By Manjima Misra
The re-emergence of the intense Gorkhaland movement in the first week of June 2017 has a history spanning well over two decades. It was recently triggered by the West Bengal governments decision to make Bengali compulsory in all the schools. In July 2017, A. R. Rahman, Indias Oscar-winning music composer, got embroiled in an unnecessary controversy for performing more Tamil songs than Hindi ones at a concert in London, due to which his fans had angrily walked out.
As these instances show, the case for and against linguistic autonomy has always been a topic of heated discourse in our country. It has given rise to various forms of turbulence since the very inception of India as a nation state.
Multilingualism in post-Partition India
Multilingualism has often served as a pretext for political regionalism and even secession, in our country. Back in the post-Partition times, Jawaharlal Nehru deferred the uncomfortable question of multilingualism until the formation of the States Reorganisation Commission in 1953. At heart, Lal Bahadur Shastri was a strong proponent of Hindi as the official language. However, in 1965, he had to give in to the demands of the non-Hindi-speaking states of the South. He realised that the unity of the country was under immediate threat due to the widespread backlash in the South. There was further support for linguistic autonomy from the East, most notably from right-winger N. C. Chatterjee. He had observed that the greatest integrating force at that time was the juridical and legal unity of India, which was validated by the fact that the top-most courts functioned in English.
Linguistic chauvinism
Linguistic chauvinism is often just another product of a majoritarian impulse, be it at the state or the national level. Equating the Hindi heartlandwhich forms a quadrilateral ranging from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Chhattisgarh in the south, and from Rajasthan in the west to Bihar in the eastwith the idea of India itself is definitely problematic. This notion reflects various cultural prejudices as echoed in the remarks of a former Rajya Sabha member: If we were racist, why would we have all the entire South . . . Tamil, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra . . . why do we live with them? While his comment was undoubtedly directed at the notion of skin colour (in the wake of attacks on African students) and not language, such prejudices have their own detrimental implications on the question of language. DMK leader and Tamil Nadus first Chief Minister, C.N. Annadurais reply to the favouring of Hindi as the natural lingua franca of India is worth revisiting. He said, If we had to accept the principle of numerical superiority while selecting our national bird, the choice would not have fallen on the peacock but on the common crow“.
Repercussions of the language debate
Harold F. Schiffman has argued that the lack of a symbolic national language causes English to take over as the instrumental language in India. Replacing English, which is our colonisers language, is a part of the nationalist decolonising project, but the pertinence of this project in the age of multinational corporations, the global capitalist market and inter-state migration is debatable. In the 1990s, Jyoti Basu, the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, had admitted to his historic blunder of trying to impose Bengali and scrap English in primary education, a blunder that had cost the Left Front its middle-class electoral base.
Road ahead
Since a language policy can either lead to consolidation or fragmentation of the nation, a careful, balanced and comprehensive approach is needed. The States Reorganization Commission had concluded in its 1955 report that linguistic homogeneity is an important factor for administrative convenience and efficiency. However, this is not an exclusive and binding principle that overrides all other considerations.
A cautious perception-building and setting of the scenario is required for framing a language policy that not only leads to the containment of explosive and disruptive tendencies of this discourse, but also one that resolves them clearly. Containment and management is invariably a temporary way out, and conflict resolution cannot take place if the projection of Hindi as the nations lingua franca gets perceived as a part of the project of building a Hindu Rashtra.
On a positive note, as professor Sanjib Barauah has observed, The Indian Constitution makes breaking up and creating new states relatively easy. Therefore, one must give credit to the constitutional flexibility which accommodates linguistic autonomy, and hence, the redrawing of states along linguistic lines. Whether this will result in fragmentation or consolidation will largely depend on political leadership and mobilisation both at the state as well as the national level.
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