Language refers to the framework of the trichotomy ‘form, meaning, function’ shaping ideas and beliefs through which an individual interprets the world and interacts with it. The language of a people reflects the ‘World view’ of that people in the form of its syntactic structures and untranslatable connotations and its denotations. The Linguistic Relativity hypothesis of Benjamin Lee Whorf describes how the syntactic-semantic structure of a language becomes an underlying structure for the ‘World View’ of a people through the organization of the causal perception of the world and the linguistic categorization of entities. As linguistic categorization emerges as a representation of worldview and causality, it further modifies social perception and thereby leads to a continual interaction between language and perception. The thesis gets further support and legitimacy through the works of Stephen Levinson and his team at the Max Planck Institute for psycholinguistics at Nijmegen, Netherlands and the work of Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University. The construction of worldview begins from fragments of worldviews offered to us by the different scientific disciplines and the various systems of knowledge which is essentially imparted through language.
There is an inseparable relationship between language and culture too. Can a language be taught without a supporting cultural symbols and cognitive expressions? Language is not just an abstract system; it is embedded in the culture it belongs to geographically. Without a social and cultural awareness, the beginning of learning a language does not take place. Children in the process of enculturation develop the required awareness of the cultural meanings of a word in a particular culture-specific context and place.
Thao Le of Faculty of Education, Tasmania University, Australia illustrates the same through an experiment. Children were asked what the word ‘Teacher’ and ‘neighbour’ mean to them; answers are as follows:
- ‘Teacher’ is someone who teaches at school and makes sure that you learn well. In High Schools, you have different teachers for different subjects (English)
- ‘Teacher’ is the one who knows what is best for you. They teach you the right things. You should show them your respect. (Vietnamese)
Whereas the first response indicates an orientation towards academic role and achievement, the second one explains the social role of a teacher. It refers to wisdom and cultural values attached to the word.
Let us take Indonesian example where a teacher is called ‘Guru’. Now, the term ‘Guru’ has its origin in Sanskrit which comprises of two syllables ‘Gu’ and ‘Ru’. ‘Gu’ denotes the spiritual ignorance that most of us suffer from, and ‘Ru’ means the radiance of knowledge that dispels the ignorance. In short, ‘Guru’ is the one who dispels the darkness of ignorance with the radiance of knowledge.
- ‘Neighbour’ is someone who lives next door (English)
- ‘Neighbour’ is the one who lives together with you in the same area. (Vietnamese)
The first response indicates the culture-specific individualism, whereas the second one reflects on the collectivism and community with emphasis on words ‘Live together’ and ‘same’. Even the Bahasa-Indonesia word ‘Tetangga’ is described by the locals as ‘People living around us’, which again reflects the collectivism aspect of the society.
The abovementioned experiment and example shows how language relates to the social, intellectual and emotional make up of a child living in a particular geographical area and social milieu. “Children are not passive language users. They are constantly engaged in creative construction with language” sums up Thao Le in his article ‘Children’s World of Words: A Developemental Perspective’
In this backdrop, I would like to reflect upon the historical development and the present Indian scenario of dealing with its 1652 known languages and the lessons learnt there from.
HISTORY:
Right since the revelation of hieroglyphic Indus script which is probably logo phonetic, in that it has both signs used for their meanings, and signs used for their phonetic values, India experienced layers of evolution of both civilizational development and the development of languages and scripts. The Indus Valley Civilization was succeeded by Vedic people around 2500 BC with Sanskrit as the principal language of communication, at least among the elite and the ruling classes of the society. The earliest Sanskrit verses of Vedas testify that Sanskrit had evolved in to a full-fledged language by this time. We have three stages of "Indic-vedic Sanskrit". Vedic and classical Sanskrit is often referred to as Old Indic, and the Prakrits as Middle Indic which may date about 400 BC to 1000 AD. The Middle Indic dialect on which we have most information is Pali; the language in which Gautama Buddha preached and Buddhist canon is preserved. At the end of the Middle Indic period we have materials known as Apbhramsas meaning 'off-branching'. From Apbhramsas developed the modern Indic dialects. Most widely spoken of these is Hindi. Others are Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Sinhalese in Ceylon and Romany, the language of Gypsies. Because of its religious associations, Sanskrit is in daily use even today.
The Kharosthi Script was more or less contemporary to the Brahmi script, appearing around the 3rd century BC mainly in modern-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, although some examples do occur in India. Like Brahmi, Kharosthi seemed to have been developed for Prakrit dialects (which was the common speech of everyday life as opposed to Sanskrit which was the liturgic language). Eventually the Kharosthi Script fell out of use by the 3rd or 4th century CE and the descendent of Brahmi eventually took hold in the northwestern South Asian.
Devanāgarī is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and South-East Asia. It is a descendant of the Gupta Script, along with Siddham and Sharada. Eastern variants of Gupta called Nāgarī are first noticed from the 8th century. From 1200 AD onward they gradually replaced Siddham, which survived as a vehicle for Tantric Buddhism in East Asia, and Sharada, which remained in parallel use in Kashmir.
The Mughal Empire that preceded the rule of the East India Company in India was a multilingual empire. People of different ethnic backgrounds with diverse dialects and languages comprised the Mughal Empire. The Mughals and the sultans who ruled various parts of India employed Persian and Arabic as the language of courts and administration, but the last few centuries of the Mughal rule saw the progressive emergence of Urdu, an idiom and speech that was an admixture of Persian, Arabic, and Hindi, with Hindi syntax and lexicon providing the base. Urdu was being established as a language of communication during the rule of Akbar. However, it was during the rule of Shah Jehan that Urdu attained the status and recognition of a court language.
There were at least fourteen to sixteen major languages spoken in the various kingdoms and princely states when East India Company became the paramount ruler of India. As far as language is concerned, they followed the tradition of using the Persian and Arabic languages for communication with the natives wherever such languages had been used in the Mughal Empire.
The British have been using English within the East India Company for all purposes. However, for communication with the Indian people, they tried to use the local languages or a language that had been in use in the past. Soon a body of people learned English and, when job opportunities were open with the government, these people who had learned and demonstrated their skill in English got jobs in the government. This created a demand among the Indians that they be given opportunities to learn English in the schools. Slowly demands were made in favor of the teaching and learning of English rather than Persian, Arabic, or Sanskrit. Soon the government began to curtail spending funds on the learning of Persian, Arabic, or Sanskrit.
A momentous decision was taken in the year 1835 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (later Lord Macaulay), that tilted the balance in favor of teaching English and European sciences and technology in the public schools supported by the government funds.
It was an amorphous character of content and utility of the Indian languages coupled with a desire to modernize the thinking and behavior of Indian mass by some social reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy that paved the way for establishing hegemony of English language in the post-mutiny years (after 1857) of British India. However, the British remained conscious of making their officers in administration learn the local vernacular languages to facilitate better communication and understanding of the ground realities.
Indian National Congress (formed in 1885) in its first-ever sitting in Bombay never considered language policy to be of paramount consequence even though it endeavoured to achieve cohesion and unity of thought and people. The participants had with them a language, English, which they all knew, and with which they could communicate with one another. It was Partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon that brought linguistic issue and category to the fore. However, the issue of language or, lingua franca was carefully avoided by the nation builders and leaders knowing the complications it may pose and the sinister shape it may take in the hands of the British masters.
Though ‘Hindustani’, an indigenous syncretic mixture of native words, idioms & phrases, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, had evolved to act as lingua franca for the Indian National Congress’ deliberations, strong use of Marathi, Telegu, Bengali and Punjabi kept dominating the intense political activities and Press at regional level. It was after the ‘Two-Nation Theory dye’ was cast Muslim League emphasized the importance of Urdu, whereas the Congress aimed at the evolution of a national lingua Franca based on Hindustani. For the Indian National Congress, since the advent of Gandhi, Hindustani was the lingua franca unifying both the Hindus and Muslims, the former generally preferring to write it in Devanagari and the latter writing it only in the Perso-Arabic, according to the underlying perceptions and assumptions of the Congress.
The issue finally became a very potent tool in the hands of British to foment disaffection and create schism among the most ardent believers of freedom. As Professor Paul Brass points out, 'the Hindi-Urdu controversy by its very bitterness demonstrates how little the objective similarities between language groups matter when people add subjective value & significance to their languages. Willingness to communicate through the same language is quite different thing from the mere ability to communicate' (Brass 1974).
Right from the election manifesto prepared by Indian National Congress in 1945 to the final framing and adoption of the Constitution on 26 January 1950, protection of territorial culture, language and script of the minorities and of the different linguistic areas remained the part of both the ‘Fundamental right’ and ‘Constitutional right’ of every Indian in the independent India. It was this embittered past that gave our leaders and constitution makers a vision to tread carefully and proceed with a very open mind and heart to deal with the issue of languages in India.
Extreme caution, at times, leads to blunders; and, that is what happened once the issue of official language was touched upon in 1950 by forming a Language Commission which decided to adopt the Soviet model developed and implemented by Lenin in USSR in 1920s and by Stalin in 1930s. The ‘Russian’ language was substituted by ‘Hindi’, turning a blind eye to the differences which bore disastrous consequences.
The issue of language transcended its normative limits and became a regional issue. Non-hindi states, esp. Tamil and Bengali reacted violently and forced their regional leaders to convene a conference of Chief Ministers of states which developed a compromise formula known as the ‘Three Language Formula’ (TLF). The 3 languages are: (i) Home Language/ Regional Language, (ii) English, and (iii) Hindi in non-Hindi speaking states and any other Modern Indian Language in Hindi speaking states.
There is no doubt that this policy “recognizes the historical multilingualism, the linguistic diversity and the reverence for ancient classical languages” (Harold F. Schiffman in “The Politics of Language: Linguistic Culture & Language Policy 1996) and is equipped with the desired potential to succeed than any other imported model in India. Gradually, through the development of institutional support in terms of researches and surveys to correct the omissions and incorporate the new realities, the Indian government has been able to give recognition to those small linguistic groups that are not given control of a territory but have elements to assert as larger groups – e.g., Maithali from Bihar and Konkani of Maharashtra. Despite bringing 22 languages to the 8th schedule of the Constitution, there are still about 20-25 languages expecting the same rights – e.g, Tulu spoken around Mangalore in Karnataka, Bhojpuri spoken in a large parts of Bihar & Uttar Pradesh.
LANGUAGE POLICY:
The language policy of India is basically embodied in part XVII of the Indian Constitution along with the eighth schedule in reference to articles 344 and 351 (which specify the languages of India for purposes mentioned in these two articles), and the articles concerning fundamental rights regarding language, education, and culture etc.
The language policy gives full freedom to the states to choose any language or languages spoken in regions as their regional languages and to have one or more of them as official languages by different states. However, for the Union, the Constitution prescribes Hindi in Devanagari script for official purposes along with English as an associate official language.
The Language Policy of India relating to the use of languages in administration, education, judiciary, legislature, mass communication, etc., is pluralistic in its scope. It is both language-development oriented and language-survival oriented.
The policy is intended to encourage the citizens to use their mother tongue in certain delineated levels and domains through some gradual processes, but the stated goal of the policy is to help all languages to develop.
The 8th Schedule of Indian Constitution acts as a tool to bargain and gain benefits for the languages. Once a language gets into this club, its nomenclature itself will change, status will change, and it will be called Modern Indian Language (MIL), Scheduled Language (SL), etc. This Schedule has emerged as the most important language policy statement. It clusters thousands of written and unwritten languages and dialects into two broad categories of scheduled and Non-Scheduled languages.
The languages of the Schedule have preferential treatment, and the languages listed in this schedule are considered first for any and almost every language development activity. They are bestowed with all facilities including facilities to absorb language technology initiatives of the government.
With all these provisions for education in multiple languages and mother tongues, the Sixth All India Education Survey (1999) informs that 41 languages are taught as school languages, and 19 of them are used as media of instruction at different levels.
CONCLUSION:
As religion, propagation of a Universal or single Language too, is a utopian expression of conflicting human fantasy and rival claims of sanity. The more it takes the pretense of reason, the more it grows hollow and comical. John Gray in ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ succinctly explains that “all conflicts between rival claims about the best life for humankind are collisions of illusions”; and I think, Universal Language falls into this category.
Inasmuch they prescribe a single bond of identity, they fall incompatible with the truth of value-pluralism. If there is anything distinctive about the mankind, it is that it can thrive in a variety of ways as depicted by our experience and evidences of history.
However, there has always been a proven relevance of utility-based minimum standards that lay ground for a peaceful co-existence among people of diverse language, dialects and scripts who always remain different despite sharing common nationality and geo-political boundaries.
India’s tryst with its myriad languages, dialects and diverse culture supports the aforesaid thesis well with its successful implementation of adopting languages to enrich its basket of multilingual and multicultural democracy. We have learnt that a multilingual, multicultural state does not wither away, nor does a single-language nation become infallible by not giving room for any dispute or dissension. “The end of toleration is not consensus. It is co-existence.”Said Thomas Hobbes; and I think I would better subscribe this view.
