RECENTLY, M.K. Stalin regurgitated the century-old Dravidian rhetoric of “Hindi imposition” in his renewed attack against the New Education Policy (NEP). But in a welcome rebuttal of sorts, Chandrababu Naidu hinted at reviving a time-honoured system of language education when he proclaimed that he was “going to promote 10 languages, including international languages, in every university.”
Naidu deserves our applause for merely making this statement of intent, and one fondly hopes that his lead would be followed by other states.
At the heart of Mr. Stalin’s outburst lies the familiar ideological discourse of Tamil linguistic separatism dating back to E.V. Ramaswami Naicker, the Justice Party and its offshoots, which yielded fructuous political harvest for the Dravidian parties.
While this was largely limited to Tamil Nadu, a parallel development was occurring.
In 1928, the Motilal Nehru Report, for the first time, tabled the proposal of the reorganisation of India on linguistic basis after independence. That became a reality with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956 against virulent nationwide opposition. The Act was entirely the product of Nehru’s propensity to succummb to organised blackmail.
With it, linguistic chauvinism which had been confined only to Tamil Nadu, became a pan Indian malaise. Intriguingly, it was (undivided) Andhra Pradesh which became the first state to be created on a linguistic basis thanks to the riotous outrage that followed Potti Sriramulu’s fast, which terminated with his death.
In retrospect, two factors have caused the maximum havoc to the unity and integrity of India after independence: Nehruvian secularism and the linguistic reorganisation of the country. In reality, it was not reorganisation but linguistic division. It gave a new map to India which did not exist even at the apex of British colonial rule; a map that ignored and violated our protracted civilisational history and lived social experience.
The combined denouement of all these phenomena is the fact that after 75-plus years, there seems to be no strand unifying Bharatavarsha.
IT IS ASTOUNDING as to how almost every element that had harmonised our society since time immemorial has been weaponised against itself and others in order to break this harmony.
At no point in our history was language a divisive factor.
Why, for example, do we find Kannada inscriptions in Jabalpur dating back to 1500 years? Or Chola-era Tamil inscriptions in Kashi? Or Pandyan copperplate grants in Ujjayini? Or Pali inscriptions of the Satavahana period authored in Mathura but found in Maharashtra?
What impelled the Kalyana Chalukya emperor, Vikramaditya VI (1076 – 1126 CE) to bestow such munificence upon the talented Kashmiri poet, Bilhana? What motivated Sri Krishnadevaraya to extend unbounded patronage to poets and men of letters hailing from Vanga Desha (Bengal), Odhra Desha (Odisha), Karnata Desha (Karnataka), Telinga-Andhra Desha (Telangana and Andhra) and Dravida Desha (Tamil Nadu)?
These innumerable hoary precedents were largely maintained even during colonial British rule notwithstanding Macaulay’s fatal disruption of our educational system.
One can cite the example of the (formerly) illustrious Mysore University, which used to offer a high standard of education in most Indian languages for more than half a century.
For instance, Sri Rallapalli Anantakrishna Sarma decorated its portals as a renowned Telugu Pandit. A healthy mastery over Sanskrit was mandatory for students who wished to specialise in Kannada language and literature. At least three generations of Kannada teachers, professors and litterateurs became proficient in Bengali solely to savour the works of masters like Bankim, Tagore, et al.
The same holds true for Andhra Pradesh. For more than a decade, Professor T.V. Venkatachala Sastry (who is still with us) served as a distinguished Kannada professor at Osmania University. Till date, Telugu people show great respect to a person who is learned in Samskr̥tāndhramu (Sanskrit and Telugu). Andhra had “adopted” Sarojini Naidu as its own daughter, a human expression conveying the deep bond that its people had forged with Bengal. Like Karnataka, it too made valuable contributions in popularising Bengali literature and culture via translations, plays, anthologies and biographies.
To spell out the obvious, the luminaries who sustained and nurtured this healthy tradition of linguistic and cultural exchange were intrinsically endowed with open-mindedness and magnanimity. Their ancestry and mother tongue were purely incidental. Thus, some of the revered names in Kannada literature hailed from non-Kannada ancestry. D.V. Gundappa, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, P.T. Narasimhachar, and T.P. Kailasam hailed from Tamil ancestry; Devudu Narasimha Sastry, T.S. Venkannayya, and T.R. Subba Rao from Telugu; and D.R. Bendre from Marathi.
WHICH BRINGS US to the vexed question of Hindi. The emphasis on and efforts to propagate Hindi as a national language arose in the specific context of the freedom struggle. It was devised as a vehicle to forge national unity under trying circumstances and was not envisaged as a conspiracy to impose some sort of linguistic hegemony upon the whole country. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was its foremost proponent.
However, this spirit originally motivated by nationalist sentiments was derailed after Independence by the Nehru government which went on a zealous haste to propagate Hindi nationwide. The move expectedly backfired, spectacularly backfired in Tamil Nadu, where Dravidian ideologues siezed the issue in their bid to capture political power. The fire that they lit spread to Karnataka and Maharashtra as well. It was further exacerbated by the linguistic division of India.
To cite only one appalling consequence of this ill-informed policy, we can visit Maharashtra. In January 1974, fifty women were stripped naked and driven out of the state simply because they couldn’t speak Marathi.
Just as how it is stupid and dangerous to legislate morality, it is disastrous to legislate language especially in a civilisational nation like Bharatavarsha. Our linguistic legislators after independence would have done well to study the manner in which our languages have evolved and spread over thousands of years.
The disaster is clearly evident. Without exception, all Indian languages are hurtling towards extinction. More than two decades ago, a venerable Tamil scholar told me that Tamil universities had not a single Tamil language scholar who could read classical Tamil. The same is true of classical Kannada as well.
This pathetic state of affairs is the toxic outcome of parochial politics, which shows no signs of abating. A rather recent strand of this politics has recast the function of language as merely a medium of communication. To this, another ingredient has been added. We are asked to believe in something called the “language of food,” meaning that which earns us a living. Both these ingredients represent reductionism and regression of the worst sort.
MULTIPLICITY OF LANGUAGES is the sign of the cultural health of a country. Historically, all languages evolved and flourished through robust mutual interchange.
English for example, shows an amazing propensity to accommodate words from all languages and make them its own. Throughout the colonial period, it was a practice of many Indian and British universities to publish exhaustive lists of words from Indian languages that were newly added to the English dictionary in their official journals.
This open-minded receptiveness is what makes English still the global lingua franca.
In sharp contrast, our languages are dying because they have stagnated and the stagnation has occurred due to, among other things, forced linguistic insularity. The current purveyors of this discourse — most notably M.K. Stalin — will find some other pretext to agitate and sully the waters even if their demands were met. In reality, it is not their love for their mother tongue or hatred against Hindi that is at work — it is their politics that they perceive as being endangered.
Dr. BGL SWAMY, a world-renowned botanist was the Principal of Presidency College, Madras at the height of violent Tamil chauvinism. In an anguish-laden essay, he describes how all non-Tamil language departments were bulldozed within half a decade.
Till the Dravidianists acquired power, the college had a vibrant Kannada department with its own library. But now, the department was summarily shut down and all the books in the library were poured under a tree in the campus. The librarian was asked for an explanation for this conduct. This is what happened next.
“It rained heavily that night. Mother Kannada was drenched in rain and slush. The next afternoon, she burned under the blistering sun. The librarian feared that the impurity attached to her death would be blamed on him. He hastily ordered his underlings to transport them to a safe place. Accordingly, the pile of books were unloaded in the lavatory attached to his cabin.”
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