VIPIN KUMAR CHIRAKKARA
The state of the controversy
As the debate on the three-language policy has intensified, what was originally an exchange between ministers of the union government and the government of Tamil Nadu, or between leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam (DMK), has become a subject of commentaries and criticisms coming from observers, intellectuals and activists.
The union government says that no state could be exempted from the implementation of the three-language formula as envisioned in the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and adds that Hindi is not made mandatory under the present formula. The condition is that two of the three languages must be native Indian languages.
The DMK leadership argues in response that the three-language policy can still be an indirect route to push Hindi into the state. The latter has appeared firm in its argument that it is the state’s prerogative under the federal system to determine its language and education policy (though during emergency education was shifted to the concurrent list of the union government).
It also opposes the measure adopted by the union government, that is, to link the funding under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan to the implementation of NEP 2020 and the language formula it includes. The parties which are not in alliance with the DMK in the state allege that the DMK has staged this conflict in order to ignite sub-national/regional sentiment to strengthen its position before the elections.
In the context of the controversy, it seems important to consider and discuss one intervention in particular, the one that has come from Yogendra Yadav, an opposition activist and former psephologist. Unlike other commentaries on the subject, his intervention, first published as an article in Indian Express, included a few direct and public suggestions to Tamil Nadu on the advantages of accepting the new three-language policy.[1]
Although he does not indict the DMK in the way the other parties did, he does mention the context of the assembly election in Tamil Nadu next year while explaining his points. It would nevertheless appear a balanced intervention as he also criticized the Hindi-speaking states for ignoring other languages and especially the south Indian ones. But as the exchange between the two governments grew into a controversy in the next few days, he made fresh observations through a set of video commentaries on the subject.[2]
This was when the DMK explicitly termed Hindi as a threat to several Indian languages. His comments and suggestions soon drew sharp critical responses from the DMK leadership. The objective of this consideration is not to engage with the entirety of the issue but to discuss in particular the disagreement of Yadav with the DMK on the question of Hindi, place together a few formulations drawn from studies of language politics in modern India, and connect them with the present state of the controversy.
Attack on Hindi
Intervening in the debate, Yadav pointed out one particular moment on which he said he would make a “friendly disagreement” with the DMK and the chief minister of Tamil Nadu M.K. Stalin. In all the aspects that are debated (such as funding, federal autonomy, delimitation), Yadav said he would side with the DMK.
In a thirty-minutes long talk, Yadav reminded the viewers about his tweet criticising the alleged high-handedness of the governor with regard to the policies of the state government in Tamil Nadu. He added emphatically that he opposes the imposition of Hindi (just as Tamil Nadu does) and has gone on to demand that measures such as the national celebration of “Hindi diwas” be stopped. But the one argument in which he would disagree with Stalin is the latter’s statement that Hindi has swallowed about twenty-five languages in north India.[3]
This, according to him, is a different kind of argument from the rest of the debate. Let us quote him here: a “chief minister of a state and that that too representing such a deep, rich language attacking another language is not done”.
Finding the DMK attack unbecoming, Yadav reasoned “that what [Stalin] says about Hindi actually applies to all other languages. This is how standard modern Indian languages have evolved, by bringing together many other languages which are today called dialects. This is not just Hindi.”
He explained further that there is a threat to Indian languages but that is not from Hindi: “the challenge to Indian languages is not from Hindi; the principal challenge comes from English. Save Indian languages, yes, I completely agree, but save from what? Can we talk about the English hegemony and the challenge that all Indian languages, Hindi and Tamil included, face?”
As he attempted in his article, he continues to advise Tamil Nadu to adopt any other Indian language in place of Hindi (as the NEP does not mandate that the third/second language should be Hindi) and end the controversy.
In his disagreement, Yadav nevertheless reminded the speakers of Hindi (among whom he includes himself) that the fundamental problem did not lie with Tamil Nadu but with north India itself, in that the latter did not venture to teach and disseminate any of the south Indian languages in the north and instead chose to implement the earlier three-language policy through the adoption of Sanskrit as the third language.
There seem to be some serious logical and historical misconstructions in the argument that Yadav has made in the controversy. They are broadly related to the understanding of Hindi as a language, the standardisation of languages in India, the positioning of Hindi and English in the debates on Indian languages, and the question of introducing an Indian language instead of Hindi as the third language. These are the broad issues that come up in the disagreement. It will be thus better to respond to the disagreement on the basis of these.
Can Hindi be attacked?
What does it mean to attack a language, when we say that it is “not done”? Is it simply the case in which a chief minister of a state launched an attack on another language, in some sort of a deliberate human act against an objective or passive entity called language? The question is, in other words, whether Hindi exists as a language independent and innocent of a context of patrons, protagonists and speakers, so that a leader can attack it (perhaps in the way the Luddites attacked machines in the nineteenth century England).
At least as he sounded so on the chief minister’s statement. Yadav seems to assume an objective existence of the language, Hindi as such, and then proceeds to disagree with the attack on it. Even if we accept the word “attack” in all its nuances, the DMK criticisms are made not on Hindi as such but on the projects to impose Hindi and on the claims that Hindi is the language of the largest masses in India (reflected apparently in the official statistics of Hindi speakers).
The processes in which speakers of several languages in the north such as Bundelkhandi, Chattisgarhi, Kumaoni, Angika, Magahi and so on are treated in various surveys and census data as speakers of Hindi are also quite widely studied in India in recent times. G.N. Devy’s works are well known in this regard.[4]
All this would show that Hindi, too, has been a product of conscious human activity, historical moments of valorisation and institutionalisation, and determination of political mission and purposes. It has its champions and formal users (if not lakhs of speakers in the realm of the everyday speech) whose initiatives are the subjects of suspicion.
The DMK attack should be taken to mean a criticism of all these agential elements and activities. In such debates there is hardly anything called an attack on a language. Since Yadav mentions standardization immediately, this raises a question conversely whether it is the promotion of Hindi as it is today that he says should not be attacked.
It has been historically recognised that at the core of Tamil Nadu’s assertion of federal autonomy, a problem around the promotion of Hindi language was always present. It is therefore not clear why Yadav is alarmed by this particular point (the statement that Hindi swallowed several other languages) when he agrees with the DMK on everything else in the same debate.
In addition, Yadav views this attack literally as one from a leader “representing such a deep, rich language attacking another language”. He seems to assume that these languages occupy equal status in India. Formally, in the book, that may be true, but in the popular perceptions they do not enjoy an acknowledgement of equal status.
Tamil, and all the languages of southern India, underwent systematic provincialisation since the adoption of the three-language policy. Hindi and Tamil do not exemplify a relation of equality; it is an unequal relation of power. Information regarding Hindi is wide in Tamil Nadu and the other southern states through various media from the times of the popular cinema and the television of national broadcasting, but the knowledge about the languages of the south is scarce in the north even among the educated.
This lack of knowledge includes a lack of the knowledge of the correct names of the south Indian languages, as well as a lack of information about the differentiated identities of these languages with regard to the states in which they are predominantly spoken. However, instead of considering the two languages in terms of their relations of power with each other, Yadav views the conflict as a sad instance in which two Indian languages try to belittle each other in self-defeating manners.
Hindi, Indian languages and standardization
In his response to the DMK argument that Hindi swallowed twenty-five languages of north India in the process of its valorisation, Yadav says that the same actually applies to all the other standardized modern Indian languages since all of them have evolved through the subsumption of many other languages/dialects.
With this, he conveys that standardization is not, per se, a problem unique to Hindi deserving further debate and theorization. By doing so, he ignores the histories of standardization of languages in India. It is true that standardization was common to languages like Hindi, Bengali and Tamil.
But it is also worth recalling that several languages, including Bengali and the much older Tamil, went through processes of standardization as early as in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was quickly followed by many other regional languages. Hindi, as scholars of language including Yadav himself pointed out, is “younger” in this regard.[5]
Hindi was standardized under a historical condition much different from the conditions in which other Indian languages were standardised. While Bengali and Tamil underwent philological projects and compilations of reference sources during the early colonial periods, mainly due to the presence of the Company and the British presidencies, Hindi came into modern being only during the time the nationalist movement and consciousness attained some presence and structure.
As Francesca Orsini, a theorist of the language politics of north India would say, the Hindi public sphere is a product of the early twentieth century.[6] She identifies the period of 1920 – 1940 as the period of the most notable institutionalisation of Hindi in north India. The delay in the making of Hindi as a modern entity, the political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj had pointed out earlier, was also due to a lack of consensus about which among the myriad varieties had to be standardised.
While their histories are different, they are not merely temporal differences with the substance being identical. The ideological objectives structuring these two temporal frames were also conspicuously different and these differences affected the future political careers of these languages too.
The standardization of Bengali and Tamil were products of the presence of the British power in the respective regions. In the centres of British power came up new educational institutions (including the first modern universities), the printing technologies, magazines and newspapers, translation projects and a host of new types of job opportunities.
For availing all these, obviously there were tendencies to move towards the speech of the administrative centres and enhance one’s linguistic abilities in accordance with the requirements of that speech.[7] Though it was the centre of economic and political activity that determined the standard, the process of standardization in the case of these languages was, in a manner, equally self-induced.
Many languages and dialects did indeed get eliminated in the process but there was still an absence of a consciousness that the language standardised was the language of a national population in the entirety of the British colonial territory of India. Hindi, on the other hand, was constituted by drawing on elements from several other languages, of the bhasha traditions and Sanskrit, that would suit the requirements of representing the modern nation state to be attained soon.
One of the central objectives in the standardization of Hindi, as it was largely achieved in the early twentieth century, was to place it as the agential language of nationalism and the nation state, and for this very reason, a sense of difference did not get built into its content and perspective.
Its promoters, if not the profound champions like Madan Mohan Mālavīya, not merely sought to erase the multitude of non-standardised languages in the north but also wanted it to dominate over the already standardised languages of the southern Indian states.[8]
Difference in languages and dialects
When we mention an internal sense of difference in languages, we must refer to two aspects which appear important. One is that the languages and dialects are not always, and solely, separated on the premises of the geography of its speakers; they are not simply regional separations. They are also separated along lines of communities and other constitutive elements of the social order.
The history of the Hindi-Urdu/Khari Boli-Braj Bhasha debates, although much of it characterised only the milieu of the elites, is emblematic of this problem. In his book Hindi Nationalism, Alok Rai outlines the history of the making of modern Hindi which included processes of rendering its association with Braj Bhasha as a “legacy of feminine association” and attributing everything amoral to Urdu treating it as a language of “courtesans” and as “the spent language of male excess”.[9]
In this vein, in the making of the Hindi literary tradition, Orsini tells us that the devotional poetry, including those written by Awadhi Sufi poets, was included in the Hindi literary tradition while ghazals and love poems became part of the Urdu literary tradition.[10] So there was a careful and motivated process of selection and elimination that propelled the making of Hindi as the language of the national consciousness and the modern state.
The process comprised Hindi’s claim to be the faithful successor to Sanskrit as well as its sexual-communal distanciation. Tamil, on the other hand, has a long history of shaping within the frames of social justice movements, even as Tamil nationalism is also internally contested by Dalit mobilizations, especially by the arundhatiyar movement asserting “an identity as original Tamils (adi tamizhar)”.[11]
Second is that during the territorial organizations before independence and the state reorganizations after independence, most of the south Indian languages and the languages of the eastern coast such as Oria and Bengali were conscious that they were becoming parts of the new independent union and had to recognise each other and their territorial reach and limit. They are languages whose speakers had settled to place themselves consciously as one among many languages that existed in the neighbourhood of their regions within the Indian union.
Sense of co-existence of languages
A sense of (co)existence in the plurality of languages was already an internal constituent for these languages at that time. Tamil or Oria were not certainly seeking to be the agential voice of the nation state in this context whereas Hindi had grossly lost the opportunity to build such an internal sense of coexistence. It is therefore doubtful whether Hindi had developed a sense of difference at the time it was envisioned and proposed as the national language or the official language.
Although standardization is a common feature of the recognised modern Indian languages, there are remarkable variations in the histories of their standardization. In addition to the differences mentioned above, we must consider the presence of the non-scheduled languages in India. As the making of Hindi involved the subsumption and elimination of many languages in the largest geographical area, Hindi is also the most contested language in its own territory.
The Maithili movement and the numerous demands of the languages of the north for inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution testify the extent to which Hindi’s status is contested. There exist cultural contestations among forms which are called as dialects, but at least officially, Tamil or the other languages of the south do not face the crisis within their territories to the extent as Hindi.
Bengali and Assamese do, and did, face certain challenges due to their standardization and imposition on certain particular communities (as on Gorkhas and Bodos). At any rate, these are aspects that can potentially mould our understanding of the histories of standardization of languages. They are not routine processes that do not call for informed differentiations.
English and the Indian languages
The third point of disagreement for Yadav concerns the challenges faced by Indian languages since independence. He says that the principal challenge to Indian languages comes from English and its hegemony, and not from Hindi.
English, for him, is the “elephant in the room” and representative of a “dense web of power” that is more difficult to break free from than resisting “a repressive and authoritarian state” or opposing “an industrial-military complex”.[12] He proposes that we better talk about the challenge of English “that all Indian languages, Hindi and Tamil included, face.”
In this shifting of the target, Yadav somehow assumes, once again, a common ground among Indian languages, of equal distribution of disadvantage in front of English. He ignores the possibility of Hindi becoming English in some sense in the absence of the hegemony of English in India.
What he attempts is to urge for a unity of the Indian languages and a resolution, a national consensus he would say, to fight English hegemony. He does not explain the challenge of English further in this particular context but only makes it as a point of abrupt shift in discussion. His only point, if at all, seems to be that we reject English because it is the language of the foreigner.
It seems important nevertheless to bring up the compelling critical description of Indian languages in terms of their arrangement in a vertical order of a “four-tier” (varna) system in which Sanskrit occupies the top slot of ritualistic practice, Hindi the second position as the language of administration and bureaucracy at the level of the union, most of the scheduled languages like Tamil the third and “lesser” levels of states and the non-scheduled languages at the bottom without any special privileges.[13]
The examples of the prolonged historical movements for recognition of languages such as Maithili and Santhali, though themselves very different from each other, demonstrate that they were not in equal terms either with Hindi or with Sanskrit. There are also well-known Dalit demands for English, beginning with the celebration of the “English Goddess” and the birthday of T.B. Macaulay by the Dalit entrepreneur-activist Chandrabhan Prasad.[14]
In short, Yadav ignores both the arguments that the Indian languages are not equal among themselves and that substantial populations in India, Dalits predominantly, have considered English, being from outside of the indigenous socio-political order of Indian languages, to be the language of emancipation.
There is also the argument, in Kaviraj, that English is the language increasingly embraced by the affluent Indian middle classes both inside and outside India while Indian languages are left behind for the education of the lower classes.[15] There can always be the question why English should be left to the monopoly of the middle classes.
A south Indian language as the third language
As for the NEP 2020, Yadav admits that it has issues, but interestingly he adds that the three-language formula that the NEP contains today has merits over the previous instances. The NEP 2020, he says, does not mention Hindi; it is enough if two languages of the three are native Indian.
This, according to him, opens up room for the south Indian and other non-Hindi states to choose any other Indian language if Hindi is unacceptable (It is the same argument heard from the BJP). The possibility includes classical languages such as Sanskrit and Tamil (classical Tamil). Following an expert group of linguists and educators, Yadav says further that the “three-language formula is not a goal or a limiting factor in language acquisition, but rather a convenient launching pad”.[16]
It does not become clear in these points why a two-language formula, which Tamil Nadu follows, could not be a more liberating launching pad. Even though the three-language formula does not itself specify the languages, it nonetheless requires the specification of a third language which will be then mandatorily taught. It will occupy and close the space of a third language.
The free bandwidth for language acquisition is already limited by a substantial measure in the three-language formula. While suggesting that the third language can be another south Indian language or the language of the neighbour state, we cannot discount the occurrences of regional linguistic tensions, arson and boycott, between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, or Karnataka and Kerala or Maharashtra, and so on.
We cannot also forget the argument of Kaviraj that the immediate post-independence scenario and the reorganization of states were determined more by inter-region discontent than by a region’s discontent with the centre and Hindi.[17]
With a high rate of migrant labour arriving especially in Kerala from the north and the east in recent decades, there is a suspicion of identities such as Bengali as the name has become generic for the migrant worker in Kerala regardless of their native state. More importantly, there are also linguistic tensions between languages like Angika and Bajjika on the one hand and Maithili on the other.
A researcher studying the relation of power between Maithili and its non-scheduled neighbours like Bajjika informs us that there are tussles on the subject of making Maithili a medium of instruction in school education, and that in such circumstances, the “weaker” ones tend to prefer Hindi to the immediate and scheduled neighbour, Maithili.[18] In the desired absence of English, the choice of a neighbouring language opens the risk of bringing in Hindi in between.
Disagreement on Hindi speakers
It is further pointed out in the disagreement that the previous consensus on languages was that while the non-Hindi speakers would learn Hindi, the Hindi-speaking states would introduce and disseminate a language and preferably a south Indian one as a reciprocal measure. Yadav says that this consensus was broken by the Hindi-speaking states. It is true too.
Stalin reminds us that upon Gandhi’s vision of national unity while a Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha was founded in Madras with an extensive reach, nothing of the kind became perceptible anywhere in the north. The Hindi-speaking states, it seems, found the short-cut of introducing Sanskrit and bypassing the spirit of the formula and the need to teach any language from south India.
Thus, Yadav’s suggestion for this time is that the new national consensus “must not allow Hindi-speaking states to get away with Sanskrit as a substitute for this language”.[19]
While endorsing the three-language formula, Yadav, however, does not understand that this suggestion is contradictory to the liberating spirit of the formula itself, something that he mentioned in the same place. If the formula does not propose Hindi for Tamil Nadu, how can it prohibit and demand that one of the three languages should not be Sanskrit wherever it would apply?
It needs to be mentioned here that the fact that freedom of choice will apply equally everywhere will render the theory of three-language learning self-contradictory and meaningless. There will be neither multilingualism nor a productive information, let alone knowledge, about each other’s languages. The only way out from the trap appears to be to follow a system of two languages and leave the third onwards to the autonomy of the people.
In defence of federalism
In its present state, the three-language controversy is not about the imposition of a particular language or the potentials of language learning. It has gone directly into the heart of the federal problem. The controversy is about the compulsion on a state government to accept a formula of education determined by the union government.
The DMK must be using it as one of the templates, among issues such as delimitation, for its defence of federalism. If the party is using it as a ground for igniting sub-nationalist feeling before the elections, it is equally unlikely that such possibility is totally unknown to the BJP and its government at the centre either. If the latter is still pushing the policy, stops funding and risks its own prospects in the election, the game has a larger goal as it appears in the plans for delimitation.
In this struggle over federalism and regionalism, the inner details of a single issue might not provide the real sense. In fact, the issues are not unrelated but parts of a totality. There is therefore hardly a point in selectively supporting the DMK on delimitation and funding but not on its insistence on two-language policy.
In his disagreement with the DMK’s approach to Hindi, Yadav has adopted a discursive method that belongs to the school of convincing (Tamil Nadu and the DMK) through means of self-indictment, making appeals for stopping Hindi from doing excess. It would be helpful if his disagreement were instead filtered through the histories and theories of language politics in India.
(Vipin Kumar Chirakkara teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Regional Campus, Lucknow)
(Courtesy: Kafila.online)
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