Carrier of culture, weapon of politics

‘Let governments rest assured that we as a people have remained beautifully unified through all these times. It is not language that has ever divided us’

Shanta Gokhale

Janmashtami festival celebration in Mumbai. Pic credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Pic used for representational purpose only

Language is culture. It is a carrier of identity, of a unique way of looking at the world. The first word a baby hears and the first lullaby that puts it to sleep is in its birth language. The first story a toddler hears from its grandparent is also in its birth language. It remains the language of emotion even when it stops being the language of thought. 

I shall not go into the history of why, during British rule, English became the language of thought and the lingua franca between educated Indian elites. However, after Independence, language became one of the most emotionally charged issues to be fought over and settled. Independence had brought the country freedom from alien rule. Now the people of the country sought cultural freedom. Kannadigas, Marathis, Banglas, Telugus and Tamils wanted to shape their own destinies within the larger destiny of the country. 

The linguistic reorganisation of states in 1956 was the result of this push. While most people got what they wanted, Maharashtra had to fight a bitter battle against the Centre to be granted its independent linguistic state with Mumbai as its capital city. The problem was typically of the rich against the poor, the mill owners against the migrant labour from Maharashtra’s hinterland. 

The mill owners too were migrants. But owners of property and holders of economic power are never called migrants. Baghdadi Jews, and Parsis and Gujaratis from Gujarat contributed to the economic and infrastructural development of the city. The Jews left Bombay for greener pastures. The Parsis were too small a community to count. But Gujaratis had the numbers, the wealth and the political clout to claim Bombay as their own in the linguistic bifurcation of Gujarat and Maharashtra. Even after Mumbai was finally granted to Maharashtra as its capital city in 1960, it continued to be a multi-linguistic, multi-cultural salad bowl. The more it advanced industrially, the more migrants it drew, particularly from the industrially underdeveloped states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. 

All through the early years of Independence, the Centre was at pains to make Hindi the chief language of communication in India. But once states were made linguistic entities, Hindi was seen as the language of the northern states. This was so even in Maharashtra where Marathi uses the same script as Hindi bar a few letters, and Hindi is easily understood although less easily spoken. For as long as Hindi was not politically imposed, Maharashtra was fine with having it as one of the languages spoken in its capital. Mumbai is the home of the Hindi film industry. Half the heroines in the early years of Hindi cinema were Marathi—Shobhana Samarth and her daughters Nutan and Tanuja, Durga Khote, Leela Chitnis, Nalini Jaywant, Nanda, Usha Kiron and Lalita Pawar. But the language of Hindi cinema then was Hindustani, the living tongue of Delhi and its environs. 

Hindi as we know it today was formed for political reasons by the British in the 19^th century. It was created to replace earlier prestige languages like Awadhi and Braj. Based on the Khariboli spoken in Delhi, Meerut and Saharanpur, it replaced the Persian and Urdu words of Hindustani with Sanskritised coinages. The literary history of Hindi goes no further than the last two hundred years. All other languages of India have evolved naturally from old to medieval to modern and have a rich literary history going back, in the case of Maharashtra, to the Maharashtri Prakrit spoken in the region during the 2^nd to 3^rd century CE. 

Politicians do not know this history. Certainly not the political party workers who bashed up a shopkeeper in the distant suburb of Mira Road. Theirs was a blatant act of linguistic chauvinism. The workers belonged to the now-marginalised Maharashtra Navnirman Sena that stands on two paper-thin political planks—the weaponisation of the Marathi language and showing North Indian migrants “their place” in Mumbai. 

This time, “the arrogant enemy” was Gujarati, not North Indian. This person committed the “crime” of not responding to a Marathi speaker in Marathi, which “offended” the customers. Not in any real way, but politically. Someone else in their place might have been  more concerned about getting what they wanted and used  broken Hindi to say what it was rather than waste time in forcing him to speak in a language he did not know. Had the shopkeeper been Tamil, they might have used sign language to get through. But then these men owed allegiance  to and were encouraged by a politician  to feel offended (read weak) in order to be strong (read beat up people). 

Such acts are low-hanging fruit for media commentators to knock down. This time, they glorified an act of narrowness and arrogance as ‘Language Wars’, making their critique as superficial as the act itself. The use of muscle in a society which hopes to be called civilised is to be condemned without qualification. A just pride in one’s language and culture, when combined with a deep love for it, does not express itself through violence. And when, fuelled by manipulative politics, it does, it is the underprivileged migrant who bears the brunt.  

Commentators did not bother to look further than the act to discover how migrants or hosts make linguistic adjustments when it is a question of survival. In Matunga, otherwise known as Matungam for its predominantly south Indian citizenry, vegetable sellers from UP have acquired a smattering of Tamil because Tamils find Hindi difficult to speak. In Pune, the very stronghold of Marathi culture, Marathi autorickshaw drivers have spoken to me, a Marathi speaker, in Hindi. Pune is host to students and techies from all over the country. Since autorickshaw drivers cannot tell where passengers come from, they speak to everyone in Hindi. Language is culture but it is also a tool for everyday communication. In Kolkata, a non-Bengali would have to pick up Bengali sooner or later because the local people, even the elite, converse exclusively in Bengali. Marathi speakers are easy with Hindi and to some extent with Gujarati. The resistance to Hindi comes only when it is politically imposed.   

A government that understands language as the very breath of a people will not attempt to introduce an alien language without consultation with thinkers, scholars and educationists of the concerned state. I call Hindi alien because it does not resonate with Marathi speakers emotionally or spiritually. Take the naming of India’s military response to the terrorist attack in Pahalgam as Operation Sindoor. A Marathi bridegroom does not trace the parting in the bride’s hair with sindoor. It is kunku that carries the same emotional charge in Maharashtra as sindoor in the North. In the old days, when a man died, his widow erased this mark of soubhagya, good fortune, from her forehead. Her ‘blank’ forehead spoke ever afterwards of her misfortune. Maharashtra being a progressive state, widows no longer do this. But the emotional memory is powerful.

The problem with the Maharashtra government’s proposed introduction of Hindi as a third language from Class 1 was the apparent speciousness of the rationale behind it. The official statement read: “By aligning with the National Education Policy’s goals, Maharashtra positions itself as a state committed to education reform and national integration, while also promoting the functional utility of Hindi across diverse regions.” Elsewhere, the words “cultural understanding” also appeared.

Education reform is always welcome when it serves the interests of the people concerned. But ‘national integration’ is a political idea manufactured out of the desire to control. It suggests a wish to fix what is not broken. How do we define national integration? How do we test it? Why does the central government feel the country lacks national integration? Given our immense diversity of languages, customs and religions, I would say we are a remarkably integrated nation. We rise as one when the country is threatened by external forces. We rise as one when a particularly horrendous rape occurs anywhere in the country. We rise as one when a natural calamity like a tsunami strikes. Perhaps the idea of having the whole nation speak Hindi of whatever kind they can manage comes from the childish idea of national unity that politicians appear to have. I also suspect that their idea of unity comes very close to the idea of uniformity, which of course goes against the very grain of this country which is defined by its diversity.

Take the next idea of the “functional utility of Hindi across diverse regions”. Who needs this functional utility? Only those who migrate to other linguistic states. Bengalis, Tamilians and Marathis living in the North need Hindi to communicate with the local populace. They learn it and speak it. But how is Hindi useful to a child in rural Maharashtra who works on his father’s farm while attending a state-supported school and is surrounded by people who speak his language? Why should the people of Kerala be able to speak Hindi to one another? The utility value of English was established in India a couple of centuries ago because the job market demanded it. Hindi does not promise us jobs. Who then stands to benefit by people all over India being able to speak Hindi? Only the people of the Hindi heartland who, like our English rulers, can then travel all over the country and be understood in their own language. This produces a certain arrogance in them that is offensive to such of their hosts as choose to be offended.

Even as MNS workers were beating up a non-Marathi shopkeeper, Deepak Pawar, a political science professor at Mumbai University and founder of the Marathi Abhyas Kendra, was spearheading a non-violent, non-political resistance to the imposition of Hindi as a compulsory language from Class 1. “The opposition wasn’t to Hindi per se; it was about democracy, about the federal spirit of the Constitution,” he said in an article about him in Hindustan Times. “When common people become assertive and politically mature, political parties, no matter how divided, are forced to respond,” he explained. 

The state government did respond to the movement by stating that it never meant to make Hindi compulsory. The idea was to introduce into the curriculum a second Indian language of a child’s choice for “cultural understanding”. A child of six has a choice? It also hastily altered its rather naïve suggestion that a child could choose any language and a school would teach it if there were a minimum of 20 students opting for it. It now says that even if there are less than 20 students opting for a language, arrangements will be made for it to be taught online. So, a child of six goes home, does its homework, then picks up its phone for a lesson in Kannada? What about playtime? What about encouraging less rather than more screen time? 

Governments must learn to think through their ideas. They have the power to impose and control. But once in a while, when the imposition cuts too close to the bone, the people of a democracy wake up to their rights and resist. Life has always been complex in this diverse country. It has become even more so with technological advances that have had far-reaching effects on people’s lives. Let governments rest assured that we as a people have remained beautifully unified through all these times. It is not language that has ever divided us. What has divided us in recent years is political engineering executed to suit political power games.

Shanta Gokhale is a novelist, playwright, translator, cultural critic and theatre historian. Her many honours include the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for her contribution to the performing arts.