language policy

Part III

Language Policyand Language Politics:

The Role of English

10

Identity and Multilinguality:The Case of India

R. K. AgnihotriUniversity of Delhi, India

Multilinguality and variability are constitutive of human existence. Evenwhen we take the existence of an innate language faculty as a given, we reg-ularly construct a multilingual space in which through a dynamic dialogicinteraction with others our identities and multilinguality are constructed.People often sustain their food, dress, birth, death, and wedding customs toassert their distinct identity; in the same way they assert their linguisticidentity through their own variety of multilinguality. In fact, most othermarkers of identity will be mediated through multilinguality. Just asbiodiversity enriches the life of a forest, linguistic diversity enhances the in-tellectual well-being of individuals and groups, both small and large. Lin-guistic identities are obviously more fundamental, as they construct agreater part of most other identities. After all, “it is in and through languagethat man constitutes himself as a subject because language alone estab-lishes the concept of ‘ego ’ in reality, in its reality, which is that of the being”(Benveniste, 1971, p. 224).

However, policymakers, often guided by vested interests, tend to favourhomogeneity rather than heterogeneity, even in such complex societies asIndia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They believe that children should be edu-cated in “a language,” and that the administration and judiciary shouldalso be conducted in “a language”; similarly, there should be “a language”of parliament and mass media. More often than not this artifact of “a lan-

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guage” converges with the language of the elite. An emphasis on homoge-neity often favours the elite and discriminates against minorities. Whenmaking language policy decisions, participatory democracy and consen-sual reconciliation often appear to be the only suitable approach. However,consensual democracy is often achieved at the cost of what Keats(1795–1821) called “negative capability,” which means we lose the capacityto accommodate contraries. The Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD) thattook place in 1946 and the subsequent language policies in India (as inmany other countries that engaged in the task of nation building after de-colonization) bear witness to this understanding. Though in many casesthere was apparent consensual democracy, it is obvious that at the heart ofthe language policymaking enterprise were the interests of the elite.Through exploring the debates in the Constituent Assembly, this chapterexamines the linguistic situation in India before and after independence,and discusses how efforts to establish a one-to-one correspondence be-tween nation, national or ethnic identity, religion and language led to polit-ical conflicts among ethnic groups. It also discusses how the efforts toachieve linguistic homogeneity contributed to an asymmetrical power rela-tionship between the majority and minority languages, resulting in the su-premacy of English over other languages in India. There were, as Tollefsonand Tsui (2004) argue, on the one hand, deep-seated desires to assert locallanguages, systems of knowledge, and cultures, and on the other, ex-tremely powerful pressures of globalisation and market economy to acceptthe hegemony of erstwhile colonial languages. In general, as Illich (1981)points out, we first create conditions that make people hate their own lan-guages and heritage and then spend token amounts of money on theirrevival.

Before the partition of India, Hindustani—a language common to bothHindus and Muslims, easily understood in a greater part of India, and writ-ten in both the Devanagari and Perso-Arabic scripts—was seen as the fu-ture language of India, a language that would eventually replace English.As soon as the partition of India became a reality, the protagonists of Hindisaw no reason to support the cause of Hindustani, just as those interested inthe creation of Pakistan saw in Urdu a powerful linguistic symbol of a newnation. The Indians argued that if Urdu was to be the language of IslamicPakistan, Hindi must be the language of Hindu India. South India saw theimposition of Hindi as a major threat indicative of Aryan domination andvehemently resisted it. The social and linguistic conflicts in some otherparts, including the northeast, were far more complex. Today both Englishand Hindi continue to be the official languages of the Indian Union,whereas Urdu is still struggling for survival. Hindustani has nearly ceasedto exist except in some forms in the streets of such cities as Meerut andAllahabad, in some newspapers and magazines, in some Bollywood films,

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or as “nostalgia” (cf. Trivedi, 2004). Though Hindi and several regional lan-guages have gained strength in postindependence India, the language thathas gained status and power is English. Languages that have suffered mostare the languages of the underprivileged, which are unfortunately dis-missed as “tribal” languages or as “dialects” of, say, Hindi or some other“major” language (Sachdeva, 2001). The seeds of the subsequent languagepolicy development had already been sown and in the CAD: An artificialform of Sanskritized Hindi would be crafted, English would dominate, cer-tainly in the near future, and eventually create a vertical divide that wouldseparate the powerful elite from the underprivileged masses.

THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

After the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and its persis-tent demands for freedom and self-government, Indians in general had be-come strongly aware of the possibility of a free country (Austin, 2000).There was a “general awareness of nationality and national dignity …. In-dependence had been an ideal, a desideratum to be worked for; now it wasan axiom of public life” (Spear, 1961, p. 5). In 1942, it was decided to sendthe Cripps Cabinet Mission (led by Sir Stafford Cripps) to India to assist theViceroy in forming a committee that would draft a constitution for India.Even though the commission had to return without completing its job, be-cause it could not reconcile the differences between the Congress and theMuslim League, the stage was set and a Constituent Assembly (CA) wascreated in 1946. There were over 300 members in the CA, including the oli-garchy of Jawaharlal Nehru (first Prime Minister of independent India,1947–1964), Vallabhbhai Patel (Deputy Prime Minister of India,1947–1950), Rajendra Prasad (first President of India, 1950–1961), andMaulana Azad (Education Minister, 1947–1958). The National Congressmade special efforts to include minorities and experts as members of theCA, including representatives of Parsis, Anglo-Indians, Indian Christians,women, and members of the scheduled castes and tribes. Among the majorissues debated in the CA was the linguistic division of India, somethingNehru resisted as long as he could although it eventually became a reality(King, 1999). Nehru strongly believed that the division must take into ac-count not only language but also geography, history, and culture. He wasalso deeply aware of the presence of linguistic minorities in each territorialarea and the fact that the presence of one dominant language, which wouldinevitably receive state support in a consensual democracy framework,would cause minority languages to suffer. For many congressmen and, inparticular, for members of the oligarchy, it was clear that a linguistic divi-sion of the country would be disastrous. Other language-related issues de-bated in the CA included the national and/or official language, its script,

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and the form of numerals to be used; the role of mother tongues; the lan-guages to be used in education, the courts and administration; the role ofEnglish and how long it should continue to be used; the place of Hindi andits standardization and propagation; the Hindustani-Hindi-Urdu conflict;the role of Sanskrit in a new India; and the role and function of major Indianregional languages. The fact that the majority of these issues were left to bedecided by future generations or parliaments shows how complex the is-sues were. In some cases tentative decisions were taken that, for a variety ofreasons, have more or less become permanent now.

HINDUSTANI, HINDI, AND URDU

From a linguistic point of view, Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani, and indeed avariety of other labels such as Hindavi and Rekhta, are essentially the samelanguage. Even today, there is hardly any basic structural difference be-tween Hindi and Urdu. It is quite common, in a seminar for example, forseveral participants to be engaged in a discussion using what is the samelanguage, save some sounds and specific lexical items, with some thinkingthat they are speaking in Urdu and others thinking that they are speaking inHindi. It is only from a sociolinguistic perspective and some rather recentinitiatives in language planning that we may talk of divergence amongthem. (For work on the Hindi-Urdu issue, see Agnihotri, 1977, 2002; Dua,1985; Hasnain, 1985; Hasnain & Rajyashree, 2004; Alok Rai, 2000; AmritRai, 1984, among others).

Historically, the divide between Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani may betraced back to the establishment of Fort William College in Calcutta on May4, 1800. The college was founded by Lord Wellesley (1760–1842) and JamesGilchrist (1757–1842) was appointed as its first Professor of Urdu. Gilchristdid all that he could to establish Hindi and Urdu as two separate varieties ofHindustani. In the “Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan” theory, two distinctlinguistic symbols were established in that Hindi (in the Devanagari script)became associated with India and Urdu (in the Perso-Arabic script) becameassociated with Pakistan. The college undertook the task of publishingbooks in two different scripts, thus projecting two different identities andaccentuating the minor differences rather than the vast similarities betweenHindi and Urdu. Hindu and Muslim writers from far-flung areas werecalled on to write prose in two styles of khadi boli (literally “standing lan-guage,” used for the variety that constituted the basis of ModernHindi-Urdu) by using two different scripts: Devanagari and Perso-Arabic.Lalluji Lal and Sadal Misra were commissioned to write khadi boli prose inthe Devanagari script and they used words of Sanskrit origin1; and scholarslike Haidar Baksh Haidari and Sher Ali “Afsos” were encouraged to writekhadi boli prose in the Perso-Arabic script, replacing words of regional or

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Sanskrit origin with Perso-Arabic words. Two major agencies, namely,Nagaripracarini Sabha, Benares (Organization for the Propagation ofHindi in Devanagari script, founded in 1893) and Hindi Sahitya Sammelan,Allahabad (Hindi Literary Academy, founded in 1910), were establishedfor the propagation of the Sanskritized style of Hindustani. AnjumanTaraqqi-e-Urdu (Society for the Propagation of Urdu in Perso-Arabicscript) was established in 1903. In fact, by the onset of the 20th century, stepstowards deliberate linguistic engineering had intensified. Rahman (1996)quotes a May 13, 1903, letter from Harcourt Butler found in the India OfficeLibrary: “The Hindus are now very much up and are trying to eliminate allwords of Persian or Arabic origin and our text book committee has got un-der the influence of the ultra-Hindu section and are writing primary textbooks in Sanskritized Hindi which the people cannot understand” (p. 73).

In 1882, the Central National Mohammedan Association establishedbranches in different parts of India and claimed that it was “the first organ-ised political body to represent the political and other interests of the Mus-lims of India” (Das Gupta 1970, p. 87). When the Anglo-American Collegeof Aligarh (set up in 1875) became Aligarh Muslim University in 1921, theassertion of Muslim political and cultural rights was high on its agenda.Similarly, the establishment of the Benaras Hindu University (BHU) in 1915was as much a political act as an academic act. It was a modern institutionwith a religious-cultural agenda. The establishment of Hindi departmentsin universities and colleges strengthened the self-image of the Hindi literatiand contributed immensely towards the success of their cultural agenda.

The early 20th century, as we have noted, marked the deliberate creationand crystallization of Hindi identity mediated through a Hindi curriculumand texts. Acharya Ramchandra Shukla (1883–1941), a teacher at the BHUand one of the finest scholars and critics of Hindi, speaks of a distinct Hindiidentity and heritage in his book hindi sahitya ka itihas (History of Hindi Lit-erature), published in 1929:

It is my opinion that Hindi and Urdu are two very different languages. TheHindus of this country speak Hindi, while Muslims and those Hindus whohave studied Persian speak Urdu. Sanskrit words abound in Hindi as Arabicand Persian words abound in Urdu. There is no necessity to use Arabic andPersian words in speaking Hindi, nor do I call that language Hindi, which isfilled with Persian and Arabic words. (Shukla, 1929, quoted in King, 1994, p.23)

A dichotomy was created not only between the Hindi and Urdu lan-guages, but also between the Hindus and the Muslims. Hindustani, a lan-guage in which the future generations could have spoken to each other, alanguage through which freedom had been fought for and in which exploi-tation could have been opposed, was completely neglected and trans-


formed beyond recognition. “The discursive space of the people ’svernacular Hindi … was progressively usurped by Sanskrit ‘Hindi ’” (AlokRai, 2000, p. 108) (for studies on how Hindustani was transformed into twomutually incomprehensible varieties, see Agnihotri, 1977, 2002; Agnihotri& Ahmad, 1998; Ahmad, 1997; Chatterjee, 1960; Hasnain & Rajyashree,2004).

For the British in India, Sanskrit was associated with the Hindus, andArabic and Persian with the Muslims. The British could not accept the factthat a common Hindu-Muslim idiom basically rooted in the Indian lan-guages could be written in the Perso-Arabic script. They needed to findcontemporary labels to separate the languages of the two communities.Hence, Urdu written in the Perso-Arabic script was to be the vernacularlanguage of the Muslims, and Hindi written in the Devanagari script was tobe the language of the Hindus. This status of Hindi was further emphasizedin the CAD and included in the constitutional provisions for Hindi. Hindu-stani, the very foundation of Hindi-Urdu and the symbol of the synthesis ofnot only the Hindus ’ and the Muslims ’ languages and cultures, but also ofseveral Indian languages such as Braj, Maithli, and Awadhi, was not onlysubjected to rather dangerous linguistic engineering, but was alsounfortunately given a very strong religious twist.

The artificial divide between Hindi and Urdu as two distinct languageslaid the ground for dividing the Hindus and Muslims at every level—so-cial, cultural, and historical. Prior to the CAD, Muslims and Hindus wereculturally integrated. It was common to exchange gifts on Diwali (theHindu festival of lights) or Id (the Muslim festival of great celebrations afterthe month Ramadan during which the Muslims fast). Hindus often claimedthat Muslims were their trusted friends and vice versa. For an outsider, itwas difficult to identify the source of a given tradition. The number of Mus-lims who were simultaneously brought up by the Mullahs and Pandits2

was very large and the number of Hindus who shared a greater part of theirsocial and cultural life with the Muslims was equally large. However, thiscultural integration was shattered by the creation of new states, mutual dis-trust and fear, and the artificial linguistic division. Suddenly, it appearedthat every Hindu would be seen as a kafir (nonbeliever) by the Muslims andevery Muslim as a fanatic by the Hindus. The rich religious sufi (devotional)poetry and folk traditions, as well as the elite poetry and wit of the royal pa-tronage to which both Hindus and Muslims were equal contributors andinheritors were suddenly divided on the basis of a few lexical items andscript. The debates in the CA, the partition and postpartition riots, the morerecent Mumbai and Gujrat riots, and the treatment meted out to Hindus inPakistan, where there is alarming evidence of intolerance and persecutionof Hindus in Pakistan ’s Sindh province,3 were all evidence of theconsequence of the split.

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Urdu (Hindustani really), as it was increasingly Persianized, became asymbol of foreign invasion and an extension of Mughal imperialism (theMughals had ruled majority Hindu India for over 200 years since 1526),and was perceived as an instrument for preserving Muslim self-identity.Hindi (again Hindustani really), which was increasingly Sanskritized dur-ing the final stages of the freedom movement (1900–1947), became a sym-bol of protest against the colonial rulers. The majority Hindus would ratheridentify with Hindi written in the Devanagari script, the script of Sanskrit,than with the script in which, for example, the Quran was written. Thesedistinct symbols emerged and dominated mass-consciousness as partitionincreasingly became a reality, and the two nations fought for their separateidentities. Rahman (1996, pp. 67–78) discusses in some detail the changingattitudes of the British to Hindi and Urdu during the first few decades of the20th century. When “Urdu” (written in Perso-Arabic script) was mostly thelanguage used in the courts, Sir A. P. Macdonnell, the then-Lieutenant Gov-ernor of the northwestern provinces issued an order on April 18, 1900, say-ing that petitions would now be received in both the Devanagari andPerso-Arabic scripts and that only people knowing both the scripts wouldbe given government jobs. Because at that point in time, more jobs wereheld by the Muslims, they were deeply hurt. However, Macdonnell knewthat British interests would be better served by a Hindu dominance. AsRahman (p. 73) points out, the only constant was British political interest,not anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu sentiments.

CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY DEBATES

The partition of the Indian subcontinent took place a few months after theCA was created in December 1946. Prior to this, most people had contem-plated a country in which Hindus and Muslims would continue to live to-gether as in the past. There was overwhelming support for Hindustani.However, the support soon vanished as the partition became a reality. Thepro-Hindi faction in the CAD of September 1949 (2 years after India had al-ready gained independence), which represented the leading Hindi associa-tions in the country, tried to form a consensus on adopting Hindi inDevanagari script as the language of the Indian Union, irrespective ofwhether it was called the national language or the state language (see CAD,1946–1950, pp. 1326–1327).

The pro-Hindi faction was challenged by several members of the CA;some of them, led by the main political leaders Nehru, Azad, Patel, andPrasad, supported the cause of Hindustani, and some argued for Sanskritor a regional language such as Bengali. Still others argued for English. Forexample, Naziruddin Ahmad, a Muslim League representative in the CA,argued very strongly for the continued use of English until such time that


an Indian language was ready to assume the role of a national or state lan-guage. “The suitability of a language,” he said, “requires a large number ofthings. It requires great writers, great thinkers, great men, scientists, politi-cians, philosophers, litterateurs, dramatists and others. I believe withoutgiving any offence, that Hindi is a language which is in a very rudimentarycondition in this respect” (CAD, 1946–1950, p. 1333). Ahmad emphasizedthat in such matters one should proceed with great caution and try to takecommon people ’s views into consideration because the question of na-tional or official language concerned everyone, not just the members of theCA.

S. V. Krishnamoorthy Rao of Karnataka, another important member ofthe CA, argued that it was unfair to declare a language that was not evenunderstood by one third of the country and still not standardized as an offi-cial language. According to him, all languages spoken in India were its na-tional languages (CAD, 1946–1950, p. 1337). Mohammed Hifzur Rahmanof the United Provinces drew the attention of the CA to Gandhi ’s andNehru ’s proposal to adopt Hindustani as the language of the country be-cause it was the idiom that united Hindus and Muslims and was under-stood in a greater part of the country. In his fairly long intervention, hepointed out that “languages do not develop by putting limitations; on thecontrary, they develop by expansion and by borrowing words from everylanguage. They are not imposed on people. They attain popularity by theirmode of expansion” (CAD, 1946–1950, pp. 1341–1348).

G. Durgabai of Madras, a powerful member of the CA, observed that“the people of non-Hindi speaking areas have been made to feel that thisfight or this attitude on behalf of the Hindi-speaking areas is a fight for ef-fectively preventing the natural influence of other powerful languages ofIndia on the composite culture of this nation …” (CAD, 1946–1950, p. 1428),and added that the “national language” of India could not be anythingother than Hindustani, which is Hindi plus Urdu.

Despite these alternative voices, and despite the call by important politi-cal leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru, Azad, Prasad, and Patel to support Hin-dustani, the pro-Hindi proposal was passed by a narrow margin of onevote. Therefore, in the name of democracy, the linguistic minorities andspeakers of other languages were forced to accept monolithic and monolin-gual solutions to a multilingual and multicultural problem. For most mem-bers of the CA, the existence of “a language,” as if an autonomous object,was a given. It was difficult for them to appreciate the fact that language isessentially a constantly changing phenomenon, and it is born out of the ne-gotiated dialogue people enter into. Languages come to mean not so muchbecause of their histories or existing grammars and dictionaries, or becauseof the intentions of individual speakers, but because of the grammars thatemerge out of the shared discourse of the people who speak them (Hall,

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2002). Since Hindi became the official language of the Indian Union, theprocesses started at the beginning of the century to “Sanskritize” and “sani-tize” it have intensified in the sense that the words and expressions of Per-sian, Arabic, and Urdu origin have been, and are still being, removed andsubstituted by new words. The decision to intensively “Sanskritize” Hindi,in spite of the explicit directive of the constitution that Hindi should drawon other Indian languages as well in addition to borrowing primarily fromSanskrit, has led to undesirable consequences for both Hindi and Urdutoday—linguistically, socially, and politically.

Another proposal put forward in the CAD was to adopt Sanskrit as thenational language. Most protagonists of Hindi felt that language develop-ment consisted of purging the language of words of “foreign” origin in-stead of borrowing freely from other languages. The advocates of Sanskritfelt that Sanskrit was by definition more scientific than any other languageand the most developed. For many distinguished members of the CA, San-skrit was regarded as pure, eternal, unchanging, and predating humanity.They also believed that Sanskrit was the mother of all Indian languages;some even believed that it was the mother of world languages. This can beseen in an excerpt from a speech made by Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra, aprominent member of the CA:

Sanskrit has the oldest and the most respectable pedigree of all the languagesin the world … unhesitatingly declared (by the greatest of Western scholars)as “the mother of all languages of the world.” … If today India has got an op-portunity after thousand years [sic] to shape her own destiny, I ask in all seri-ousness if she is going to feel ashamed to recognise the Sanskrit language—the revered grandmother of languages of the world … Sir, we are proud of thegreat provincial languages of this country—Bengali, Marathi, Gujrati, Hindi,Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and others. They constitute a variety ofwealth of Indian culture and civilisation. This is not a province ’s property. Itis all our national property. But all these languages derive their origin fromSanskrit. (CAD, 1946–1950, pp. 1354-1362)

Given that India has over 1,652 languages belonging to five different lan-guage families, namely Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic,Tibeto-Burman, and Andamanese-Nicobarese, it was preposterous to sug-gest that Sanskrit was the mother of all Indian languages even though it isno exaggeration to say that most of the Indian languages have borrowedwords from Sanskrit. The emphasis on Hindi, English, Sanskrit, and somemajor Indian languages, such as Gujrati, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu, re-sulted in the neglect of minority languages belonging to the Austro-Asiaticand Tibeto-Burman families. The price that we are still paying for this ne-glect is that millions of children who speak minority languages such asAngami, Santhali, or Bodo are forced to study in languages that are com-pletely unknown to them. When they cannot understand the content of sci-


ence or social sciences because of linguistic difficulty, they are unfairlydubbed as dull and incompetent.

The CA left many issues unresolved, some of which are at the root ofsome of the problems we face today. Some of the language-related deci-sions made by the CA included the resolution not to have a national lan-guage and to designate Hindi in Devanagari script as the official languageof the Union. Regarding regional languages, it resolved to give autonomyto individual states to use their regional languages in their respective states,and to give every citizen the right to make representation in any languageto the state and to ask for adequate facilities for instruction in the mothertongue at the primary stage of education to children belonging to linguisticminorities.

One resolution that could be considered a stroke of “raw genius” was toleave the list of languages under the VIIIth Schedule “Languages” open.This allowed a speech community to have its language included in the listwhen its members felt the need to assert their identity. Indeed, the last 55years have witnessed the inclusion of Sindhi in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri,and Nepali in 1992, and Bodo, Santhali, Maithili, and Dogri in 2003.

ENGLISH IN CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY DEBATES

Since the missionary activities of the early 19th century and Macaulay ’sMinute of 1835 followed by Wood ’s Dispatch of 1854, English has increas-ingly been used as the medium of education, administration, and the judi-ciary in India. Though there were very strong protests against English inthe CA, there was a general agreement that it must be used until a substitutelanguage could be found to serve the same functions as English in differentdomains. For the protagonists of Hindi, the English language was insepara-ble from the colonial rulers; it must leave India with them. For people likeNaziruddin Ahmad who supported retaining English but not British domi-nation, English was a world language and as such it had an important roleto play in India (CAD, 1946–1950, p. 1333). Nehru supported the continueduse of English, but he was equally aware that a language “is a unifying fac-tor of our society and it is also a factor promoting disunity” (CAD,1946–1950, p. 1411). He maintained that though English was indispensable,India would become a very sad nation if English remained in the hands of aselect few. He believed that English must increasingly become part of India’s multilingual repertoire, though the work of the nation must increasinglybe carried out in Indian languages. He said:

However good, however important, English may be, we cannot tolerate thatthere should be an English-knowing elite and a large mass of our people notknowing English. Therefore, we must have our own language. But English …

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must continue to be a most important language in India which large numbersof people learn and perhaps learn compulsorily. (CAD, 1946–1950, p. 1416)

The constitution resolved to designate English as the official language ofthe Supreme Court and high courts, and to continue to use English as thesecond official language for a period of 15 years with the provision that par-liament could extend that period. However, as the year 1965 approached,the opposition to Hindi intensified in the south. It wanted English to con-tinue as one of the official languages. There were widespread riots in SouthIndia. As Das Gupta (1970, p. 191) points out, phrases such as Arya Samaj,Arya Sanskriti, Arya Bhasha, Arya Lipi4—which refer to the greatness ofHindu organization, culture, language, and script respectively—alienatednot only the Muslims, but also the South Indians who were perhaps in Indiabefore the Aryans came, and who in no way regarded their language or cul-ture as less glorious. The anti-Hindi student agitation in Tamil Nadu re-sulted in 66 deaths and two self-immolations. The government realizedthat removing the official status of English would reinforce the dominationof Hindi over other languages and would exacerbate the resentment. Eng-lish was therefore assured of the continued status of the associate officiallanguage in 1965. However, since then, no measure has been put in place toensure that English is accessible to all. Today, English continues to domi-nate in the echelons of power, not only in the south, but also in other parts ofthe country including North India. Some states in the northeast have de-clared English not only the medium of instruction in education, but alsotheir sole official language. In the country as a whole, English has becomeincreasingly associated with prestige, important jobs in the public and pri-vate sectors, and higher education. Those who receive education onlythrough their regional languages lag behind socioeconomically and aredeprived of social mobility.

ENGLISH IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

India has a large bilingual population that is proficient in English. UrbanIndians generally have highly positive attitudes towards English. IndianEnglish is a variety in its own right, with its own literature and discoursestrategies, where the mantra (message; see Kachru, 2005) is essentially In-dian. The great debate surrounding “native” versus “non-native” varietiesof English has been largely laid to rest. There is a widespread desire tostudy English as a subject from the early years of education. English-me-dium schools are mushrooming in every town and village (Agnihotri &Khanna, 1997; Kachru, 2005).

From a sociolinguistic perspective, we must continue with what Kachru(2005) calls a persistent interrogation and problematization of English, that


is, “English opening the doors to religious and cultural ‘enlightenment ’,English as a tool of colonial exploitation and political consolidation, andEnglish symbolizing the ‘killer language ’ for various languages and cul-tures” (p. 100). Unless we continue to do this, we may not be able to sustainlocal systems of languages and cultures. Languages are created and re-cre-ated in social space; even though they are constitutive of intimate relationsamong family and friends, they are associated with power. In multilingualIndia, as a result of the CA ’s decisions and subsequent planning, Englishhas retained its colonial color and continues to be associated with the elitethat occupy the positions of power in education, administration, the judi-ciary, international relations, and now the global corporate world. Thegates of employment, social mobility, and power are open to only thosewho are proficient in English or both in English and their regional lan-guage. The globalized economy, the arrival of the information superhigh-way, and the networked society have further strengthened the value ofEnglish as a commodity in the “Outer Circle” (Verma, 2002). The universalaccess to English that Nehru emphasized, unfortunately, did not material-ize and the English divide that had started in the early 19th century has in-tensified. Not only do speakers of regional languages suffer in terms ofemployment and social mobility, but most important journals andmagazines in Hindi are no longer published due to insufficient advertisingrevenue (see Verma, 2002).

If Hindustani, written as it was both in the Devanagari and Perso-Arabicscripts, were adopted as the official or national language, it would becomea modern language in due course, developing, as all major languages of theworld have, into a language of science and technology, of mathematics andphilosophy. Modern Hindi or Urdu has not achieved anything of that sort.The linguistic and social losses have indeed been substantial. On the onehand, the shared social and cultural space between Hindus and Muslims isbecoming increasingly smaller. On the other hand, both Hindus and Mus-lims lose out because of the domination of English. If one were to narrowdown one ’s choice to a single issue that divides the rich and poor of SouthAsia, it would without doubt be English.

LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION IN MULTILINGUAL INDIA

Given the complexity of the situation at the time when the constitution wasdrawn up, members of the CA have achieved nothing less than a miracle(Austin, 2000, pp. 265–305). The significance of the mother tongue as themedium of instruction in education was recognized in the constitution.There was not a single region in India that did not have linguistic minori-ties. The Karachi Rights of 1931 and the Central Advisory Board of Educa-tion (CABE) of 1938 strongly advocated the cause of education through the

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mother tongue and argued that the culture, language, and scripts of the mi-norities should be protected. The 1938 CABE espoused “the principle ofmother-tongue instruction in primary schools, and official support for this,and for the use of mother-tongue instruction at higher levels” (Austin,2000, p. 287). What they could not anticipate however was that monolin-gual solutions to multilingual societies would not work. A multilingual so-ciety would need a multilingual perspective, and monolingual solutionsthat would eventually be formulated in terms, for example, of a three-lan-guage formula would not work. Any classroom in India is in general multi-lingual, and unless we conceptualize the school curriculum, syllabus,textbooks, and classroom transaction in terms of multilingualism as a re-source, strategy, and a goal, where languages are not seen as discrete objectsand language boundaries are porous, we may not be able to arrive at a ped-agogical breakthrough where an individual child ’s language and systemsof knowledge are respected. Simply saying that the school will ensure thatevery child will learn three languages (even that has remained a distantdream in the country) is not likely to sustain the linguistic and culturalwealth of this country.

The annual conference of the chief ministers of different states held inAugust 1961 adopted the three-language formula, which was modified bythe famous Kothari Commission (1964–1966; Kothari Commission Report,1966) seeking to accommodate the interests of group identity (mothertongues and regional languages), national pride and unity (Hindi), and ad-ministrative efficiency and technological progress (English) (Sridhar,1989). As Pattanayak (1986) points out, the three-language formula is only astrategy and not a national language policy. Anational language policy willfirst have to be negotiated with a completely different view of language, aview that looks at language as constantly engaged in the process of creationand identity formation and not as a reified object. Policymakers will alsoneed to examine carefully the differential functional load of different lan-guages in different domains of activity. The spirit of the three-language for-mula is that Hindi is learnt in addition to English and the local Indianlanguage in South, East, and West India, whereas Hindi, English, and aSouth or some other non-North Indian language is learnt in North India.However, this formula is not always observed. The Hindi states operatelargely with Hindi, English, and Sanskrit, whereas the non-Hindi-speakingstates, particularly Tamil Nadu, operate through a two-language formula,Tamil and English. Some states such as Orissa, West Bengal, andMaharashtra, among others, have indeed implemented the formula. Butbecause the infrastructural facilities in the schools are poor and languageeducation is not conceptualized in a multilingual framework, most chil-dren come out of the school system without attaining proficiency in anylanguage. Because they cannot understand language, that is, cannot read


and write with comprehension and imagination, they cannot understandother content areas, such as science and social sciences.

It is true that the kind of rich understanding we have today about the na-ture of multilingualism and its relation with cognitive growth and scholas-tic achievement was not available at the time when the CA policy decisionswere made. Today, we know that multilingualism is constitutive of our lin-guistic and social identity and that in pedagogical terms it is worth pursu-ing as a goal, resource, and strategy. Several studies (e.g., Agnihotri, 1998;Arora, 2004; Khubchandani, 1983, 1988; Pandit, 1969, 1972, 1988; Sharma &Annamalai, 2003; Subbarao & Arora, 1989, among others) have also shownhow languages display porous boundaries and persistently converge in afluid space.

SOME RECENT PROPOSALS

Recently the National Council of Education Research and Training(NCERT) undertook the task of revising the national curriculum. It set up21 different focus groups to write position papers. For the National FocusGroup on language, the challenge was to provide a new perspective for amultilingual country. It was hoped that the gaps resulting from the variousconstitutional provisions and the implementation of the three-languageformula would be overcome and that there would be a set of feasible recom-mendations that ensure high levels of proficiency in the languages that chil-dren study at school. Most of all, it was hoped that the new language policywould help to reduce disparities in society. Earlier approaches (e.g.,NCERT, 1991) produced a linear and segmented view of knowledge andskills in terms of itemized Minimum Levels of Learning (MLL) that definedlinear objectives corresponding to, say, listening to sounds, listening towords, and every textbook was written according to these MLLs. In fact, itwas hilarious (disastrous pedagogically) to see each lesson addressing onlytwo or three specific skills indicated at the top of each lesson. It was sofirmly rooted in the behaviorist paradigm of S–R association, reinforce-ment, and linear and additive learning that it left very little scope forlearner ’s imagination or holistic learning.

After a series of discussions, the group agreed on certain fundamentalguiding principles in its position paper (NCERT, 2005). Some of the recom-mendations include the following:

• Multilingualism is a normal human state of affairs; it is an asset; itshould be treated as a resource, a teaching strategy, and a goal.

• There is a strong positive correlation between multilingualism andcognitive growth, divergent thinking, scholastic achievement, andlevels of social tolerance.

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• It is imperative that children achieve high levels of proficiency in dif-ferent languages. This is particularly true of languages that would bethe media of instruction in content subjects.

• Mother tongues of children in a given classroom should constitute notonly the medium, but often also the content of teaching and learning.

• Language teaching should be sensitive to the relationship of languagewith thought, gender, and social power.

• It is important to ensure that the language of each child be respectedin the classroom.

The National Focus Group ’s recommendations have been developed inthe context of societal and individual multilingualism. Mother tongue(s)have been defined as languages of home, street, neighbourhood, peergroup, and kinship networks, regional language(s) as language(s) widelyspoken in the state, or in the case of minorities, outside the state, and statelanguage(s) as language(s) officially recognized by each state. Hindi is theofficial language and the intranational lingua franca, and English is the asso-ciate official language and the international lingua franca.

Bilingualism, achieved in successive stages, should eventually lead tomultilingualism. Jhingran (2005) points out that over 12% of children suffersevere learning disadvantages because they are denied access to primaryeducation through their mother tongues. This percentage includes childrenof scheduled tribes, children who are speakers of stigmatized “dialects,”children of migrant parents, and children who are speakers of languagessuch as Sindhi, Kashmiri, Dogri, and Konkani. Therefore, the first task ofthe school is to relate home languages to school languages. Mothertongue(s) or regional language(s) should be taught as compulsory subjects.Thereafter, one or more languages are to be integrated into the curriculumso that children can learn other languages without losing the first. This isthe only way in which some of the fast-disappearing literacies and localsystems of knowledge could be saved, and in which a space for the con-struction of new knowledge in these languages could be created. In themiddle or higher stages of school education, the medium of instructionmay be gradually changed to the regional or state language, or to Hindi orEnglish. The National Focus Group strongly recommended that the teach-ing of English be woven into the texture of developing strategies of teach-ing in a multilingual classroom. Conversational English may be introducedat early stages of education, if adequate facilities are available. In short, therecommendations aim at the maintenance of all languages, with each ofthem playing a complementary rather than a competing role.

Recent work on multilingualism and education (e.g., Agnihotri, 1995,1997, 2005; Crawhall, 1992; Cummins & Swain, 1986; Edwards, 1998; Ed-wards & Walker, 1995; Heugh, Plüddemann, & Siegrühm, A., 1995) has


clearly demonstrated the advantages of multilingualism as a resource forteaching and learning. It is only when we recognize the strengths ofmultilingualism that we will be able to achieve a goal in which minorityvoices will not be pushed out in the name of consensual democracy.

CONCLUSION

Because sound theoretical alternative perspectives on language (e.g.,Chambers, 2003; Fairclough, 1989, 1992; Gumperz, 1982; Hymes, 1974;Labov, 1972; Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985; Singh, 2000; Williams, 1992)as a dynamic social system are available and some empirical work hasshown that implementation strategies in terms of the curriculum, syllabus,and textbooks worked out in this framework are possible, we need to workseriously towards a new era in the domain of language, culture, and iden-tity—an era in which minority voices will not be suppressed in the name ofconsensual democracy. In spite of their wisdom, we need to grow out of therecommendations of and the policies based on the CAD. It is also clear thatdialogic discourse that is porous and fluid, and not discrete languages seenas finite systems, will constitute the foundation of this new era; fuzziness insome sense will have to be their essential property so that they “cope with aconstant flow of new information” (Lee, 1992, p. 27).

Multilingualism as a resource is always available in the classroom. In thecase of most empirical sciences, one has to go out and collect data, oftenspending long stretches of time and negotiating difficult terrains. But in thecase of language, all the language data a teacher might need is present in theclassroom itself—in the minds of children. It is not only that the data isthere, but every child also has the competence to evaluate its accuracy andappropriateness of use. Multilingualism as a teaching strategy would in-voke a carefully planned scientific approach to the study of languages inwhich explicit and often boring and pointless teaching of grammar wouldbecome redundant. Children would formulate the rules of grammarthrough inductive reasoning going through the stages of data collection,classification, categorization, comparative analysis, rule formation, andtesting the rules they have arrived at against more data. In this approach toclassroom transaction, a teacher is also a learner and the classroom spacebelongs largely to the children. The way languages and language analysiscan be taught in a multilingual classroom may be seen, for example, inAgnihotri (1995, 2000, 2001, 2005). Imagine a classroom in Delhi where theEnglish teacher is a Tamilian and different languages represented in theclassroom include Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali among others. A teacher cansimply introduce some seemingly unorganized data, for example, a set ofwords from Tamil in their singular and plural forms. She can then relax andsit at the back of the classroom, seriously working alongside children. She

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has a lot to learn herself now. Children speaking different languages, for ex-ample, English, Bengali, and Telugu, provide the equivalents of the Tamilwords in these languages. All these words could be written in broad Romantranscription. The stage is set for children to split into groups to go througha process of data analysis and arrive at significant rules.

Such tasks not only enhance knowledge of grammatical systems, mak-ing children aware of commonalities and differences across languages, butthey also sharpen the cognitive skills of children, divergent thinking, andsocial tolerance. Children begin to respect each other ’s language, noticingthat all of them are equally systematic in different ways. These processesmight also help undo the damage that, for example, was done by artificiallysplitting Hindustani into Hindi and Urdu and ensure that English reachesthe common masses and flourishes as a component of the Indian repertoirerather than as a symbol of prestige and a source of exploitation. Such strate-gies of teaching do not render the teaching of different genres redundant;they only make them more meaningful to children. In the English class, forexample, it is not necessary that only an English poem by an English authoris taught. A Hindi poem, perhaps provided by a student, is as legitimate anarea of study. The multilinguality available in the classroom would makeits meaning transparent in different languages; the class could then be splitinto different groups that undertake the translation of this poem intoEnglish. It is the whole process rather than the product that is at the heart ofthis approach.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks are due to the editors of the volume for their comments. Iowe a great debt of gratitude to Vandana Puri, who not only carefully readthrough the first draft but also helped me in collecting materials for somespecific issues. Thanks are due to Gyanam and Anoop Mahajan (UCLA)and Rizwan Ahmad (University of Michigan–Ann Arbor) for their com-ments. I am also grateful to Santosh, Rasheed, Apoorvanand, Om, andShashi. The usual disclaimers apply.

NOTES

1. Lalluji Lall ’s prem sagar (literally, “Sea of Love”) appeared in 1810;Meer Amman ’s Urdu bagh-o-bahar (literally, “Garden and Spring”) cameout in 1804 (the titles themselves betray the Sanskrit and Persian bias, re-spectively).

2. Mullah and Pandit here refer to Muslim and Hindu priests respec-tively. Many students received simultaneous education in the Muslim andHindu religious texts.


3. See, for example, www.hinduhumanrights.org/Pakistan.4. The word Sanskrit arya, literally meaning noble and honourable, is

used to refer to the people and languages of North and Central India in op-position to, for example, the people and languages of South India(Dravidian) or the northeast (Tibeto-Burman).

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