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,
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.
