me to read German! That is hard work, as I know from experience. Whether you are talking of language or script, the issues of identity, individual and collective, should never be lost sight of. Multilinguality subsumes mutiscriptality.

Nothing else perhaps illustrates the concept of multilinguality better than the Hindi-Urdu-Panjabi (and now at least for the educated, English) continuum. Where

does Panjabi stop and Haryanavi begin; where does Hindi stop and Urdu begin and where for the educated does English stop and Hindi or Panjabi begin? To which language does an utterance likemeraa bhaaii kaam kartaa hai and my father too belong? Hindi and Urdu, like Serbian and Croatian, constitute eminent sites for examining the relationship between language and politics. There is no exaggeration in saying that people slept with Hindustani one evening and were shocked into waking up into the worlds of

Hindi and Urdu the next morning; Serbo-Croats more recently slept with Serbo-Croatian and were woken up with Serbian and Croatian. It is not an issue of being right or wrong; it is more an issue of identity formation.

You want to be an independent political identity; you choose Hindi (Hindustani in Perso-Arabic script) in the Devanagari to be your official language; it does not matter that

people there speak 1652 different languages belonging to four different language families. Another piece of land wants to be a nation state. It does not matter whether most people speak Panjabi or Sindhi or Urdu; you choose Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script as your national language.

In the process of sanitising Hindi and Urdu, we have lost a rich heritage, a shared literary and cultural tradition, to the extent that today, even though for a linguist Hindi and Urdu continue to be the same, they have been lexically driven so far apart that a Urdu speaker

Debabrata Karmakar

Gutkara 1 Circle

Abirampur Pry School

Burdwan

fails to understand Doordarshan Hindi news or can’t figure out what is going on in a class of Hindi literature and vice versa! We have today succeeded in formalising the equation between Urdu and Muslim and Hindi and Hindu. Nothing could be more unfortunate for a tradition in which one could not guess the religion of the author from her/ his poem or narrative. Yet, it is the Bombay films that are most popular in Pakistan today and, till recently, the most sought after videos in India

were those of the Pakistani Urdu plays! Let’s try to save that tradition, not in the name of nostalgia but in the name of healthy multilinguality and social togetherness.

Nothing has done more damage to the underprivileged sections of society than the increasing domination of English in the Indian society. This has, of course, been compounded by the experts of the ELT industry across the world. It is true that there are major state initiatives to introduce it from Class 1 for all children, but with increasing state withdrawal from the education system, this really means nothing. First, there are no teachers; if there are some, they don’t know any English themselves;

and if some do know it, there are no materials and support systems.

In the capital city of Delhi, there is of course great enthusiasm; we tie up with the British Council to invite experts straight from the mother country herself (even though English, almost across the whole world, not only in Africa, the Middle East or Singapore but also in the UK and the USA, is taught by Indians).

The Commonwealth games are round the corner; so we need boys and girls to pick up tennis balls and we need teachers with functional fluency in English.

We have no vision of how millions of marginalised children will ever get anywhere close to this language of power. I think it is important for our education planners to realise that if English has to be checked from consistently widening the gulf between the elite and the marginalised, it should become a part of the Indian multilinguality. In India it can only

survive in collaboration with other languages; otherwise, there is no reason to believe that what happened to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit or Persian will not happen to English. It is often argued that English has massive support from technology; yet it is now increasingly becoming obvious that other languages are appropriating that technology fast. The pedagogy of English must get located in multilinguality.

In fact, I wonder when and if the teaching of English (as well as other languages) will get out of the traditional mode of a linear and additive approach, a method that runs counter to all canonical principles of language acquisition.

Perhaps some day we will realise that languages are not acquired in bits and pieces of alphabets and words, but in terms of whole texts and discourses and that there are no fixed, prescriptive ways of constructing a discourse. Even the kind of ‘communicative dialogues’ that are taught in the ‘modern English medium schools’ do not really take place in any real world.

What we need is to allow children to negotiate texts. In the beginning it does not matter what language they

use and what mistakes they make; what is important is that what they are looking at or saying makes sense to them. Form will follow meaning. Don’t try to teach it because you cannot. Even a simple reflection on the pronunciation of ‘e’ in words like ‘elephant, make, fear, see, battle, university’ and so on, would make it clear that it is criminal to teach ‘e’ for ‘egg’.

Many people believe that Sanskrit is the mother of all human languages; many more believe that even if that’s not true, it is certainly the mother of all Indian languages. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Tibeto-Burman, Munda and Dravidian languages have

very little to do with Sanskrit in terms of its structure; many of course borrow heavily from the Sanskrit lexicon just as Sanskrit borrowed heavily from the then Dravidian and other languages. Hindi and English, like any other language, are full of words from other languages; languages flourish in each other’s company. They begin to die when you sanitise them.

Even though the Indian Constitution suggests that Hindi should borrow from Sanskrit, it explicitly encourages borrowing from other languages. Words such as baaltii, darvaazaa, kamiiz, almaarii, vakiil, mag, kaar, bas and so on, are all of foreign origin,

but nobody (I hope) plans to replace them and most will recognize them as proper Hindi words. Let that process continue. We already have hundreds of words from Sanskrit; more are welcome but let’s not ‘drive people into Paradise with a stick.’ If Hindi has to prosper and really become a language acceptable to most people, it must keep its doors open to all

languages. Our education system must provide spaces in which interested students can learn Sanskrit but forcing it with a stick once again would lead to a waste of time, money and energy.

One of the major concerns of Seminar 11 was education, including medium of instruction, employment opportunities and social mobility. We first need to recognise that there are hundreds of marginalised groups where millions of children are systematically denied access to school: there are children who are

permanently labelled as criminals and dirty, children from low castes, girls who can never go beyond primary school because they belong to their in-laws and because the total environment at home, on the road to the school, in the classroom and school, including the teacher, hide severe threats of sexual harassment.

Language is an additional barrier. Many children leave school because their language is insulted in the classroom; in fact, it is often not even recognised. Not many teachers even know that the children they are teaching come from diverse linguistic backgrounds. It is just assumed that education can be

conducted only in ‘a language’ which must be shared between the teacher and the taught. Since that’s rarely the case, the silence and dropout rate is really frightening.

Every individual in the class and the class as a whole constitutes a symphony of a multilingual repertoire and we need to recognise it as a resource, teaching strategy and a goal. Research has for long now demonstrated the positive correlation between multilinguality on the one hand and scholastic achievement, divergent thinking,

cognitive flexibility and social tolerance on the other. Most children’s voices in India will echo what one of my young informants said:

‘Since Hindi is my mother tongue and I’ve learnt it at my home, I feel very comfortable to use it while talking to my parents. In school, I learnt English; therefore, while relating to friends and siblings,

I prefer English. Hindi is also my language with my friends and siblings. Some of my relatives hardly know any other language but Bhojpuri.

I like this language as I’ve been using it since childhood. With my teachers and strangers, English is quite comfortable, being an international language. Also to sound formal I love using English.’

We need to capitalize on this rich verbal repertoire, both in language planning and language pedagogy. Multilinguality in the classroom can constitute a site for subversive discourses about the nature and structure of language and a range of social and political issues leading to meta-linguistic awareness and reflections on possible social change.