Languages of Nationhood: Political Ideologies and the Place of

English in 20th Century India

by

Vasudha Bharadwaj

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by Professor Bette London (English)

and Professor Stewart Weaver (History)

Department of English and

Department of History Arts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester Rochester, New York

2010

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for Palash, and Ma

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Curriculum Vitae The author was born in Bangalore (Bengaluru) in India on 2nd November 1976. She

graduated from the Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi with a Bachelor of

Arts (Honours) in Literature in 1997 and subsequently a Master of Arts in English

Literature in1999. She joined the English Department at the University of Rochester

in the Fall of 2001 to work on her Ph.D., which she converted to a dual

interdepartmental degree in 2004 when she joined the Department of History at the

same university; she earned her M.A. in English Literature here in 2005. She was a

Raymond N. Ball Dissertation Fellow during the academic year 2008-2009. Her

research project at the University of Rochester was on the relationship of language

and national identity with particular reference to English, which she worked on under

the supervision of Professor Stewart Weaver in History and Professor Bette London

in English.

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Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to a vast number of people for the many ways in which they

helped me through this project. First and foremost, I must thank my advisers,

Professor Stewart Weaver and Professor Bette London, for their infinite patience,

invaluable suggestions, and unfailing support over the course of several years, even

when faced with the horrendously mixed metaphors that punctuated my dense

writing. I must also thank Professor Jeffrey Tucker for his consistent interest and

support over the years, and Professor Celia Applegate for her encouragement. My

thanks also go to Professor Anthony Carter, for agreeing to serve on my committee. I

also thank the Department of English, the Department of History, and the Dean’s

Office for approving the joint degree: in particular, my thanks go out to Professor Ted

Brown whose enthusiasm was so infectious. I also owe Cindy Warner of the English

department and Helen Hull and Jacqui Rizzo of History special thanks for their

patience and cooperation in handling the complicated paperwork that came with the

dual departmental affiliation.

This project would also have not been completed without the invaluable

support of the library staff, who have on more than one occasion helped me with

getting the dozens of books that I often borrowed at a time from the stacks to my car,

and who have allowed me to keep nearly three hundred books for more months than I

knew was possible. I am especially grateful to members of the Interlibrary Loan

office, who helped me get hold of the many books and documents I needed from

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various libraries around the world. My most heartfelt thanks also go out to Helen

Anderson, who approved the various book purchases that I recommended and who

became a friend and well-wisher long before we actually met. I am also grateful to the

unknown librarian at Rush Rhees from all those years ago, who built the University

of Rochester’s impressive but sadly underused collection on South Asia.

I owe thanks to Learning Assistance Services, where I worked for so many

years and which gave me many warm friends. I especially thank Nirmala Fernandes,

who suggested I apply there and Vicki Roth, who hired me. My thanks also go to the

College Writing Center, particularly Deborah Rossen-Knill, where I learned so much

not just about teaching but also writing. I must thank Professor Lukas Novotny and

the Nano-optics group, who so generously hosted me in their conference room on

infinite summer days, late nights, and weekends, with endless cups of outstanding

espresso. To all my friends who took an interest in what I did, and who debated with

me details of my research into the wee hours when I just wanted to sleep, thank you.

Finally, thank you to my family for their support through the good times and

bad: I could not have done it without you all. I thank my mother for her interest in the

past and her insistence that she pass on the memories, both her own and those of

others, and for planting in me the seeds of persistence, thoughtfulness, and

adaptability. Above all, I must thank Palash, my husband, friend, and critic, who

supported me through all these years, read every word I wrote, and always knew

when I needed a cookie.

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Abstract

My research studies the relationship of language and national identity in

postcolonial India, with a particular emphasis on the English language. Language

politics in India has historically been polarizing, and is already the focus of a

significant body of work. Research has focused especially on the trajectory and

ramifications of the Hindi-Urdu (or Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani) controversy of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which interwove the discourse of nation and

linguistic nationalism with that of religion and authentic “Indian-ness.” Discourses of

language community and of resistance to linguistic hegemony have been the other

major focal point of the existing repertoire, especially with respect to Tamil in south

India. This theme has also been analyzed extensively in the context of the linguistic

reorganization of states, where the question of national (dis)integration and the

potential threat of separatism inherent in the official recognition of geographic and

cultural boundaries is front and center. Finally, important debates on the

constitutional objective of universal empowerment periodically thrash out the

implications of the Indian education policy and the effects of language-related

legislation.

While each of the above threads is extremely important, the political

significance of the English language in postcolonial India has remained largely

neglected by academia. The language has been integrated into the cultural fabric of

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the country in very specific ways. Generally considered the language of power and

opportunity, it has a certain socioeconomic purchase that emphasizes class

differences and carries echoes of the social stratification from the colonial period. At

the same time, local linguistic patterns make this English peculiarly Indian, even as

its lexicon is co-opted into the regional languages. Most importantly, English

continues to be politically ambivalent, even sixty-two years after India’s

independence, as is apparent in its constitutional status: it is the co-official language

of India along with Hindi, but only as long as the non-native-Hindi-speaking states do

not sanction its removal.

My project situates English in the historical and political context of twentieth-

century India. I examine the political and semi-literary writings of three gargantuan

personalities of the Indian national movement – Jawaharlal Nehru, freedom fighter

and India’s first Prime Minister, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, freedom fighter and

icon of non-violent resistance, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, civil rights activist,

political theorist, India’s first Law Minister, and architect of the Indian constitution –

to demarcate the complexities of English in public discourse. The use of these three

figures is particularly useful as, between them, they are representative of the three

strongest currents of political discourse on language, which contend that (a) too close

a focus on cultural identities detracts from the larger national project of development

and universal empowerment, (b) linguistic (and other cultural) identities both

constitute and signify communities of belonging and exclusion, and (c) literacy and

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linguistic facility in the language of power is the means to empowerment, but this

principle is highly problematic in a multilingual, resource-strapped society.

My examination of a combination of literary-historical works and political

documents about current events by Nehru, Gandhi, and Ambedkar establishes the

existence of a dichotomous pattern of native / foreign, traditional / modern, and

inclusive / exclusive in their engagements with English. This pattern, I argue, is a

signifier of twentieth-century India’s fraught relationship with its own past, and of

how the diverse class, caste, and cultural experiences that constituted the emerging

democracy defied attempts at simplification. It also testifies to the larger problem of

how a conflict between governmentality and the complexities of equal recognition in

a self-consciously multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic state is perceived. Each

individual figure’s attempt to resolve this felt (but not entirely theoretically

understood) tension is telling, as it as it lays bare his understanding of the substance

and functioning of democracy: Nehru emphasizes the iterative and piecemeal nature

of achieving ideological objectives of the state, Gandhi underlines that governance as

well as nationhood is often an article of faith, and Ambedkar makes clear that if the

principle of equality should not be compromised, adherence to neat narratives of self

must be.

Finally, I demonstrate that public discourse about English in India generally

conflates the politics of identity with the politics of multiculturalism. Regional

movements demanding the demarcation of states on linguistic lines as well as the

official language controversies are manifestations of protonationalist tendencies that

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claim specific cultural identities, I argue, while discussions of the sociological

problem of ensuring equality of treatment as well as opportunity in a self-proclaimed

multilingual nation-state are symptomatic of a crisis of inclusion. The historical and

textual analyses and the theoretical exposition that accompanies them make my

project relevant not just to South Asia specialists, but also to political theorists and

anyone interested in the politics of multiculturalism, language, and democracy.

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Table of Contents Chapter 1 Modernization, Mother Tongue, and National Identity: Language in

Twentieth-Century India 1

1.1 Conflict? What Conflict? 1

1.2 What’s in a Name? 9

1.3 The Rhetoric of Civilizational Hierarchies 15

1.4 Identity and Independence 34

1.5 Scope of this project 40

Chapter 2 Nehru and Language Politics in India: Multilingual Society, Democratic Dilemmas

45

2.1 The Case of the Modern, Pragmatic Intellectual 45

2.2 An Urban Liberal 52

2.3 Proto-nationalism and the Consolidation of Linguistic Identities 57

2.4 Language and The Question of National Identity 69

2.5 The Stakes of Script 74

2.6 In Support of Impurity 84

Chapter 3 Culture, Community, and Commitment: Gandhi and Linguistic Anti-Colonialism

92

3.1 Nationalist and Ideologue 93

3.2 The Metaphor of the Mother 101

3.3 Religion and the Mother(-Tongue) 109

3.4 The Many Mothers Problem 115

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3.5 The Incompatibility of Ambiguity and Homogeneity 130

3.6 The Law of Unintended Consequences 138

Chapter 4 Empowerment or Identity: Ambedkar on English and Indian Nationhood

140

4.1 Activism, Criticism, and the Search for Sustainable Solutions 140

4.2 Language, Oppression, and Empowerment 145

4.3 Multiculturalism and the Definitions of Nationhood 168

4.4 On the Meaning of Democracy 176

4.5 The Nation-State and Linguistic State Apparatus 182

Conclusion 187 Bibliography 197

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Chapter 1

Modernization, Mother Tongue, and National Identity: Language in Twentieth-Century India

Proficiency in English is widely perceived as an important avenue for employment and upward mobility, which also greatly facilitates the pursuit of higher education.

National Knowledge Commission, 20091

1. Conflict? What Conflict?

On 9th November 2009, newly elected legislators were being sworn into office

in the state legislative assembly in Mumbai, Maharashtra. One of them, Abu Azmi,

chose to take his oath in Hindi, the official language of India, native to the northern

plains; he was promptly assaulted by members of assembly who belonged to the

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (“Maharashtra Reconstruction Force” – MNS) for not

using Marathi, the official language of the state.2 This incident was one of a series of

episodes in Maharashtra, where over the past few years the MNS has targeted Hindi

speakers, mainly from the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar regions of the north, with verbal

and physical violence. Azmi criticized the attack by pointing out that there were

1 Sam Pitroda, "National Knowledge Commission: Report to the Nation, 2006 -

2009." (New Delhi: National Knowledge Commission, Govt. of India, 2009), http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/reports/default.asp.

2 "Abu Azmi Slapped by M.N.S. M.L.A. For Taking Oath in Hindi," Indian Express, November 09 2009.

2

double standards in the MNS position about Hindi as a threat to the local language

and culture: “The very same MNS people who are spreading hatred, resort to Hindi

during elections as they go about asking for votes in Maharashtra. Their CDs,

pamphlets, all are in Hindi. For seeking votes, Hindi is good, but they raise objections

if some official work like oath-taking is held in the Hindi language.” He also noted

that a further double standard existed: “Yesterday it was proved that they have

nothing against English. If somebody takes the oath in English in the Maharashtra

assembly, they will have no objection, but if anybody takes the oath in Hindi... they

will be manhandled.”3

The Abu Azmi incident, and his response, is evidence (if any were needed)

that the issue of how linguistic identity and national identity intersect in India is not

yet resolved. Tensions between linguistic communities (and, indeed, regarding

linguistic preferences) continue to exist, albeit not in the same form as even forty

years ago. English today is part of the fabric of modern Indian life, though it

continues to be oddly dysfunctional: that Azmi poses the MNS’s lack of objection to

English as a counterpoint to its attitude towards Hindi itself suggests that such an

objection would have been less vexed. Inequities of access, distribution of resources,

and prospects of growth all contributed to language conflict in the past, and continue

to do so as political parties mobilize the rhetoric of cultural and linguistic loyalties to

garner votes.

3 "India Lawmaker Hit for Hindi Oath," BBC (bbc.co.uk),

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8255620.stm.

3

This dissertation examines, in the broadest terms, the relationship of language

and national identity in twentieth-century India. It brings together the various aspects

of language politics in India by focusing explicitly on the politics of English in the

twentieth-century. Such a discussion inevitably includes an examination of the

historical relationship of languages and collective identity in the subcontinent,

because of the history of modern education here as well as the trajectory of swadeshi

nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Also, the Indian

constitution today names English as a co-official language, but only until all states

accept Hindi as the sole official language.5 As a result, focusing on English is also

useful in addressing the larger relationship between language and national identity in

this modern multilingual state, as political and state mechanisms cast it,

simultaneously but unequivocally, as insider and outsider. Furthermore, a discussion

of the broader relationship between language and national identity in India is made

difficult by the existence of different languages with distinct literary histories: It is

practically impossible to focus on just a few (or even all the major) tongues and still

emerge with a powerful, generally applicable argument about how the rhetoric of

nation negotiates multilingualism within political discourse. On the other hand, the

politically awkward compromise with respect to English actively lends itself to such a

4 swadeshi means “of one’s own land.” 5 The actual implementation of this constitutional clause seems increasingly

unlikely as, with the passage of time and increasing globalization, the English language proves instrumental to India’s economic growth. However, the very improbability of it coming into effect underlines the nominal importance of Hindi as the official language, as illustrated by the federal government’s annual celebration of various Hindi-related events like Hindi divas (Hindi day) and Hindi pakhvada (Hindi fortnight), the exclusive conduct of national politics in Hindi, etc.

4

discussion, as it attempts to reconcile an anti-colonial nationalist ideology with the

internal stresses of diverse regionalisms and the external pressures of ever-increasing

globalization.

As the current controversies and constitutional provisions in India indicate,

the relationship of identity and language in the twentieth-century has been

particularly complicated here; indeed, even the identity of language has been far from

simple. Attempts to understand and tabulate its linguistic diversity have persistently

yielded mind-boggling results. For instance, George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of

India (LSI), the first project of its kind, went into twelve volumes and listed one

hundred and seventy nine languages and five hundred and forty four dialects. Census

results have tended to be, if anything, even more unnerving, producing vastly

different counts from decade to decade, depending on how “language” was

differentiated from “dialect.”6 This was a difficulty that Grierson also recognized in

his introduction to the LSI:

6 The problem of differentiating “language” from “dialect” is not unique to India,

though discussions in other contexts frequently revolve around issues of linguistic centralization or standardization rather than might be called “dialect-ification.” The political nature of classifying a particular form of speech as “dialect” as opposed to “language” can be assessed from the following sources, among others. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen : The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976)., for instance, describes the process of language standardization in France. See also John Earl Joseph, Eloquence and Power : The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages (New York: B. Blackwell, 1987). Björn H. Jernudd and Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Language Purism, Contributions to the Sociology of Language (Berlin: New York, 1989). R. D. Grillo, Dominant Languages : Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France (New York, 1989). Ralph W. Fasold, The Sociolinguistics of Society, Language in Society (Oxford, England: New York, NY, USA, 1984).

5

In the course of the Survey, it has sometimes been difficult to decide where a given form of speech is to be looked upon as an independent language, or as a dialect of some other definite form of speech. In practice it has been found that it is sometimes impossible to decide the question in a manner which will gain universal acceptance. The two words…are in this respect, like ‘mountain’ and ‘hill.’ One has no hesitation in saying that…Everest is a mountain, and Holborn Hill, a hill, but between these two the dividing line cannot be accurately drawn.7

As a result, censuses have generated astronomical variations in the data posted: the

1961 census of India, for instance, reported 1,652 languages, while the 2001 census,

122. Anvita Abbi notes the fundamentally arbitrary nature of (supposedly) simple

language enumeration as explained by the 2001 census: “raw returns of mother

tongues has totalled 6661, and this resulted in 1635 rationalized mother tongues and

1957 names which were treated as ‘unclassified’ and relegated to ‘other’ mother

tongue categories.” “Obviously,” she adds sardonically, “the Government does not

equate mother tongues with languages.”8 Particularly awkward within this linguistic

maelstrom has been the place of English, India’s co-official language; the 1991

census listed it as one of those “mothertongues / languages with less than 10,000

speakers” despite its obvious hegemonic presence on the socioeconomic landscape,

and despite being the first language of many urban Indians.9

7 Sir George Abraham Grierson, The Linguistic Survey of India (Calcutta:

Microfiche. Zug, Switzerland, Inter Documentation Company, 1903). 26, 22. 8 Anvita Abbi, "Vanishing Diversities and Submerging Identities : An Indian

Case," in Language and Politics in India: Themes in Politics Series, ed. Asha Sarangi (New York, 2009). 303.

9 Central Institute of Indian Languages, ""Others" Under Non-Scheduled Languages-2," http://www.ciil.org/Main/languages/map2.htm.

6

The problem of language in India, and especially the riddle of English, has

only become more compelling with the advent of the twenty-first century and its

growing economic dynamism. The epigraph of this chapter, a passage from a 2009

report compiled by the National Knowledge Commission (NKC), gives some

indication of what is at stake in any discussion of English here. The NKC was an

advisory body established in 2005 to provide guidelines to the Prime Minister and his

legislature for policy reform compatible with the twenty-first century and the

imperatives of a changing world order,. Its mission statement makes clear that the

question of language is far from trivial: “The ability of a nation to use and create

knowledge capital determines its capacity to empower and enable its citizens by

increasing human capabilities. In the next few decades, India will have the largest set

of young people in the world. Following a knowledge-oriented paradigm of

development would enable India to leverage this demographic advantage.”10 Its report

of a four-year investigation, officially released in January 2010, had multiple

emphases, but language and education proved to be recurring themes. The English

language, in particular, garnered the sort of attention previously unseen in documents

related to policy development (not counting the Indian constitution). The social and

economic realities of twenty-first century India were such that English has been

10 "About N.K.C.," National Knowledge Commission,

http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/about/default.asp.

7

framed unequivocally as “a critical determinant of access to, and opportunities for a

better life.”11

The report summed up the socioeconomics of the situation starkly, resisting

the temptation either to gloss over the facts or to sentimentalize the issue with

gestures towards linguistic nationalism:

An understanding and command over the English language is a most important determinant of access to higher education, employment possibilities and social opportunities. School-leavers who are not adequately trained in English as a language are always at a handicap in the world of higher education. More often than not, teaching is in English. Even if it is not, in most subjects, books and journals are available only in English. And those who do not know English well enough find it exceedingly difficult to compete for a place in our premier educational institutions. This disadvantage is accentuated further in the world of work, not only in professional occupations but also in white-collar occupations overall.…There is an irony in the situation. English has been part of our education system for more than a century. Yet English is beyond the reach of most of our young people, which makes for highly unequal access. Indeed, even now, no more than one per cent of our people use it as a second language, let alone a first language.12

This summation of English focuses on the current tendency of the language to

perpetuate differences of class, separating especially the rural and urban spheres.

However, it also explicitly regards the acquisition of English as the path to economic,

professional, and social advancement, in complete contrast to the pre-independence

rhetoric of high nationalism. Gandhi, for instance, wrote passionately throughout his

political career against English as a medium for education in India, and declared that

11 "National Knowledge Commission: Compilation of Recommendations on Education." (New Delhi: National Knowledge Commission, Govt. of India : Academic Foundation, 2007). 9.

12 Pitroda, "National Knowledge Commission: Report to the Nation, 2006 - 2009." 27.

8

“[a]mong the many evils of foreign rule this blighting imposition of a foreign medium

upon the youth of the country will be counted by history as one of the greatest. It has

sapped the energy of the nation, it has shortened the lives of the pupils, it has

estranged them from the masses, it has made education unnecessarily expensive.”13

The point at issue for Gandhi and other linguistic ideologues was that English was

“foreign,” the language of the imperial master: “I am not an enemy of the English

language or script. But I believe that a thing in the wrong place is ugly. …[T]he

English language and script…are not appropriate for the Indian people. I have said it

time and again, and I repeat it, that Hindustani alone can become the common

language of all Indians.”14

The change in tone from Gandhi to the NKC is representative of a significant

sociopolitical and economic transformation that has taken place in the intervening

years, during which English in the subcontinent not only retained important aspects of

the purchase it had before independence but also became distinctly Indian.15 The

13 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "The Curse of Foreign Medium,' from Young

India, 5-7-1928," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 42 (1928). 209. 14 ———, "Speech at Prayer Meeting (Goriakhari, March 19, 1947)," The

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 94 (1947). 153. 15 Sarvepalli Gopal, "The English Language in India since Independence, and Its

Future Role," in Nehru Memorial Lectures, 1966-1991, ed. John Grigg (Delhi: New York, 1992). briefly examines up the watershed moments in the history of English in India, up to 1988, while Hans R. Dua, "The National Language and the Ex-Colonial Language as Rivals: The Case of India," International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique 14, no. 3 (1993). looks specifically at how English as the ex-colonial language was cast as a threat to the native (and hegemonic) Hindi. The historic elitism of English has been studied extensively, but some more significant recent works are Veena Naregal, Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere : Western India under Colonialism, Anthem South Asian Studies.; (London: Anthem, 2002); Paul R Brass, "Elite Interests, Popular Passions, and Social Power in

9

rhetoric of language ideology became less impassioned, particularly as the promotion

of Hindi as national language lost some of its momentum. Strident, government-

approved Hindi nationalism, in particular, lessened, leading in turn to a reduction in

opposition to Hindi among different regional language groups even as they

increasingly acquired the language from popular media. The ruckus about the

retention (or elimination) of English, too, became muted, prompting scholars like

Granville Austin to declare rather blithely that “Language, as a nationally disruptive

issue, has progressively disappeared, although sensitivities persist.”16

2. What’s in a Name?

Granville Austin’s confident claim about the disappearance of language as a

“nationally disruptive issue” has its roots in the changed character of language-driven

conflict in India. Friction related to language and linguistic identity was confined to a

few main problems for much of the twentieth century. The oldest of these problems

was the definition of Hindi. The question engaged British Orientalists almost as soon

as the East India Company established administrative authority in Bengal, as it

affected the language training of Company employees. An early matter of debate was

what exactly constituted the “elegant language which is used in every part of the Language Politics of India " Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 no. 3 (2004). P. Sailaja, Indian English, Dialects of English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). discusses the peculiarities of the form and structure of Indian English, as well as the history of its various transformations.

16 Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution : The Indian Experience (New Delhi: New York, 1999). 155.

10

Hindustan and the Dakhin, which is the common vehicle of intercourse among all

well-educated natives and among the illiterate also, in many provinces of

India,…which is almost everywhere intelligible to some among the inhabitants of

every village,” as H. T. Colebrooke described it.17 The question was a compelling

one, and the quest for a standardized idiom led to significant value judgments on both

language and culture in the subcontinent, as well as far-reaching (re)constructions of

authenticity and historical change. Nathaniel Halhed, for instance, commented

critically in 1778 about the difficulties in understanding Indian culture even through

the language considered representative of its people:

[The] primitive Hindustanic tongue has by no means preserved its purity, or its universality to the present age: for the modern inhabitants of India vary almost as much in language as in Religion. It is well known in what an obstinate and inviolable obscurity the Jentoos conceal as well the Mysteries of their Faith, as the Books in which they are contained: and under what severe prohibitions the most approved Legislators have confined the study of the Shanscrit to their principle tribes only.18

One observes the germination of the association of a certain idiom with religious

difference in his subsequent analysis, along with the notion of linguistic purity and

foreign corruptions:

The Pundit who imparted a small portion of his language to me…readily displayed the principles of his grammar, [but] he has invariably refused to develope a single article of his religion. Thus we

17 H. T. Colebrooke, Sir T. E. Colebrooke, and Cowell Edward B. (ed.),

Miscellaneous Essays, by H.T. Colebrooke, with Life of the Author. By His Son, Sir T.E. Colebrooke, 3 vols. (London: Trübner, 1873). 25.

18 Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, "Bodhaprakasam Sabdasastram Phiringinamupakarartho Kriyate Haledangrejåi. A Grammar of the Bengal Language." (Hoogly: Charles Wilkins, 1778, 2004). x.

11

may suppose that when the Mahometan Invaders first settled in India, and from the necessity of having some medium of communication with their new subjects, applied themselves to the study of the Hindustanic dialect, the impenetrable reserve of the Jentoos would quickly render its abstruser Shanscrit terms unintelligible; and the Foreigners, unpracticed in the idiom, would frequently recur to their own native expressions. New adventurers continually arriving kept up a constant flow of exotic words…But the Brahmins and all other well-educated Jentoos, whose ambition has not overpowered their principles, still adhere with a certain conscientious tenacity to their primeval tongue.19

Encouraged by Orientalists like Halhed, the “pedants of Fort William College” were

the “prime candidates for initiating the modern process of linguistic division”

between the languages today known as Hindi and Urdu , as Alok Rai notes.20

Historian Tara Chand pinpoints how pedagogical decisions of the College affected

far-reaching linguistic changes:

[W]hen the East India Company ordered the establishment of the Fort William College in Calcutta to teach Indian languages to their officers, Urdu was the language for which teachers were appointed, as also for the classical languages, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, and provincial languages like Bengali and Brajbhasha. Modern Hindi was till then unknown, for no literature existed in it. It was at this time that it began to be employed for literary purposes. The professors of the college encouraged…teachers to compose books in the language used by the Urdu writers; but to substitute Sanskritic words (tatsama) for Persian and Arabic words. Thus the new style was born which was considered specially suited to the requirements of the Hindus, and the Christian missionaries gave a fillip to it by translating the Bible in it.21

This language did not have a standardized form even as late as 1880, even though the

notion of a Muslim Urdu and a Hindu Hindi had started to solidify, as we observe

from Augustus Hoernle’s description:

19 Ibid. xi-xii. 20 Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Hyderabad, A.P.: Orient Longman, 2002). 21. 21 Tara Chand, The Problem of Hindustani (Allahabad: Indian Periodicals, 1944).

12

It appears that there are three different forms of speech current in the Hindi area; viz., the H. Hindi or Urdu, the W. Hindi and the E. Hindi. The first of these is nowhere the vernacular of the people; and it takes the form of Urdu among the Mohammadans and of Hindi among Hindus; though the difference between these two forms is less marked in the mouth of the people than in the books of the learned. On the other hand, both the W.H. And the E.H. are vernaculars of the people generally.22

Hoernle’s interpretation of the various Hindis in use was clearly more

nuanced than the approach of the Fort William pedants, but it nevertheless summed

up the major problem of Hindi. The perception that it was a language with registers

determined by religious affiliation was doubly divisive, as not only did the larger

communal differences fuel conflict, but suddenly visceral language loyalties

exacerbated them. Policy decisions of the nineteenth century British administration,

and the associated lobbying, also drove a wedge between them, as both communities

adapted to the altered sociopolitical conditions at different rates. Lord Bentinck

replaced Persian with English as the official language of the court in 1835. At the risk

of oversimplifying the complex attitudes of far from monolithic communities, one

might remark that the literate Hindu response was pragmatic, leading to a speedy

adoption of English in order to be (or to remain) gainfully employed with the

government. In subsequent decades, this apparent acceptance of English was

accompanied by demands that the Devanagari (Sanskrit) script be used for official

interaction. The Muslim response, on the other hand, was to resist the displacement of

Persian language and learning, which had become iconic of refinement and social

22 A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, A Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages,

with Special Reference to the Eastern Hindi, Accompanied by a Language-Map and a Table of Alphabets (London: Tr¸bner & Co., 1880). vii-viii.

13

prestige. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the religious tensions evolved,

two increasingly divergent forms – generally called Urdu and Hindi, along with the

consistently ambiguous signifier, “Hindustani” – gained currency, divided by script,

lexicon, and religion. As a result, when linguistic nationalism and the cause of the

national language reached its peak in the first half of the twentieth century, the

problem of Hindi-Urdu was less one of language and more that of religious

difference.

The other aspect of language conflict in twentieth-century India related to the

rhetoric of filial affection and the recasting of language as mother and the citizen as

offspring, which also carried with it religious and cultural overtones. Such a

gendering of language lent itself to multiple ideological contexts: citizen-sons owed

the mother-language their allegiance and duty; the woman-language needed

protection and nurturing; the seductress-language tempted attachment where none

was deserved; and the demoness-language threatened to consume the (individual or

collective) soul.23 Unsurprisingly, the fluidity of this discourse had unforeseen results,

23 More about the gendering of language can be found in the following sources:

Sumathi Ramaswamy, "En / Gendering Language: The Poetics of Tamil Identity," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 4 (1993); ———, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); ———, "Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India," Gender &History 10, no. 1 (1998); ———, "The Demoness, the Maid, the Whore, and the Good Mother: Contesting the National Language in India," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 140(1999); ———, "The Goddess and the Nation: Subterfuges of Antiquity, the Cunning of Modernity," in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin D. Flood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003); Asha Sarangi, "Languages as Women: The Feminisation of Linguistic Discourses in Colonial North India," Gender & History 21, no. 2 (2009); Charu Gupta, "The Icon of Mother in Late Colonial North India: 'Bharat Mata', 'Matri

14

such as the resistance to the proposed national language in non-native regions and the

casting of Urdu, Hindi, and English variously as the destructive temptress.24 The

rhetoric of mother-and-child had proved crucial in stimulating and encouraging the

revival of different regional languages, and in the fixing of linguistic identities in the

former instance, leading to the latter development. Even the demand for

linguistically-defined states, an inflammatory issue in the years immediately

following India’s independence, was a direct result of this discourse.

The above-mentioned rhetoric of loyalty to the mother nation and the mother

tongue became integral to the national movement, as it enabled the emotive

personalization of political objectives in a largely illiterate region. It particularly lent

itself to visual representation and speechifying by providing a syntactical shorthand Bhasha' and 'Gau Mata'," Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 45 (2001); V. Geetha, "Gender and Political Discourse," Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 7 (1991).

24 Detailed accounts and some analyses of the resistance to Hindi as the national language of India can be found in: Asoke Kumar Majumdar, Problem of Hindi: A Study, ed. K. M. Munshi and R. R. Diwakar, Bhavan's Book University: 133 (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1965); V. K. R. V. Rao, "Many Languages, One Nation: Quest for an All-India Language," Economic and Political Weekly 13, no. 25 (1978); S. Dwivedi, Hindi on Trial (New Delhi: Vikas, 1981); K. L. Gandhi, The Problem of Official Language in India, 1st ed. (New Delhi: Arya Book Depot, 1984); Krishna Kumar, "Quest for Self-Identity: Cultural Consciousness and Education in Hindi Region, 1880-1950," Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 23 (1990); Dua, "The National Language and the Ex-Colonial Language as Rivals: The Case of India."; Rai, Hindi Nationalism; Ram Mohan, Hindi against India; the Meaning of Dmk (New Delhi: Rachna Prakashan, 1968); E. Es Venu, Why South Opposes Hindi, 1st ed. (Madras: Justice Publications, 1979); Gopalrao Ekbote, A Nation without a National Language (Hyderabad: Hindi Prachar Sabha, 1984); B. V. R. Rao, The Constitution and Language Politics of India (Delhi: B.R. Pub. Corp., 2003). Eugene F. Irschick, "Tamil Revivalism in the 1930s." (Madras : Cre-A, 1986), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/15015416.html

Materials specified: HathiTrust Digital Library http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/15015416.html.

15

for recognizable objects of devotion, worthy of sacrifice.25 These constructions also

effectively denied the English language a place within a culturally-defined Indian

nationalism: the language was only mother tongue to the Colonizer, and was

responsible at least by association for the servitude of Indian subjects. That English

education had enabled an educated elite and middle class to communicate across

regional language barriers, much like Persian and Sanskrit before it, was an

unpalatable paradox, best forgotten.

3. The Rhetoric of Civilizational Hierarchies

Much of this discomfort with the English language came from the history of

its introduction into India. The lofty status of English in the twentieth century is

undeniably the result of English rule and English education in the subcontinent, a

distinctly colonial legacy. British education policy in the nineteenth century had an

overt bias against traditional texts, learning models, and institutions; inevitably, the

absence of incentive for native knowledge, both in terms of future economic

prospects and public recognition of intellectual achievement, led to a decline in its

practical desirability and sociopolitical status.26 Regional languages also suffered

25 In addition to the works mentioned earlier on nation as mother, see Lisa N.

Trivedi, "Visually Mapping The "Nation": Swadeshi Politics in Nationalist India, 1920-1930," The Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 1 (2003). for the various ways the image lent itself to visual representation.

26 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Naregal, Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere : Western India under Colonialism.

16

because the knowledge of English opened up comparatively lucrative opportunities

right through the nineteenth century.

Language, as I suggested earlier in my discussion of Hindi, had been an early

preoccupation of the British administration, not only because of how fundamental it

was to communication, but also because it enabled cultural translation. Bernard Cohn

notes how this process operated: the British “believed that they could explore and

conquer this space [India] through translation: establishing correspondences could

make the unknown and the strange knowable.” The comparative method was central

to this effort to understand an alien land, and depended for its effectiveness on

“classifying, binding, and controlling variety and difference;” this was a procedure

inherently insensitive to differences of paradigm across cultural spaces due to its

single-minded purpose of recasting one culture in terms of another.27 Not

surprisingly, such an approach resulted in fraught value judgments resulting from the

unequal power relationship between the English and the Indians, and its influence on

the educational system as a whole.

India saw, in the first half of the nineteenth century, great debates about the

education of its people, and far-reaching changes. Education had until then been left

largely to traditional systems and texts, and had come to mean, in general, a

knowledge of texts in the classical languages of Sanskrit and Persian. The rich and

highly developed grammar and ancient literature in these languages combined with

27 Bernard S. Cohn, "The Command of Language and the Language of Command,"

in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India [the Bernard Cohn Omnibus] (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 53-55.

17

limitations on access to literacy had led by this time to stagnation in the evolution of

what education consisted of and, indeed, even meant. The existence of ancient

treatises in purposefully obscure languages were by then taken for granted, and focus

had shifted away from any attempt to explore new frontiers or develop further the

existing body of knowledge. Prior to the nineteenth century, reform efforts were

directed towards increasing access to education; the actual content of education

retained a sense of continuity with older traditions of the land, many of them the

hybrid product of cross-cultural contact. However, British rule changed the very

axioms of Indian education, largely because the objectives of education themselves

changed by the early nineteenth century. The utilitarian and evangelical values and

interests of an emerging English middle-class, and a whole new economic system in

Britain based on manufacturing, started off processes of assimilation designed to meet

the requirements of newly defined standards of efficiency, rationality, and economics.

However, though the broader goal of education by the middle of the nineteenth

century was largely to serve British interests, the language used by the harbingers of

change was one of moral and intellectual ideals. This rhetoric ultimately created and

reinforced an imperial discourse about Western superiority that was to endure longer

than the colony itself.

The attitude of the English in India towards the region underwent a significant

change from the end of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth

century. Briefly put, the view that Indians should be made to learn the culture and

practices of their Western rulers, an outlook that ultimately became a fundamental

18

principle of educational policy replaced the desire among the Englishmen in India to

assimilate themselves to their surroundings by acquainting themselves as fully as they

could to the languages, traditions, and culture of the country. Stanley Wolpert notes

the role that practical difficulties played in this decision to establish a single language

of administration across a culturally and linguistically diverse subcontinent: “The

company was obliged to teach English to at least enough ‘natives’ to facilitate and

sustain the effective administration of the territories recently brought under its vast

new imperial umbrella. The alternative of expecting young Britishers to learn enough

Indian languages to carry on the daily chores of administrative collecting, spending,

and punishing was simply too expensive and intellectually unlikely.”28 Further, this

shift from a wish to assimilate to a desire to dominate, historians like John Clive

argue, had its roots in England’s own economy. As long as India was merely a trading

partner or a source of surplus revenue to be distributed to shareholders of the East

India Company, Clive argues, it was merely a means for the Company’s employees to

enrich themselves. The minions of the company did not explicitly consider

themselves as the members of a ruling aristocracy or even as establishing a permanent

empire. However, the Industrial Revolution introduced a “tremendous manufacturing

potential,” necessitating the development of markets for the mass-manufactured

28 Stanley A. Wolpert, A New History of India (Oxford University Press, 2009).

215.

19

goods thus produced.29 Clive points out the economic reasoning behind the change

from a policy of reconciliation to one of assimilation:

As long as India had served primarily as a source of profit and revenue, the necessity for interfering with native Indian administration and customs had appeared minimal. […] But the contrast with what was to come in the nineteenth century is clear enough. Hundreds of millions of people came to be looked upon as potential customers for British goods rather than mere contributory agents to landed revenue. A program of “Westernization” was bound to follow, to prepare them for their new role.30

For all its reasonableness, however, Clive’s economic argument fails to account for

the complex responses to English seen in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. An

examination of the rhetoric surrounding the introduction of English education in India

enables one to account for that more effectively.

Two widely differing views on education and, indeed, empire – the

conciliatory and the transformational – existed in the late eighteenth century, which

are best represented by the rhetoric of Warren Hastings and Charles Grant

respectively. The company’s presence in India changed from that of commercial

enterprise and soldier of fortune to political power under Hastings’s governorship, as

he replaced the dual government system initiated by Robert Clive with a more direct

rule and demonstrated the company’s abilities to defend itself against native Indian

armies without extra support from Europe. However, though his administration lent

the company’s rule some coherence and a political viability, it was not as

characteristically British as that of a Cornwallis or a Wellesley. Hastings embodied

29 John Leonard Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, [1st ] ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973). 306, 305.

30 Ibid. 306.

20

the early, cautious, approach of the Company, directed towards the maintenance of its

sudden political good fortune, and under his leadership, the Company stuck closely to

traditional methods of governance. “We have endeavoured to adapt our Regulations

to the Manners and Understanding of the People, and the Exigencies of the Country,

adhering, as closely as we are able, to their Ancient Usages and Institutions,” he

stated unequivocally.31 This endeavor extended to the kind of educational institutions

that the governor patronized.

As Governor of Bengal and the first Governor-General of India, Hastings

championed the cause of providing linguistic training at Oxford to civil servants

before they came to India, so that they would be in a better position to understand and

adapt to their surroundings.32 He was instrumental in the establishment of a madrasa

in Calcutta in the year 1780, the result of a dialogic process guided by the combined

efforts of both rulers and ruled.33 As Governor of Bengal, he showed great

receptiveness to local suggestions on how to carry out the responsibilities of his

public office. He recorded some of this process in an official minute: A group of

Muslim petitioners, consisting of a “Number of Mussalmen of Credit and Learning,”

petitioned him to persuade a visiting scholar to remain in Calcutta, and to establish

31 Quoted in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1959). 35-36. 32 David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance; the Dynamics of

Indian Modernization, 1773-1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 18.

33 Eugene Irschick, paraphrased in the Introduction to Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843 (Richmond: Curzon, 1999). 2.

21

the proposed institution.34 Their arguments, as he records them, cast him in the

traditional role of patron of learning, which he was not averse to embracing:

They represented that this was a favourable Occasion to establish a Madrassa or College and Mudged O’den the fittest Person to form and preside in it, that Calcutta was already become the Seat of a great Empire, and the Resort of Persons from all Parts of Hindustan and Deccan, that it had been the Pride of every polished Court and the Wisdom of every well regulated Government, both in India and in Persia to promote by such Instructions the Growth and Extention of liberal Knowledge, that in India only the Traces of them now remain, the Decline of Learning having accompanied that of the Mogul Empire, that the numerous Offices of our Government which required Men of improved Abilities to fill and the care which had been occasionally observed to select Men of the first Eminence in the Science of Jurisprudence to officiate as Judges […] and […] the Belief that generally prevailed that Men so accomplished usually met with a distinguished reception from myself[.]35

The substance of the group’s petition reveals the tactics of the petitioning group.

Using a mixture of personal flattery and panegyric, the group cast the highest

authority of the province into the mould of earlier, more familiar, Indian regimes. The

subtle comparison of the British rule with the highest point of the Mughal empire

simultaneously elevated the status of the former while describing the local

expectations from it. This sophisticated maneuvering of the ruler into a mode of

patronage that was both familiar and desirable to the local group was also

accompanied by more pragmatic reasons (offered by the petitioning subjects) from

the ruler’s point of view about the advantages of doing what the group wanted. This

34 Warren Hastings, "“Minute by Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Fort William (Calcutta) in Bengal, Recorded in the Public Department, 17 April 1781” " in The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843, ed. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Richmond: Curzon, 1781, reproduced 1999). 73.

35 Ibid. 74.

22

combination of approaches – personal flattery, elaborate (and formal) praise, and

hardcore practicality – was consistent with traditional negotiating practices of the

region at the time, and revealed the extent of participation of the ruled in the creation

of the conditions around them.

For his part, Hastings apparently recognized the potential and political

advantages contained within the form of address of the petition. An association,

tenuous though it was, with a recognized (and, for most part, revered) line of

emperors of India gave the British assumption of power a legitimacy that would

otherwise have been beyond their reach. Further, by acting in keeping with the codes

followed by Indian rulers and by adapting to local laws, customs, opinions, and

expectations, the British position of power could only be secured. Gauri Visvanathan

correctly notes in her Masks of Conquest that the civilizing mission was incidental to

the early colonizers’ desire to consolidate their power: the “goal of ‘civilizing the

natives’ was far from being the central motivation in [the] first official efforts at

educational activity.”36 Hastings’s Indianizing policy had been designed to disturb

minimally the existing social and political structures (at least in theory); he even

commissioned Sir William Jones to compile and translate Hindu legal tracts into

English such that they could guide English judges presiding over native cases. Yet

later statements he made to the effect that Indians “have no laws, no rights, no

property movable or immovable, no distinctions of ranks, nor any sense of disgrace”

and that despotism was the “only principle of government acknowledged in India”

36 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. 24.

23

expressed a cynical justification of oppression and cemented the stereotype of the

barbarian to which young company employees increasingly subscribed. Even

Nathaniel Halhed, one of Hastings’s closest aides and an eastern scholar with several

tracts on the language, literature, and laws of the Indians to his credit, lent weight to

Hastings’s claim of the Indian tradition of lawlessness and despotism, effectively

giving credence to this picture for the young trainees and feeding their growing

contempt for the stereotype and the people.37

Ultimately, however, the moral, social, and economic excesses of the early

representatives of the company led to protracted Parliamentary debate in Britain,

followed by moves to rectify the wrongs by taking on some amount of social

responsibility. “Orientalism,” as Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir note, once again

became the “official policy and unofficial mood” of the young British government in

this milieu.38 The Calcutta madrasa was established, with the administration still

defining itself in terms of continuing an older tradition of kingship and patronage, as

much as it was possible for transferable employees of a company to do so. However,

the very nature of the center of power was different in this case as it was no longer an

individual line or a settled group of people occupying the highest seat. The fact that

the government consisted of career-bureaucrats with a base outside the country,

supported by powerful lines of communications created stronger loyalties to and

37 Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke and India : Political Morality and Empire,

Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). 245-246.

38 Zastoupil and Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843. 2.

24

bonds with the parent country. Conciliation was plausibly a desirable policy to

follow, but assimilation was limited even when the increased nationalism of a Britain

fighting Napoleon allowed it.

Later governors of Indian provinces like Munro and Elphinstone continued the

early policy of conciliation begun by Hastings right into the 1820s. Subtle but

significant changes had already appeared in the imperial ideology that dictated this

policy, however, in terms of the underlying motivation. While Hastings had worked

at reconciling the people of India to the British raj to consolidate the Company’s

position as the new rulers, the later governors were driven by concerns about

continuing and perpetuating the empire. Notions of past – and lost – splendor, never

far from the surface, increasingly underlay the principles of tolerance for Indian

people and the Indian traditions that they promoted. The wars with and conquests of

Nepal and the Marathas in the second decade of the nineteenth century added a new

dimension of practicality that reinforced the need of the “new” breed of British

administrators to placate rather than openly dominate, as newer regions and larger

populations came under British control. More than ever, there was a sense of the

fragility of the new empire. As Zastoupil and Moir note, the belief crystallized among

a group of individuals “that the British empire was one of opinion, meaning that it

would stand only so long as British power was unchallenged and the British could

secure the good opinion of their Indian subjects.”39 This argument became key to the

39 Ibid. 10.

25

stand that the Orientalists took in the debate about Indian education, and influenced

several of their recommendations.

This group, which recognized and acknowledged weaknesses in the English

position, stood in stark contrast to the one rooted in evangelical convictions and later

supported by utilitarian thought. Charles Grant was a major influence on this

particular school of thought, which used the rhetoric of the superior morals,

institutions, and beliefs of the English. That even the most fervent Orientalists

appeared ultimately to deride native society and culture cemented the case against

native education as far as evangelists, utilitarians, and other moralizers for the empire

in the early nineteenth century were concerned. Grant’s ideas and logic became

seminal to later Anglicists in the debate on the language of Indian education, as I will

soon show. He served two phases as an employee of the East India Company, first

from 1768 to 1771, and then again from 1774 to 1790. In 1776 he underwent a

religious conversion in Calcutta, which brought him into the public eye in England as

a major voice of the evangelical movement. His new-found religious beliefs and

evangelical zeal permeated his entire worldview, leading to a conviction that Britain

(and Christians) had much to teach and nothing to learn from Indians. This outlook

soon became a part of the imperial spirit itself, with the radical Anglicists swearing

by it and the conservative Orientalists playing apologists for suggesting otherwise.

Grant’s Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of

Great Britain, written in 1792, presented South Asia as a depraved land whose people

were steeped in immorality and criminality of every imaginable kind. He blamed the

26

“disorders” of the land on the religion of the majority, framing “Hindoo” religious

practices exclusively in terms of criminal, immoral, or irrational practices. Against

this “depravity” was juxtaposed the construct of the Christian Englishman as a

member of “a free, humane, and an enlightened nation, a nation itself professing

principles diametrically opposite to those in question,” whose moral duty it was to

subvert the “fabric of error.”40 Observations became Grant’s most influential treatise,

and was instrumental in the setting up of the binaries of the enlightened imperialist

and the innately corrupt heathen “native” in the public imagination: “The true cure of

darkness, is the introduction of light. The Hindoos err, because they are ignorant; and

their errors have never fairly been laid before them. The communication of our light

and knowledge to them, would prove the best remedy for their disorders,” he

proselytized. He erected the image of the Christian Britisher as a colonizer with

powerful moral and ethical codes that eschewed coercion: “Shall we resort to the

power that we possess, to destroy their distinctions of castes, and to demolish their

idols? Assuredly not. Force, instead of convincing them of their error, would fortify

them in the persuasion of being right; and the use of it, even if it promised happier

consequences, would still be altogether unjust.”41 Combined, these masterly strokes

provided the ultimate justification for the rule of the East India Company in India – it

was its moral duty to teach Christian (and English) values to the benighted Indians.

40 Charles Grant, "'Part of Chapter Iv of Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals. Written Chiefly in 1792'," in The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843, ed. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Richmond: Curzon, 1792, reproduced 1999). 81, 82, 84.

41 Ibid. 83.

27

Besides constructing a moral and religious justification for British rule in the

public imagination, Grant’s work was also a significant step in establishing dull-

wittedness and intellectual incompetence as specific characteristics of the conceptual

category of the “Hindoo” or the “Indian native.” His endeavors were paralleled by

administrative decisions under the current governor-general, Lord Cornwallis, whose

ambition it was, according to Gauri Viswanathan, “to achieve an impersonal

government of law” by removing Indians from offices of responsibility. Following

the changes in administrative machinery came the gradual but inevitable disconnect

between the ruler and the ruled. Very few sections of the indigenous population now

came into direct interaction with the administration, allowing the reduction of the

colonial subject to what Viswanathan calls “an object emptied of all personal identity

to accommodate the knowledge already established and being circulated about the

‘native Indian.’”42 Grant’s view of “Hindoos” as passive objects is apparent in his

discussions of options in teaching them. He makes a claim for the intellectual and

racial superiority of the Europeans at the very outset: “The acquisition of a foreign

language is, to men of cultivated minds, a matter of no great difficulty. English

teachers could therefore be sooner qualified to offer instruction in the native

languages, than the Indians would be prepared to receive it in ours;” however he

almost immediately follows this statement, which could be mistaken for a suggestion

that Western enlightenment be conveyed in the vernacular, with all the reasons why

42 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. 11.

28

English was the desirable medium of instruction.43 This assertion of the superiority of

English as a medium of instruction is, not surprisingly, followed up by an affirmation

that it was really possible to reach even such dark depths of ignorance that the

“Hindoos” represented, provided both technique and pace were appropriate:

…it is perfectly in the power of this country, by degrees, to impart to the Hindoo our language; afterwards through that medium, to make them acquainted with our easy literary compositions, upon a variety of subjects; and let not the idea hastily excite derision, progressively with the simple elements of our arts, our philosophy and religion.44

Finally, he identifies the ultimate goal of such a change in the medium and the

content of education:

…undoubtedly the most important communication which the Hindoos could receive through the medium of our language, would be the knowledge of our religion, the principles of which are explained in a clear, easy way, in various tracts circulating among us […] Thence they would be instructed in the nature and the perfections of the one true God, and in the real history of man; his creation, his lapsed state, and the means of his recovery, on all which points they hold false and extravagant opinions[.]45

The ultimate aim of such education as Grant envisioned was to convert the “Hindoos”

to what he considered the “true faith”, so inextricably linked to a particular language

and its literature.

It is unsurprising to see the biases of an eighteenth century evangelist in his

representation of alien peoples and systems of learning. The adoption of similar

43 Grant, "'Part of Chapter Iv of Observations on the State of Society among the

Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Morals. Written Chiefly in 1792'." 84.

44 Ibid. 84. 45 Ibid. 88.

29

rhetoric and representations in the discourses of some educated Indians themselves,

however, is much more complicated. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, for instance, used much

of the vocabulary and imagery of the imperialists in his well-known 1823 letter to

Lord Amherst. His attempt to convince the government of the need for opportunities

to acquire western sciences was punctuated with the same dichotomy of the

enlightened and the benighted: “thanks to Providence for inspiring the most generous

and generous nations of the West with the glorious ambition of planting in Asia the

arts and sciences of modern Europe;” “the laudable desire of Government to improve

the natives of India by education;” “gentlemen of talents and learning educated in

Europe.” These phrases mirror the convictions expressed by Grant.46 Roy framed

traditional Sanskrit education in much the same terms as Grant, as useless and false.

Though Roy did not explicitly deride the possibility of the communication of

the Western sciences through the vernaculars in his letter to Amherst, his emphasis

remained on the need for European instructors and modern western education,

foreshadowing the persistent equivalence of progress with English education in

present-day India. The importance of his intervention in the education debate can be

inferred from the number of times Thomas Babington Macaulay alluded to portions

of this letter in his influential February 1835 minute on education. This document has

“reverberated…in the Indian and British cultural psyches” because of how arrogantly

Macaulay dismissed Indian thought and literature in favor of an “uncompromisingly

46 Rammohun Roy, "'Letter to Lord Amherst, Governor-General in Council, Dated 11 December 1823'," in The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843, ed. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Richmond: Curzon, 1823, reproduced 1999). 111, 113.

30

anglocentric notion of India’s future:” “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all

the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the

Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry

abridgments used at preparatory schools in England,” he declaimed about the

literature that had been “admitted to be of small intrinsic value.”47 “I have no

knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic,” he declared grandiosely, “but I have done

what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. [… A] single shelf of a good

European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabic.”48

Contemporaries such as Lord Auckland attributed such hyperbolic comments

to Macaulay’s tendency “to exaggerate in controversy,” but as Zastoupil and Moir

observe, the latter’s argument was highly tendentious because of the false choice it

posed between absurdity and useful science.49 Further, at one stroke, it attributed to

the English language the quality of providing “ready access to all the vast intellectual

wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the

course of ninety generations,” even as it emptied literatures in other languages of any

47 Zastoupil and Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating

to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843. 162. Thomas Babington Macaulay, "'Minute Recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council, Dated 2 February 1835'," in The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843, ed. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Richmond: Curzon, 1835, reproduced 1999). 165, 170.

48 Macaulay, "'Minute Recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council, Dated 2 February 1835'." 165.

49 Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian. 342. Zastoupil and Moir, The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843. 33.

31

worth whatsoever. Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic became, within this exegesis,

languages “barren of useful knowledge,” to be taught “because [they were] fruitful of

monstrous superstitions:” “We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false

medicine, because we find them in Company with a false religion,” he proclaimed.50

The opposition of the east and west as conceptual categories was so powerful within

Macaulay’s framework that he failed to consider that the position of Sanskrit and

Arabic was analogous to that of Greek and Latin in contemporary Europe, as David

Kopf argues at length, and that English was a false substitute.51

The proposal that company emphasis be on English education thus was

framed as directed towards the altruistic invigoration of learning; implemented,

however, it became one directed towards the forming of “a class who may be

interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern[–]a class of persons Indian

in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”52

This stated objective, one feels, was but the natural culmination of the line of

questioning begun years before by Charles Grant: “[H]ow are our subjects to be

formed to a disposition … favourable to us, to be changed thus in their character, but

by new principles, sentiments, and tastes, leading to new views, conduct, and

manners; all which would, with one and the same effect, identify their cause with

50 Macaulay, "'Minute Recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council, Dated 2 February 1835'." 166.

51 Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance; the Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835.

52 Macaulay, "'Minute Recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council, Dated 2 February 1835'." 171.

32

ours, and proportionally separate them from opposite interests?”53 The effects of such

an education were being felt even at the time that Macaulay composed his infamous

minute. In 1835, William Adam reported that alienation was the inevitable lot of

English-educated Bengalis:

those who have more or less profited by the opportunities presented to them do not find much scope for their new attainments which on the other hand little fit them for the ordinary pursuits of native society. They have not received a good native education, and the English education they have received finds little, if any, use. There is thus a want of sympathy between them and their countrymen…There is also little sympathy between them and the foreign rulers of the country, because they feel that they have been raised out of one class of society without having a recognized place in any other class.54

Nearly fifty years later, the 1882 Education Commission reported along the same

lines. It recognized, along with early nationalists, that contrary to rhetoric, English

studies had not set Indians on the path to progress, but had instead confined the

educated Indian to a “narrow circle of … life; the absence of facile ties for travel,

whereby his sympathies and experience may be enlarged; the strong temptation to lay

aside his studies…all help to dwarf the moral and intellectual growth, and to

foster…faults.”55 Unsurprisingly, fledging nationalists faced with racial

discrimination in the judicial as well as professional realm felt the need to assert a

positive identity by the late nineteenth century, spawning newspapers in several

53 Charles Grant, cited in Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and

British Rule in India. 74. 54 William Adam, Report on the State of Education in Bengal. Published by the

Order of Government (Calcutta: G.H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1835). 191.

55 Quoted in Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. 149.

33

native Indian languages both to supply an existing demand as well as to create a

consciousness of larger community. The renaissance of various regional languages

and literatures was an associated development, along with the evolution of the

metaphor of language as mother. Language, which had been a largely apolitical

communicative tool for the unread native before British colonization, became an

explicit axis for identity in various parts of India by the end of the nineteenth

century.56 But English remained the main link language for the educated elites and

middle classes across different regions, “the language used exclusively for the

expression of India’s political aspirations,” as B. Shiva Rao calls it.

56 However, decisions about the language of administration were partially political

in pre-British India, as was Akbar’s decision to make Persian the court language so that the Mughal empire’s relationship with the Persian empire could be firmly cemented. See Muzaffar Alam, "The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics," Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (1998). For discussions of different regional language movements, see Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970; Lisa Ann Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India : The Making of a Mother Tongue (Indiana University Press, 2009); Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness : Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, Soas Studies in South Asia (Delhi: New York, 1995); Naregal, Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere : Western India under Colonialism; Christopher Rolland King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sheldon I. Pollock, Literary Cultures in History : Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Arvind-pal Singh Shackle C. Mandair and Gurharpal Singh, eds., Sikh Religion, Culture and Ethnicity (Curzon,2001).

34

4. Identity and Independence

The twentieth century marked the transformation of the Indian National

Congress from what was essentially an upper class debating society to an

organization representative of populist aspirations.57 National ideologies also

consolidated at this time. Language formed a significant component of the new

nationalism, which emphasized indigenous pride and self-sufficiency. The language

policy adopted by the INC in 1925, however, captures some of the difficulties posed

by linguistic nationalism. It had to negotiate between the tendency towards religious

schisms exacerbated by Hindi-Urdu, and also ensure that the focus on creating a

unifying national language did not alienate any linguistic community; the solution

was to suggest multiple options. “The proceedings of the Congress shall be

conducted, as far as possible, in Hindustani,” the resolution began; “The English

language or any provincial language may be used if the speaker is unable to speak

Hindustani or whenever necessary. Proceedings of the Provincial Congress

Committee shall ordinarily be conducted in the language of the Province concerned.

Hindustani may also be used,” it concluded.58 Not surprisingly, no substantial change

57 For more on the history of the INC, see Paul R. Brass and Francis Robinson,

The Indian National Congress and Indian Society, 1885-1985 : Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Dominance (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1987); John L. Hill and Congress Conf Author: Canadian Conference on the Centenary of the Indian National, The Congress and Indian Nationalism : Historical Perspectives, Collected Papers on South Asia (London : Curzon Press: Wellesley Hills, MA, 1991); Amvika Charan Mazumdar, The Indian National Congress and the Growth of Indian Nationalism (Delhi: Daya Pub. House, 1985).

58 Rajendra Prasad, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Correspondence and Select Documents, ed. Valmiki Choudhary, 21 vols. (New Delhi: Allied, 1984). Vol. 3. 416.

35

resulted from this feeble resolution, and English continued to be the main language

used in the INC despite the growth of initiatives to study and spread Hindi/Hindustani

as national language.

The prospect of independence in 1947, however, rekindled the issue of

language as it related to the identity of the nation, making it again the focus of

controversy. When the Constituent Assembly began to consider the definitions,

rights, and principles for a free India in 1946, language almost immediately became a

point of contention, underlining how fundamental the issue was as both symbol and

medium of communication. This time, however, it was not so much a question of

what was to be the national language (there was some consensus that it would be

“Hindustani”). Instead, the issue was, in what language were the principles of a free

India to be framed? Even more basic, and incendiary, was the question of the

language in which to conduct the debates about constitutional provisions: the

impulses of a representative state collided with those of an ethno-nationalistic one on

the second day itself. Records of the Constitutional Assembly debates show that one

of its members, R. V. Dhulekar, began his address in Hindi, only to be stopped. The

subsequent exchange between Dhulekar and the Chairman began tamely enough, with

the then-chairman of the Assembly Dr. Sachchidananda Sinha enquiring if Dhulekar

knew no English. The tone, however, escalated to antagonism within seconds:

Dhulekar’s response of “I know English, but I want to speak in Hindustani,” drew the

reminder that “Many of the members [of the Assembly] do not know Hindustani.”

This rebuke Dhulekar countered with the statement, “People who do not know

36

Hindustani have no right to stay in India;” “People who are present in this House to

fashion out a constitution for India and do not know Hindustani are not worthy to be

members of this Assembly. They had better leave,” he added, for good measure.59

This statement and his subsequent proposal that all rules of procedure should be

framed solely in Hindustani were provocative but not without some support within

the assembly, and they were virtually a microcosm of the linguistic tensions already

rumbling in the embryonic state. The chairman was only able to contain the conflict

at that moment by prohibiting further discussion of the issue.

The exchange between Dhulekar and Sinha was an ominous portent for the

future unity of India, given that the partition of the country along religious lines was

already imminent. Proponents of a single official language that was not English

showed no willingness to consider arguments that “over sixty to seventy million

people from South India did not understand Hindustani,” reducing them instead to

evidence of the unwillingness of certain linguistic groups to participate in the process

of nation-formation.60 “I want to tell my brethren from Madras that if after 25 years of

efforts on the part of Mahatma Gandhi they have not been able to understand

Hindustani, the blame lies at their door,” an assembly member declared, for instance.

“It is beyond our patience to bear that because some of our brethren from Madras do

not understand Hindustani, English should reign supreme in a Constituent Assembly

which is said to be a sovereign body and which has assembled to frame a constitution

59 India: Constituent Assembly, "Debates: Official Report," (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1946-1950). Vol. 1, pp. 26-27.

60 B. Shiva Rao et al., The Framing of India's Constitution, 5 vols. (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1966). Vol. 1, 783.

37

for free India.”61 Strong anti-Hindi (and often also pro-English) sentiments in the

south only fueled this perception that South Indians and natives of Madras state were

resistant to a particular ideology of nation, embodied in the proposed national

language.

However, the realization that difficulties of language acquisition could be very

real in a country with multiple language families, and that the goal of literacy in one’s

native language was challenging enough in a largely illiterate country ensured that

linguistic nationalism did not drown out dissenting voices. The language issue came

up before the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee, which ruled in favor of including

clauses on both language and education. However, whether any such clause could

realistically be enforced remained an open question, because of which the final

provisions on the fundamental rights of the citizens of free India did not include any

reference to a national language. Compromise provisions on official language came to

include, instead, the clause that Hindi would be the official language while English

would only be a co-official language for a reasonable period of time, but the then-

President of the Constituent Assembly added a rider. Dr. Rajendra Prasad pointed out

that the question of language, and particularly the language of the Indian constitution,

was not simply one of cultural pride or anti-colonialism but was also about

intellectual histories:

Whatever our sentiments may dictate, we have to recognize the fact that most of those who have been concerned with the drafting of the Constitution can express themselves better in English than they can in

61 Assembly, "Debates: Official Report." Vol. 1, 233.

38

Hindi; it is not only a question of expressing [oneself] in English or Hindi, but the ideas have also been taken from constitutions of the West. So the expressions which have been used have, many of them, histories of their own and we have taken them bodily from the phraseology of constitutions of the West in many places.62

This argument, coupled with the accusations of language imperialism and

attempted totalitarianism, suggested that the choice really lay between mandating a

“Hindi India” from above and allowing a unified India to emerge naturally.

Jawaharlal Nehru, especially, emphasized the need for caution in framing provisions

regarding language:

Language ultimately grows from the people; it is seldom that it can be imposed. Any attempt to impose a particular form of language on an unwilling people has usually met with the strongest opposition and has actually resulted in something the very reverse of what the promoters thought. I would beg this House to consider the fact and to realize if it agrees with me, that the surest way of developing a natural all-India language is not so much to pass resolutions and laws on the subject but to work to that end in other ways.63

Rajendra Prasad, too, underlined the futility, and indeed the counter-productiveness,

of blind linguistic nationalism: “Let us not forget that whatever decision is taken with

regard to the question of language, it will have to be carried out by the country as a

whole,” he reiterated. “There is no other item in the whole constitution of the country

which will be required to be implemented from day to day, from hour to hour, I might

say from even minute to minute in actual practice….The decision…should be

acceptable to the country as a whole.”64 The final constitutional provisions on

62 Ibid. Vol. 7, 20. 63 Ibid. Vol. 7, 235. 64 Prasad, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Correspondence and Select Documents. Vol. 12,

181.

39

language in 1950 were a universal compromise: Hindi was deemed the official

language of free India, with English being a co-official language for a period of

fifteen years. Two disparate responses to this decision capture the essence of the place

of English, both at the time and today: “I am afraid,” intoned an Assembly member,

quite prophetically as it turned out, “that in the next fifteen years the roots of English

influence in this country would have become twice as strong as the English people

were able to make in their rule extending over a period of hundred and fifty years.

The effect of all this is that the reins of power would remain in the hands of he

English-knowing classes.”65 Rajendra Prasad, on the other hand, saw in this decision

reasons for optimism about the future of India: “It shows a spirit of accommodation

and a determination to organize the country as one nation that those whose language

is not Hindi have voluntarily accepted it as the official language. There is no question

of imposition now….The use of English…was considered inevitable for practical

reasons and no one need be despondent over this decision, which has been dictated

purely by practical considerations.”66 A compromise at multiple levels, this decision

has proved decisive in perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities in India even while

providing an imperfect solution to them such as the one the NKC offered recently.

65 Raghu Vira in Assembly, "Debates: Official Report." Vol. 11, 714. 66 Ibid. 612.

40

5. Scope of this project

This project as a whole addresses the question of the place of the English

language in independent India. English in India has its roots firmly in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gauri Visvanathan has provided a classic

discussion of how ideology influenced the introduction of English education in India

in the nineteenth century in her Masks of Conquest, which describes a process that

indirectly encouraged the development of nationalism (linguistic and otherwise) and

proved critical to the consolidation of what might be called modern Indian identity.67

This discussion, however, is just the prelude, as the more recent body of work on

linguistic identity, elite / democratic politics, and Hindi nationalism shows.68 The fact

that language policy, even in its proposed form, directly and materially affects a

citizenry has generated separate but related discussions in the context of education,

history, and politics; all these analyses engage issues of identity and empowerment,

though to different extents.

67 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. 68 Amrit Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu

(Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India; Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940 : Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Asha Sarangi, ed. Language and Politics in India, Themes in Politics Series (New York,2009); Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970; Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India : The Making of a Mother Tongue. Naregal, Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere : Western India under Colonialism. and Rai, Hindi Nationalism. are some of the major works on the subject in recent years.

41

The rest of this dissertation analyzes different attempts in late colonial and

early postcolonial India to negotiate the frequently contradictory formulations of

national identity and empowerment in a culturally and linguistically diverse

democracy. I begin with a brief examination of how language came to be associated

with collective identity in the subcontinent, and segue into the history of modern

education in India. I use three figures – Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Karamchand

Gandhi, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar – as the ostensible subject of each of the

following chapters to delimit the scope of an admittedly expansive topic and to focus

my discussion. These three figures are notable for having had a tremendous impact on

the terms of political discourse in modern India as well as the trajectory of its policies

after independence. Each is, typically, evoked in contexts other than language

politics. Of the three, Nehru’s premiership in the crucial years after independence is

entwined most closely with the formation of linguistic states in India, but even he is

more frequently associated with the developmental model of economics adopted by

early postcolonial India, investment in science and technology, nuclear non-

alignment, Kashmir, and the war with China in 1962. Gandhi, on the other hand, is

inseparable from the principles of nonviolence and its use for political leverage, and

from the extension of his philosophical thought into the realm of economics through

an emphasis on small government, self-sufficiency, and small-scale industry. Finally,

Ambedkar’s advocacy of the “depressed classes” or Dalits (i.e. traditionally

disadvantaged low-caste groups) is so well remembered that his preoccupation with

42

other issues concerning governance, legality, and justice tends to be overlooked in

both popular and academic discourse.

This focus allows me to address an important gap in current scholarship on the

politics of language in modern India, which has tended to focus on the politics of

Hindi-Urdu in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the southern resistance to the

establishment of Hindi as the sole official language of the country, and the

intersections of discourses of regionalism and linguistic nationalism. Despite the

richness and utility of the existing body of research, it generally neglects the many

paradoxes and contradictions of English in twentieth (and twenty-first) century India,

such as its simultaneous perpetuation of class differences and potential for

empowerment, its representativeness of both a colonial past and a globally

interconnected future, and its hegemonic as well as equalizing impulses. These

tensions have instead largely remained within the purview of discussions on

educational policy. The historical importance in modern India of Nehru, Gandhi, and

Ambedkar, their persistent preoccupation with India’s past, present, and future, and

their direct and indirect influence on the Indian constitution allows one to bridge this

gap between historical analysis and contemporary tensions.

Thus, an important tertiary argument I make throughout this dissertation is

that though the politics of language and linguistic identity were secondary or even

tertiary concerns for Nehru, Gandhi, and Ambedkar, all three figures are extremely

important to an understanding of the complexities of language ideology and language

politics in India, both because of what and whom they represented and because of

43

how their interventions influenced the debate on language and education rights as it

has unfolded after independence. Nevertheless, my analysis prioritizes the discussion

of the political status of English and the emergent political relationship of language

and national identity within the multilingual context that is India. Therefore, in each

chapter, I will not provide a truly comprehensive account of how each individual

engaged with controversies on language, but rather will treat each figure as

representative of a specific existing school of thought regarding Indian languages and

English. Their deliberations on the relationship of a citizen of free India with

language, while having some similarities, show important differences that have

reappeared with an altered emphasis in the modified context of today’s India, which

together sum up many of the attitudes to and problems with the various language

ideologies extant. Nehru’s decision to institutionalize the operations of what one

might call the linguistic free market, along with some reluctant concessions to the

emotional need for recognition among different linguistic communities, cannot be

underestimated for its role in preserving the administrative unity of the postcolonial

state. On the other hand, Gandhi’s ideological understanding of language use and

linguistic preferences as a marker of community, which had been so important in

bringing the struggle for freedom from colonial rule out of the realm of the upper

middle classes to the masses, finds remarkable echoes, ironically, in the divisive

discourse that posits language use as reflective of ethnic affiliation, and thereby,

ethnic differentiation. Finally, Ambedkar’s complex negotiations between the burden

of history and the march towards modernity help to articulate some of the most

44

compelling attractions and problems of English as a language of contemporary

dominance, underlining how nations and identities are a product of both antecedents

and political choices. My approach will, one hopes, offset any failings with respect to

inclusivity at one level by offering, at another level, a more complete and coherent

argument on a complex topic.

45

Chapter 2

Nehru and Language Politics in India: Multilingual Society, Democratic Dilemmas

[The question of language] is not important because of that cry of the ignorant that India is a babel of tongues with hundreds and hundreds of languages. … It has to be faced for the moment because of its communal and political implications. But that is a temporary matter and will pass. The real problem will remain: as to what policy we shall adopt in a scheme of general mass education and the cultural development of the people; how shall we promote the unity of India and yet preserve the rich diversity of our inheritance? …

Jawaharlal Nehru, “The Question of Language” (1941)69

1. The Case of the Modern, Pragmatic Intellectual

The previous chapter discussed in some detail how language ideology evolved

in the Indian subcontinent during the early decades of British rule in India. This

chapter examines the politics of the pragmatic liberal, Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the

Indian National Congress (INC) and independent India’s first prime minister. I take

up Nehru not so much to discuss comprehensively his take on language and language

ideology, but rather to examine his views on language politics in general and on

English in particular.70 This examination is important because of how influential

69 Jawaharlal Nehru, "The Question of Language," in The Unity of India; Collected

Writings 1937-1940, ed. V. K. Krishna Menon (London: L. Drummond, 1941). 70 Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (Delhi ; New York:

Oxford University Press, 1997). provides a more comprehensive discussion of Nehru and language in general.

46

Nehru’s views were in shaping the constitution of independent India as well as its

educational policies, and through them significant numbers of the postcolonial

generations. The many paradoxes that the Indian constitution has perpetuated, in fact,

directly or indirectly reflect his views.

The constitutional ossification of tensions is not a coincidence: Nehru was a

gargantuan presence on the Indian political landscape both before and after

independence, and the contradictions in the constitution bear the indelible mark of his

opinions. Journalist Neville Maxwell correctly noted that the first two decades of

Indian independence showed a remarkable coincidence of personal view and state

doctrine: “Nehru’s policies were [truly] India’s, and vice versa.”71 These opinions

Nehru shared in letters, speeches, and negotiations with other politicians, and any

issue bound up with the distribution of power and / or cultural preoccupations drew

his attention in a political career spanning nearly half a century. Gandhi’s

assassination in 1947, and Ambedkar’s retirement and death in the early 1950s only

assured his predominance in the making of modern India. It is not for nothing that

Escott Reid, the Canadian High Commission to India from 1952 to 1957, described

his contemporary’s impact on modern India as Napoleonic, a view that Ramachandra

Guha has echoed more recently.72

71 Neville Maxwell, "Jawaharlal Nehru: Of Pride and Principle," Foreign Affairs

52, no. 3 (1974). 633. 72 Escott Reid, "Nehru: An Assessment in 1957," International Journal 19, no. 3

(1964). 279. Ramachandra Guha, "Verdicts on Nehru: Rise and Fall of a Reputation," Economic and Political Weekly (2005). 1958.

47

Nehru’s politics were definitively shaped in the final decades of British rule

and had a direct influence on policy-making in the years that he led the central

government. A significant part of these politics was ambivalent, drawing criticism

from contemporaries and historians alike for weakness, incompetence, and / or

mismanagement. High Commissioner Reid went so far as to comment that

“Sometimes [Nehru] behaves as if he were [himself] also the leader of the

opposition.”73 However, biographer S. Gopal makes the case that, as far as inclusive

governance went, Nehru was a true pioneer in that he allowed efforts towards fair

legislation to override any strictures for ideological coherence. Gopal and Sunil

Khilnani both point out that a middle class monopoly over nationalism meant

something entirely different from (and simpler than) a heterogenous movement that

crossed various social barriers, and they attribute Nehru’s halting, ponderous

approach to a desire to “find for nationalism an ideology that would hold the various

classes together.”74 Robert D. King shares this sentiment most emphatically in his

own analysis of Nehru’s interventions on language policy, giving the man full credit

for shaping “a unified India with a strong government at the centre” instead of leaving

behind “an India weakly divided along linguistic and cultural lines.”75

Finally, analyzing Nehru’s interventions on the question of language (and,

through it, identity) is also historically important to an understanding of the change in

73 Reid, "Nehru: An Assessment in 1957." 279 74 Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru : A Biography, 3 vols. (London: J. Cape,

1975); Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999); Sarvepalli Gopal, "The Formative Ideology of Jawaharlal Nehru," Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 21 (1976). 787.

75 King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. xvi.

48

his domestic status from popular elected leader to often-vilified politico. His political

stature on the domestic and international stage at independence and in the years soon

after was such that it drew encomiums from several public figures of the time. In

1953, soon after Nehru was elected to office, writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote of him:

“[W]ithin the country, Nehru is the indispensible link between the governing middle-

classes and the sovereign people[;] he is no less the bond between India and the

world.” Nehru was for him, as for many others at the time, “the most important moral

force behind the unity of India;” he was, Chaudhuri argued, personally responsible for

keeping together the governmental machine and the people, and without this nexus India would probably have been deprived of stable government in […]crucial times. He has not only ensured cooperation between the two, but most probably has also prevented actual conflicts, cultural, economic, and political. Not even Mahatmaji’s leadership, had it continued, would have been quite equal to them.76

Reid noted the fervent religiosity of the adulation: “[Nehru] is king as well as prophet

and priest, for he is the symbol of the unity of India; he is the spokesman of India, the

head of its government.”77

The adulatory phase, however, was temporary, and did not outlast Nehru’s

lifetime. As Maxwell pointed out, the conflation of man and maxim was a major

factor in the decline of Nehru’s reputation: “So much of his reputation was the

projection of his charisma that when he was alive it was not easy for those in contact

with him to separate policies from personality so as to weigh the former in

isolation….With [the] charismatic magnification withdrawn, immediately Nehru’s

76 Guha, "Verdicts on Nehru: Rise and Fall of a Reputation." 1959. 77 Reid, "Nehru: An Assessment in 1957." 279.

49

stature appeared shrunken.”78 Guha notes how Chaudhuri never allowed the essay

that had praised Nehru so fulsomely to be reprinted after 1953, and that by 1959,

humorists like R.K. Laxman were making quips at the endless challenges the premier

had to face: “As the years rolled by, the very foundations on which Nehru’s prestige

and reputation rested began to weigh him down. At one time, he had a solution to

every difficulty; today, he faces a difficulty in every solution.”79 By this time, the

man was consistently (and not very successfully, his critics said) wrestling with many

problems, the most exasperating of which – to him, and to much of his public – was

that of language ideology.80 Increasingly, states had had to be defined by their

linguistic (and by extension, cultural) borders, and a southern political party even

electioneered on an unmistakably secessionist manifesto. In the span of little over a

decade, Nehru had gone from being extolled as the statesman whose political rallies

drew so many people that special trains had to connect the rural countryside to the

more urban centers, to the politician who ostensibly bungled not only international

issues like Kashmir and China, but even the domestic problem of integrating the

south with the “rest” of the nation.

Despite the diverging views on the value of Nehru’s legacy, however,

historians, intellectuals, and politicians alike concur that today’s India bears the

unmistakable stamp of his early leadership. Sarvepalli Gopal, noted historian and

78 Maxwell, "Jawaharlal Nehru: Of Pride and Principle." 633. 79 Guha, "Verdicts on Nehru: Rise and Fall of a Reputation." 1959, and

Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, 1st ed. (New York: Ecco, 2007). 287.

80 Selig S. Harrison, "The Challenge to Indian Nationalism," Foreign Affairs 34, no. 4 (1956).

50

biographer, has unequivocally given the credit for India’s continued unity and

progressive aspirations to Nehru: “[He] made certain objectives so much a part of the

general consciousness of India that they can today be taken for granted even if they

have not been as yet fully attained — unity, democracy, civil liberties, secularism, a

scientific and international outlook, planning to realize the vision of socialism. He

provided India with a rich and many sided morality,” Gopal writes.81 And just as

supporters ascribe credit for what they deem achievements, so do critics project back

to him the blame for many contemporary problems, including “pseudosecularism,”

the stranglehold of a ponderous bureaucracy (generally termed “license raj”), and

systemic weaknesses in the field of education.

Among the more persistent problems in India attributed to Nehru is that of

linguistically defined states, first formed under his aegis. The periodic (and often

much more tightly focused) replication at the regional level of the vaguely

ethnocentric notion of the Indian nation has resulted in political tensions and even

violent conflict between different linguistic groups over the years. The sporadic

violence against non-Kannada speakers in Bangalore throughout the first decade of

the twenty-first century was an example of such a conflict couched in terms of “us”

and “them,” even though the grievances generating the violence were more complex

than the discussion surrounding the incidents suggested. The ongoing conflict in

Maharashtra between the right-wing Marathi maanus of the Shiv Sena and the

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) on the one hand and the Hindi-speaking

81 Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru : A Biography. Vol. 3, 301, 302.

51

immigrant and / or diasporic populations on the other is an even starker example of

the subnational mutations of an ethno-national narrative, much of which was

significantly sustained by Nehru in The Discovery of India. Even the furor in

December 2009 about the formation of Telengana dates back to Nehru, and testifies

to the slipperiness of language ideology in India. Sudipta Kaviraj succinctly

summarizes how the language issue interacts politically with identity, both national

and regional: “Much of current Indian politics revolves around how nationalism

decides to deal with [linguistic identities] – to attack and destroy them as competing

attractions, or to give them a place within its own internal architecture.”82

Given this context, an analysis of Nehru’s language politics will enable us to

infer how the citizens of the newly independent state sought to define themselves and

how its varied constituent parts were seen to have added up – or not – to the whole.

This discussion will allow us to examine once more Escott Reid’s criticism that

“[Nehru] could be a much better leader for India than he is,” keeping language

ideology as the backdrop.83 As mentioned before, Nehru’s views on linguistic identity

in particular had a significant effect on federal policy and on the narrative of nation

that received governmental validation, and therefore influenced and was influenced

by policy and notions of community at the state level. This resulted in tensions, both

foreseen and unforeseen, between linguistic communities that, to this day, continue to

emerge during elections, if at no other time. But could a pioneering designer of a

82 Sudipta Kaviraj, "Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation of Identities in India," in Language and Politics in India: Themes in Politics Series, ed. Asha Sarangi (New York, 2009). 334

83 Reid, "Nehru: An Assessment in 1957." 289.

52

model for national inclusion really have done anything different? The rest of this

chapter will try to answer this question.

2. An Urban Liberal

Language exercised a peculiar fascination for Nehru, one that was not, as

King points out, altogether pleasant: “If [Nehru] was thoroughly conversant with

‘language’ as a means of expression, another use of ‘language’ – as a political force,

as a pawn in the tug of domestic politics – was initially foreign to him, uncongenial.

Awareness of the potential of language for mischief and grief came slowly.”84 The

two poles of language – as simply a way to communicate as well as a means to define

community – alternately drew and repelled him as he grappled, theoretically and

practically, with the numerous implications of politically privileging one over the

other. Nehru’s personal and political engagement with the issue of language enables

one to articulate some of the more unrelenting contradictions at the heart of the

matter, as he vacillated between an often paralyzing hyper-introspection and an active

impatience with language-related matters. The consequent “recalcitrance” (Robert

King’s term), his characteristic response to post-independence linguistic tensions, I

argue, was in fact the expression of a long-held intellectual discomfort with

discourses that suggested that patriotism and national loyalty were only valid in a

specific incarnation. His vacillations on language serve to underline reasons why

conditions of perpetual, even if tense, equilibrium might be more desirable in a

84 King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. 21

53

multicultural milieu than a stable “homogeneity” that establishes and reinforces

hegemonic sociopolitical relationships.

Nehru’s inconsistencies are unsurprising, given his family and educational

background. He was the epitome of the modern urban Indian intellectual, a child of

privilege and an archetypal product of colonialism and the associated liberal

education.85 Motilal Nehru, his father, was a successful lawyer who, though fluent in

Arabic and Persian in addition to his native Urdu, began to acquire English only in his

early teens.86 Jawahar’s education in English, on the other hand, was the natural

outcome of his father’s material successes: as King puts it, “English had become [by

this time] the path to power and riches; a vector towards the future. Indians of a

certain class would want their children educated in English,” in order to ensure their

success by assuring their access to opportunities for growth; needless to say, Jawahar

was suitably provided for.87 Irish Theosophist Ferdinand T. Brooks tutored him as a

boy, after which he went on to attend Harrow and Cambridge.

The emphasis in Nehru’s formative years on the English language and

“modern” education left their mark. His highly privileged, Anglicized upbringing and

education had given him a greater fluency in English than any other, Indian,

language, so much so that it added to his resistance towards public speaking in his

85 For an extended discussion of how the colonial experience shaped twentieth-

century Indian nationalism, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World : A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

86 Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom; the Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York,: The John Day Company, 1941). 18.

87 King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. 14.

54

early years in politics: “I felt that public speeches should not be in English and I

doubted my capacity to speak at any length in Hindustani,” he wrote in his

autobiography.88 He was himself aware of the contradiction inherent in speaking for

“masses” whose native language was often as alien to him as to the imperial masters,

but this fact did not prevent him from identifying their interests as being at the core of

his own, or from having democracy as his goal. A liberal, secular consciousness at

odds with the traditional approach of even his own mother and wife, let alone the

largely unlettered peasants of rural India, characterized the adult Jawahar. He

acknowledged frankly the contradictions that resulted from the immersion in two

disparate worlds, which left him simultaneously straddling two separate realms while

never completely occupying either: “[I am] a queer mixture of the East and the West,

out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” Doubts of his representativeness plagued

him as early as 1935, as he wrote his Autobiography in jail:

I often wonder if I represent anyone at all, and am inclined to think that I do not…[M]y thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me…in innumerable ways… I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance [of a hundred, or whatever the number may be, generations of Brahmans] or my recent acquisitions. They are both part of me… I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.89

This ambivalence about his own identity gave Nehru a unique insight into the

dilemmas of modernity. David Kopf frames this struggle in terms of attempts to

reconcile the past with the future, and suggests that the resulting ambivalences are “at

88 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004). 37. 89 Ibid. 616.

55

the expense of the present:” Nehru was torn, he suggests, “between his sympathy with

the past and his unshaken faith in the promising future” that “secularism, scientism,

and socialism” heralded.90 Nehru’s age was certainly different from what he called

“The old days…of faith, blind unquestioning faith:” “it [was] an age of disillusion, of

doubt and uncertainty and questioning.”91 Reason, as Sunil Khilnani argues, offered

Nehru the alternate point of stability, by not only providing “an instrument by which

to accomplish goals,” but also offering a mechanism for determining moral

objectives.92 Yet it was this same passionate belief in reason (and its offspring,

science) that, as King points out, “made him peculiarly ill-equipped to regard any

kind of language or religious dispute as anything more serious than a childish

tantrum.”93 He frankly considered the collective emotions surrounding subjective-but-

politically-charged abstractions like religion and language the manifestations of pre-

rational impulses. Nevertheless, the philosophy, history, and functionality of different

languages and their relationship to identity fascinated him, despite (or perhaps

because of?) his admitted linguistic incompetence.

Nehru exercised what Robert D. King calls a “linguist-like approach to

language — unemotional, patient, ‘scientific,’ and ‘clinical,’” and frequently revisited

the topic during his stints in jails all over India, events only remarkable for their

90 David Kopf, "A Look at Nehru's "World History" From the Dark Side of Modernity," Journal of World History 2, no. 1 (1991).48, 49.

91 Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004). 952.

92 Sunil Khilnani, "Nehru's Faith," Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 48 (2002). 4793.

93 King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. 168.

56

frequency.94 However, the complexities of language in India, current events, as well

as the conflict between his own nationalist impulses and his critical faculties forced

him to examine language politics more often than even he liked. Many of the

complications surrounding the political discourse on language were products of the

processes of nation-formation, which had started in the nineteenth century and were

well under way by the early twentieth century. As a result of the aftermath of the

armed rebellion against the British overseers in different regions in 1857, the

administration of the colony passed from the East India Company to the British

crown. This change of leadership had set in motion a series of administrative reforms,

which, coupled with the combination of indigenous pride and resentment following

the ruthless suppression of the revolt, led to a greater sense of community across

more heterogeneous groups than had been the norm in the subcontinent. In addition, a

middle-class educated in the Western mode had come of age to find itself deprived of

opportunities for growth, Macaulay’s children no longer content with remaining “a

class who may be interpreters between [the English] and the millions whom [they]

govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in

opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”95 The Indian National Congress (INC) was born

in 1885 for and out of this group and grew to be the organization to which Nehru was

eventually political heir.

94 Ibid. 124, 186. 95 Thomas Babington Macaulay, "“Minute Recorded in the General Department by

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council, Dated 2 February 1835,” " in The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843, ed. Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Richmond: Curzon, 1999).

57

3. Proto-nationalism and the Consolidation of Linguistic Identities

The establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885 in Bombay

marked what Brass and Robinson call “the self-conscious embarkation on national

life” in subcontinental politics. The INC started out as an organization to voice

grievances and negotiate compromises with the imperial administrators, an “elite

debating society petitioning government for extra privileges for the few.”96 The two

major trends within the intelligentsia which were to influence the evolution of the

national movement were already clearly visible by this time, especially in Bengal: the

“modernizers of Hindu traditions” who located themselves within a dialectic of

“tradition and modernity,” and “Hinduphiles” mobilizing a rhetoric of “us and them”

against the threat of cultural intrusion.97 (Nehru was undeniably the intellectual spawn

of the former group.) The modernizers or progressives had tended to view the British

conquests in India as timely and providential even as late as 1878, when Surendranath

Bannerjea exhorted his fellow Indians to “live and work for the benefit of a beloved

Fatherland. Under British auspices,” he categorically stated, “there is indeed a great

96 Brass and Robinson, The Indian National Congress and Indian Society, 1885-

1985 : Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Dominance. 2, 3. 97 David Kopf, "Precursors of the Indian National Congress " in The Indian

National Congress and Indian Society, 1885-1985 : Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Dominance, ed. Paul R. Brass and Francis Robinson (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1987). 62.

58

future for India.”98 The traditionalists – a term I prefer to Hinduphiles – on the other

hand were oriented towards preserving their culture from what they perceived as

Western intrusion, by adhering more vehemently to their own practices and beliefs, or

by redefining them in ways that were more conducive to the changing circumstances,

or by a combination of both approaches.

Linguistic nationalism began to appear around this period of intellectual

unrest in the mid-nineteenth century, but was a far from monolithic — or should one

rather say, monolingual — version. Bengal had been home to the most Anglicized of

progressive groups in the early nineteenth century, including Young Bengal whose

members were “so Anglicized that their dreams were in English.”99 Under the aegis

of Debendranath Tagore, however, it began to see a revival of pride in the local

language and the development of Bengali literature. David Kopf describes an early

but influential instance of the channeling of cultural pride into education and

linguistic practices:

In April, 1866, Rajnarian [Bose, early Bengali patriot] issued his “Prospectus for a Society for the promotion of National Feeling among the Educated Natives of Bengal.” He urged a program of physical training to “restore the manliness of Bengali youth and their long-lost military prowess;” the establishment of a school of Hindu music with the “composition of songs for moral, patriotic and martial enthusiasm;” and the encouragement of “Indian antiquities” to illuminate the “glory of ancient India.” He was most adamant about

98 ""Surrender-Not" Banerjea: Bengali Moderate: "The Need for Indian Unity" ",

in Sources of Indian Tradition, ed. William Theodore De Bary (New York Columbia University Press, 1966). 76.

99 J. Sarkar, "Rajnarian Bose, Grandfather of Indian Nationalism in India," Modern Review V(1909). 67. Also cited in Kopf, "Precursors of the Indian National Congress ". 67.

59

cultivating the Bengali language. “We must learn to communicate in our language,” he wrote. Do the English communicate with one another in French or German? [sic] He recommended that Bengali boys learn Bengali before learning English in school.100

As mentioned in the previous chapter, English had replaced Persian and Sanskrit by

the mid-nineteenth century as the primary language of education, with Indian students

devoting a third of their time to it, but it was restricted to the educated and relatively

elite.101 Kopf’s example thus becomes that much more significant in illustrating the

form taken by the emergent prototypical nationalism because the man in question was

Rajnarian Bose, a Young Bengal member who, until he became a member of

Debendranath’s Brahmo Samaj, knew no Bengali, but then went on to become a

Bengali prose stylist. This Indian proto-nationalism was directed not so much towards

constructing the idea of a unitary India or building community across different

linguistic groups but was instead focused on a retrieval of a self from a middle-class

consciousness that was perceived to have been undercut by a “foreign” education.

Nor was this phenomenon of linguistic proto-nationalism restricted to Bengal and

Bengali: the late nineteenth century saw similar trends in the Tamil-, Telugu-, and

Hindi- (or, as some would have it, the Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani-) -speaking regions of

100 Kopf, "Precursors of the Indian National Congress ". 69. 101 For more about nineteenth-century changes in language in India, see Cohn,

"The Command of Language and the Language of Command." Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu. Brass, "Elite Interests, Popular Passions, and Social Power in the Language Politics of India ". Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (London: New York, 1974). Pollock, Literary Cultures in History : Reconstructions from South Asia. and Dwivedi, Hindi on Trial.

60

the subcontinent, and the burgeoning vernacular presses of the period only

encouraged the development of ever newer linguistic loyalties.102

The idea of swadeshi, or “of one’s own country,” thus appeared very early in

the process of national consolidation in the context of language and education, and

therefore lent itself to multiple manifestations even while maintaining a discursive

consistency. The meaning of desh itself prefigured the subjectiveness inherent in

swadeshi as an intellectual category: unlike rajya (kingdom, and, lately, state) and

rashtra (nation), desh as country was more abstract and therefore followed the idea of

desh as place or land. It is unsurprising, therefore, that while the increasing populism

of the INC in the early decades of the twentieth century expedited the process of

reclaiming selfhood and, eventually territory and governance, through the reclaiming

of pride in one’s language and culture across the different regions of the subcontinent,

the undertaking was far from homogeneous. Presidencies under the British Raj

generally cut across all linguistic boundaries, with the result that groups that

identified a single language community were distributed across different provinces.

Further, each administrative region usually had significant populations identifying

primarily with one language even while being entirely bilingual in practice (Telugus

102 Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India,

1891-1970; Lisa Ann Mitchell, From Medium to Marker: The Making of a Mother Tongue in Modern South India (Columbia University, 2004); Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India : The Making of a Mother Tongue; Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu; King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India; Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions : Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: New York, 1997); Naregal, Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere : Western India under Colonialism.

61

in Madras city, for instance). As early as 1891, proposals were being mooted to

change administrative boundaries along linguistic lines, especially among the more

radical young activists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who suggested that language,

administration, and advancement were directly related: “[A] system of administrative

units created on a linguistic basis…will be to some degree homogenous and will

facilitate the development of the people and the languages of the respective peoples,”

he argued.103 Inevitably, however, different communities adopted different discourses

and followed divergent trends in their quest for self-definition. What particulars got

highlighted in the simplistic narratives of self being generated led in turn to cultural

associations that went beyond mere linguistic and literary history, as in the case of

Punjabi (which was coupled with Sikhism), and more importantly, present-day Hindi

(alternately called Hindi-Urdu, and Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani), which by the end of the

nineteenth century was already mired in controversies of script and lexicon, and

through them, religion.

The oral tradition of South Asia had a major influence on the form taken by

language ideology. Illiteracy was rampant outside the uppermost privileged classes,

which meant that more literary configurations of linguistic nationalism had very clear

limitations. Community-building exercises meant to highlight the shared nature of

individual experiences under the colonial regime therefore depended a great deal on

narratives of continuity customized for different audiences, which negotiated

variations of history (and timelessness), geography, and culture. In his Imagined

103 Boris Ivanovich Kliuev, India, National and Language Problem (New Delhi: Sterling, 1981). 120-121. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. 59.

62

Communities, Benedict Anderson refers to the literal journey “between times, statuses

and places, as a meaning-making experience,” of great religious pilgrimages in which

“vast hordes of illiterate vernacular-speakers provided the dense reality of physical

passage, while a small segment of literate bilingual adepts drawn from each

vernacular community performed the unifying rites, interpreting to their respective

followings the meaning of their collective motion.” Anderson’s own aside underlines

how this description of a social practice is pertinent to nationalism: “There are

obvious analogies here with the respective role of the bilingual intelligentsias and

largely illiterate workers and peasants in the genesis of [the] nationalist

[movement].”104 The passage could have very well been describing the role of INC

activists and especially INC workers at the grassroots level, who maneuvered

between large and abstract political goals and the immediate realities of rural India,

which remained a stranger to more modern technologies like the radio (or, in fact,

even electricity) until well into the twentieth century.

The particulars highlighted by the “unifying rites” performed by the “literate

bilingual adepts” of organizations like the INC led in turn to cultural associations that

went beyond mere linguistic and literary history. Mainstream Bengali nationalism, for

instance, was primarily of the bhadra lok, or middle-class Hindus; religious

revivalism was an important element in it, as was the rejuvenation of Bengali

literature and language by infusions of Sanskrit. This emphasis provided some of the

impetus not only for the founding of the Muslim League to speak for middle-class

104 Benedict R. O'Gorman Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1986). 56, and footnote 27.

63

Muslims, but also generated Oriya, Assamese, and (forms of) Hindi nationalism

among the speakers of other languages in the composite province.105 Similarly, the

trajectory of narratives of Sikh identity ensured that Punjabi was most closely

associated with Sikhism. As Donald Horowitz notes, the growing rift between

Muslims and Hindus in the subcontinent (exacerbated by the various religious revival

movements) almost incidentally led to a sharp differentiation of Sikhs from Hindus,

partly because of the emphasis among the reformist Arya Samajis on Hindi “as the

language of a revitalized Hindu culture.” An ascriptive Sikh identity was

subsequently consolidated through a “purification” of Sikhism that excised Hindu

elements despite “centuries of ritual and social interaction, as well as intermarriage

and conversion.”106

Further, even the associations generated by certain common “unifying rites”

were susceptible to localized variations that were less than unifying. For instance, the

Sanskrit slogan vande mataram (“I bow to the Mother”), coined by Bankim Chandra

Chatterjee and popularized in the song in his Bengali novel Anandamath, became a

signature phrase that declared visceral loyalties of land, language, and lineage by the

end of the nineteenth century. In 1905, Lord Curzon announced the partition of

105 For an analysis of the emergence of Bengali nationalism, see Kaviraj, The

Unhappy Consciousness : Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. and also Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 : Resistance in Interaction (New York, 2002).

106 Donald L. Horowitz, "Ethnic Identity," in Ethnicity : Theory and Experience, ed. Nathan Moynihan Daniel P. Glazer and Schelling Corinne Saposs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). Also cited in Simon Harrison, "Cultural Difference as Denied Resemblance: Reconsidering Nationalism and Ethnicity," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003). 348.

64

Bengal in an effort to ease administrative strains, along lines that separated a

predominantly Muslim east from a Hindu west. This division fanned nationalistic

passions, in part favoring a united Bengal and in part protesting against the

machinations of a foreign hand, across the country, as it was seen by many as a

deliberate attempt to perpetuate sectarian tensions. Vande mataram, both as slogan

and song, became a vehicle to convey both dissatisfaction with administrative

measures and filial loyalty of citizen towards the motherland. The spirit of swadeshi

that the cry conveyed reached as far south as the majority-Tamil Madras city, where

the slogan expanded among Telugu-speakers to include the reclaiming of agency:

“Vande Mataram – Manade Rajyam” not only saluted the mother(land), but also

declared that the realm was one’s own.107

While the larger reference of the phrase was to the abstract community of all

Indians, the anti-partition protests directed the Telugu population’s attention to their

own immediate circumstances, wherein they had no political clout in their province

despite being its largest language group. In 1910-1911, predominantly Telugu

districts accounted for forty percent of Madras state and native speakers totaled 58

percent of the population. In spite of their numbers, however, they had virtually no

representation in the government. This invisibility in the public sphere despite a

newly rediscovered past glory made the community a subject of derision among the

more dominant Tamils. In 1911, a passenger’s fleeting encounter with a Tamil co-

traveler on a train was reported in an article in The Hindu, the leading English daily

107 P. Raghunadha Rao, History of Modern Andhra Pradesh, [4th rev. ed. (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1988). 84-85.

65

of southern India, and fueled heated public and private debates: “[T]he Telugus are a

backward race,” the Tamilian was quoted as saying, “they have no brains, and they

have never had men like our Bhasyam Aiyengar or Muthuswamy Aiyar.”108 The press

substantiated its descriptions of inequities with civil service statistics of Madras

presidency, all of which indicated a highly lopsided representation of linguistic

communities, increasing whispered demands for a separate podium to address Telugu

concerns. Newspaper articles became positively apocalyptic by December 1911,

prophesying doom for the community if conditions did not change towards more

favorable representation: “Telugu talent is fast dying out. It is the duty of the

government to see that it does not become extinct ere long. It can be nurtured only

when the Telugu people are placed under a separate government.”109 Telugu speakers

were quickly reaching the conclusion that they were doubly disadvantaged by being

part of a Madras state. English overlords and officers could not directly communicate

with them to begin with, but the status of Madras city as the state capital

disadvantaged non-Tamilians further, as the more powerful Tamilians spoke little or

no Telugu, and could not and did not advocate their interests. Readers wrote in to

newspapers about the importance of language to a community’s intellectual and

material development, and the need for recognition as a unique political entity to

obtain greater political leverage: “So long as the Andhras are only one among many

in the southern presidency they cannot progress. They must have an individual

108 Ibid. 86. 109 Deshabhimani, 21st December 1911, Ibid. 87.

66

existence and must make their existence felt by others. … The most essential thing is

to have a separate province of the Telugu districts.”110

The engagement of Telugu native speakers with a larger imagined political

body – India, or Bharat – based on the principle of self-representation had redefined

community, individual rights, and administrative responsibilities for them, and made

them more sensitive to the visible injustices in everyday life. As a result, by mid-

1912, public figures began to float the idea of an Andhra Conference to represent and

discuss the interests of the linguistic group as a whole. But anxieties about the long-

term effects of demands based on a principle of difference rather than one of unity

also began to emerge within the Telugu community as well as among nationalists.

Some feared retribution against Telugus from powerful Tamilians in the face of

alleged provocation, while others gave dire warnings about the entrenchment of

differences between native communities at a time when the idea of a united India had

still not fully put down its roots. The Hindu wrote about the all-“too[-]many walls of

separation forbidding unification among the India [sic] peoples,” opposing the

separatist demand, even as Tamils responded by “vulgariz[ing] the Andhra movement

by equating it with a demand for posts.”111 Preoccupations with patterns of

community development and disempowerment came into conflict with initiatives for

national unity and emergent national ideals about language affiliation and

110 “Andhras” is used interchangeably with “Telugus” here. Deshabhimani, 26th

December 1911, Ibid. 87-88. 111 Letter from “A Non-Entity” to The Hindu, 24th August 1912, and Letter from

“Viswamitra” (“a friend of the world”), also to The Hindu, 29th August 1912, quoted in Ibid. 89-90.

67

empowerment. The nation could only empower itself if its members willingly

embraced disempowerment, this argument seemed to suggest. Very few regarded the

developments in Andhra as a manifestation of the many changes that would

accompany the establishment of democracy and self-representation in a multicultural

nation within an increasingly interdependent and interconnected world, as did Dr. B.

Pattabhi Sitaramayya, a prominent regional Congress leader. “[T]he future map of

India will indeed have to be recast in a measure which may very soon confound us

and the geography we learnt,” he prophesized in The Hindu in support of the creation

of a separate Telugu province.112

The protonationalist processes of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth

centuries, thus, actively engaged with the felt need for a singular narrative of identity

as well as with the other emerging discourses of community definition. Linguistic

loyalists and other community builders engaged two qualitatively different discourses

and privileged the spoken language as the symbol of a united people, but this was an

intrinsically limited model in a illiterate, multilingual country: it broke down as the

imagined community grew larger and less local. As a result, the rhetoric of

nationalism engaged with language at two separate levels while constructing the idea

of an Indian nation. The first was at the level of the common citizen, which

necessitated the cultivation of the local language in order to create the consciousness

of a community beyond one’s immediate physical circumstances and surroundings.

This process evoked commonalities of shared experience at multiple levels and

112 Ibid. 90.

68

through different mediums, and the need for pride in the extended self that the shared

nature of the experience created.113 The inculcation of pride in and identification with

one’s own language and culture was an important part of this process, which also had

a non-literate, non-language-oriented dimension focusing on material culture,

including religious celebrations, attire, and fabric, as a part of a larger impulse

towards swadeshi.114 Exhibitions, visual images, and lantern slideshows formed the

medium for this material narrative of the nation, just as they also served as the

crossover point from the local and parochial community to the more global and

national.115 These materialities also served as the site in which the discursive level of

language was sometimes introduced, in which the intelligentsia and the elite thrashed

out the relationship of language and identity among themselves even as they

113 For more detailed discussions of localized processes of nationalism channeled

through the discourse of language, see Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness : Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970; Mitchell, From Medium to Marker: The Making of a Mother Tongue in Modern South India. and more recently, ———, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India : The Making of a Mother Tongue.

114 This development was in keeping with a long tradition of community signifiers that did not depend on what David Washbrook calls “commonalities of word.” David Washbrook, "' to Each a Language of His Own': Language, Culture, and Society in Colonial India " in Language, History, and Class, ed. P. J. Corfield (Oxford, UK: Cambridge, Mass., USA, 1991). 179. Bernard S. Cohn, India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization, Anthropology of Modern Societies Series; (Englewood Cliffs: N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1971). introduces some of the cultural nuances of Indian society.

115 See Trivedi, "Visually Mapping The "Nation": Swadeshi Politics in Nationalist India, 1920-1930." Also see Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi's Nation : Homespun and Modern India (Indiana University Press, 2007); Rahul Ramagundam, Gandhi's Khadi : A History of Contention and Conciliation (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008). for the place of cloth in the national movement.

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(re)defined identities in ways that both appropriated and rejected frames deployed by

the colonial apparatus, such as in the case of the (proposed) national language.

4. Language and The Question of National Identity

Linguistic self-definition across the subcontinent had a paradoxical project of

generating regional pride and enlarging the communities with which individuals

identified. However, no natural lingua franca could be claimed across the

subcontinent. The major Indian languages belonged to different language families —

the Indo-European and the Dravidian, with a smattering of Sino-Tibetan —

complicating the quest for an iconic national language even further. Moreover,

multiple first-language capacities had not been an uncommon phenomenon in pre-

colonial South Asia, as L. M. Khubchandani points out, because of which linguistic

identity was not traditionally bound up with political identity.116 The Sanskrit lexicon,

however, provided a connecting link across the Indo-European and Dravidian

language families. Its spread was the early result of what Sheldon Pollock terms

“almost a process of cultural osmosis,” resulting in a purely cosmopolitan

“transethnicity” and “translocality” bound to neither people nor place across much of

116 See Lachman Mulchand Khubchandani, Plural Languages, Plural Cultures :

Communication, Identity, and Sociopolitical Change in Contemporary India (Honolulu: Published for the East-West Center by University of Hawaii Press, 1983). 9. and Mitchell, From Medium to Marker: The Making of a Mother Tongue in Modern South India., later revised and published as ———, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India : The Making of a Mother Tongue.

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the precolonial South Asian empires.117 All the regional languages had evolved

subject to its influence, and because of the liturgical nature of Sanskrit, the

Brahmanical register of all languages was liberally laced with it.118 Sanskrit, however,

was never a real political contender as lingua franca: it had died out as a spoken

language in the subcontinent in its last stronghold Kashmir by the thirteenth century,

and its literary knowledge was confined to the upper castes, a numerical minority.119

Persian, on the other hand, was strictly the language of the court, and a language of

the book rather than of the bazaar. It was also completely alien in the south and parts

of the west, which had remained largely impervious to or outside the sphere of

Islamic influence.

The evolving discourse of Indian nationhood demanded that the

administrative unity of India be mirrored in a narrative of cultural commonality. In

terms of sheer numbers, the language today known as Hindi (or Hindi-Urdu, and

occasionally, Hindustani) was the most widely spoken, as some variation of it was to

be found all across the northern plains extending from Rajputana in the west to

present-day Bihar in the east. Moreover, as Syamcharan Ganguli noted in 1882, it was

often the language of tradesmen, soldiers, “service-seeking classes,” shopkeepers, and

ascetics even where some other language was predominant; this fact encouraged

117 Sheldon I. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit,

Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California Press, 2006). 254. 118 Ibid. and Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the

World, 1st American ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005). have detailed histories of Sanskrit and its influence and spread across South and South East Asia.

119 Sheldon Pollock, "The Death of Sanskrit," Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 2 (2001).

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Ganguli to suggest its adoption as the indigenous lingua franca across the

subcontinent, years before the formation of the INC.120 Christopher King credits

Ganguli with unusual prescience, but the idea of a single language being fundamental

in uniting different peoples across the subcontinent was no longer novel by 1882.121

Credit for the idea of a single national language has been variously given to Pandit

Vamanrao Pethe, Bharatendu Harishchandra, Narmad, and Bankim Chandra

Chattopadhyay (all native speakers of different languages – Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati,

and Bengali respectively), but Alok Rai in Hindi Nationalism cites a publication that

establishes that the notion had been around at least since 1872. That was the year that

a certain Baba Kishan Das Niranjani wrote explicitly: “bhaiyo jab takke hindustan

mein ek lipi, ek bhasha, ek dharm na hoga tab takke hindustan mein purna sudharna

na hogi…” [brothers, until there is in Hindustan one script, one language, one

religion, there will be no real progress in Hindustan - translation mine].122 The

adoption of Hindi by Keshab Chandra Sen, and through him, Swami Dayanand

Sarawati of the Arya Samaj made stronger the case for Hindi as national language in

the subsequent years, by establishing that it could be learned by non-native speakers

and could thus cement a generic Indian identity not bound to a geographical region or

culture.123 Discursively, then, the primary requirements for a national language

appeared to include a real or perceived ubiquity, a predominantly non-parochial

120 Syamcharan Ganguli, "Hindi, Hindustani and the Behar Dialects," Calcutta Review LXXV(1882). 25.

121 King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India. 6.

122 Rai, Hindi Nationalism. 129. 123 Majumdar, Problem of Hindi: A Study. 16.

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identity, and a comparative ease of acquisition, all conditions that “Hindi,” “Urdu,”

and “Hindustani” together seemed to fulfill.

However, “Hindi” itself was an ambiguous signifier in the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, one that operated less as a specific tongue than as a

category. The degree of its ambiguity can be inferred by a passage from the Gaudian

Grammar that Ganguli quoted in 1882: “[T]here are three different forms of speech

current in the Hindi area….The first of these is nowhere the vernacular of the people;

and it takes the form of Urdu among Mohammadans and of Hindi among Hindus;

though the difference between these two forms is less marked in the mouth of the

people than in the books of the learned.” The first form mentioned here was a hybrid

called Khariboli, a modern literary manifestation of the vernacular that grew

increasingly visible in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The spoken vernacular

was more flexible, and could draw on either lexicon, Sanskrit or Persian; it could

even settle approximately around a median, as was often the case in urban centers.

However, the difficulty of coming up with a stable definition of either “Hindi” or

“Hindustani” or “Urdu” had by no means trivial implications. Ganguli observed that

“[i]t is…the written phase of Musalmani Hindustani, than the spoken, that is called

Urdu. The reason appears to be that the written phase, besides being in the Persian

character, has a more thoroughly Arabo-Persianised vocabulary than the spoken

phase, which in consequence differs less from spoken Hindi.”124 The chameleon

idiom could take on either Hindu or Muslim characteristics depending on the

124 Ganguli, "Hindi, Hindustani and the Behar Dialects." 26.

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speaker’s lexical preferences and / or religious affiliation. Such an elastic definition

acceptable in verbal and / or written interaction and non-authoritative usage could not

lend itself without some stabilization to claims of representativeness, authority, and

authenticity, so essential to an ideal national language. As a result, different points on

the continuum of speech and script came to be associated with conflicts of interest

between different ideological groups, underlining that the proposed national language

was truly, in Woolard and Schieffelin’s words, “a discursive project rather than an

established fact.”125 As Francesca Orsini puts it, “In nationalist terms, language and

literature were the means to define and communicate the agenda for progress, and

were themselves metaphors for the…nation.”126 The national language project,

therefore, aspired not only to establish one native language of the region as the

dominant one, but also to codify and standardize a particular form of speech and

script within that language as the norm.127 Malcolm Yapp neatly describes the various

125 Kathryn A. Woolard and Bambi B. Schieffelin, "Language Ideology," Annual

Review of Anthropology 23(1994). 64. 126 Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940 : Language and Literature in the

Age of Nationalism. 5. 127 This aspect of the national language project has been the subject of all the

recent research on Hindi-Urdu that I have previously mentioned. A more general discussion of the ideologically-driven standardization of language and its effects can be found in Joseph, Eloquence and Power : The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages; James Milroy Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language : Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation, Language, Education, and Society; (London: Boston, 1985); Franklin C. Southworth, "The Social Context of Language Standardization in India," in Language of Inequality, ed. Nessa Wolfson and Joan Manes (Berlin: New York, 1985); Nessa Manes Joan Wolfson, Language of Inequality (Berlin: New York, 1985). and Malcolm Yapp, "Language, Religion, and Political Identity: A General Framework," in Political Identity in South Asia, ed. David D. Taylor and Malcolm Yapp (London; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Curzon Press ; Humanities Press, 1979).

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results of this undertaking: “a group which identifies itself as a majority [attempts to

take] control… [W]hen this happens the economic, social and political eminence

formerly enjoyed by minorities is substantially diminished and…when these

minorities define themselves in cultural terms a new system of political identities and

national conflicts is created.”128 The rhetoric of national language within a

nationalistic framework that demanded democracy thus paradoxically created and

sustained the demands for recognition by religious and linguistic minorities.

5. The Stakes of Script

Despite the fact that all these controversies about language were rife in his

formative years, Nehru’s relationship to language prior to his own engagement with

matters of state was aesthetic rather than political. As I mentioned before, he

struggled studying languages as a boy, especially those which included an emphasis

on grammar. “After many years’ effort the Pandit [who taught me Sanskrit] managed

to teach me extraordinarily little, so little that I can only measure my pitiful

knowledge in Sanskrit with the Latin that I subsequently learned at Harrow,” he wrote

in his autobiography.129 Once he joined the INC, however, Gandhi’s advocacy of

Hindustani as the national language influenced him to the extent that, in 1923, he

gave a speech in Hindi before an INC session in Kakinada, a Telugu-speaking region,

128 David D. Taylor and Malcolm Yapp, Political Identity in South Asia

(London; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Curzon Press ; Humanities Press, 1979). 129 Nehru, An Autobiography. 15.

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despite calls from the audience that he switch to English.130 But in spite of such

incidents, characteristic of his formative years, he essentially remained a moderate

and a pragmatist in his views on language.

The personal flexibility of Nehru’s position best appears in his

Autobiography, written in 1936. In an episode from 1933 that really establishes him

for the reader as the hybrid urban product of an explicitly colonial milieu,

qualitatively different from other nationalists like Gandhi, his sister Krishna was to

wed outside their caste, necessitating a civil ceremony as the marriage act of British

Indian law at the time precluded a religious ceremony. Jawahar, who supported

“intermarriages” over endogamy, issued the wedding invitations as the head of family

following Motilal’s death, but ones “written in Hindustani in the Latin script” as “an

innovation,” “an experiment…to see the reactions of the various people.” The said

reactions, unsurprisingly, were “mostly unfavourable,” he noted, and added

fatalistically, “The recipients were few: if a larger circle had been approached the

reaction would have been still more unfavourable. Gandhiji did not approve of what I

had done.”131 This anecdote is particularly interesting because of how Nehru went on

to frame it, testifying to his most compelling preoccupations about the issue:

I did not use the Latin script because I had become a convert to it, although it had long attracted me. Its success in Turkey and Central Asia had impressed me, and the obvious arguments in its favour were weighty. But even so I was not convinced, and even if I had been convinced, I know well that it did not stand the faintest chance of

130 Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal,

et al. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972). Vol. 2. 87. 131 Nehru, An Autobiography. 468-469.

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being adopted in present-day India. There would be the most violent opposition to it from all groups, nationalist, religious, Hindu, Muslim, old and new. A change of script is a very vital change for any language with a rich past, for a script is a most intimate part of its literature. Change the script and different word pictures arise, different sounds, different ideas. An almost insurmountable barrier is put up between the old literature and the new, and the former becomes almost a foreign language that is dead. Where there is no literature worth preserving this risk should be taken. In India I can hardly conceive of the change, for our literature is not only rich and valuable but is bound up with our history and our thought and is intimately connected with the lives of our masses. It would be cruel vivisection to force such a change, and it would retard our progress in popular education.132

This single paragraph exemplifies how even the question of script for Nehru

was no simple one, but rather included within its interplay with identity issues of

advancement and modernity, compromise and resistance, bonds of history and

culture, coercion and freewill, and, not least, the relationship of the past with the

future in a free and educated society. The Latin script of the English language had

many technological advantages over any of the scripts of the native languages, a huge

point in its favor as far as he was concerned. “It is certainly more efficient than either

Hindi or Urdu from the point of view of rapid work,” he wrote in “The Question of

Language” in 1937. “In these days of the typewriter and duplicator and other

mechanical devices the Latin script has great advantages over the Indian scripts,

which cannot fully utilize these new devices.”133 His attraction to the potential for

progress inherent in the use of such technology was obvious even in his later

declarations like, “Science, a scientific approach to problems and a scientific outlook,

have to be developed if India has to progress in the modern world;” modernization,

132 Ibid. 469. 133 ———, "The Question of Language." 247.

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and modernization alone, as Bhikhu Parekh points out, was truly “unifying national

philosophy.”134 The wistfulness in his rejection of the Roman script because of the

“wall of sentiment” is hard to overlook: “[I]n spite of [its] advantages I do not think

there is the slightest chance of the Latin script replacing Devanagiri or Urdu. There is

the wall of sentiment, of course, strengthened even more by the fact that the Latin

script is associated with our alien rulers.”135

Nehru’s example of Turkey in his discussion of the impediments to the Latin

script in India suggests the other factors that possibly appealed to his rationalism.136

Kemal Ataturk’s language policy had effectively separated the modern Turkish

identity and language from a cumbersome past and turned them both towards a

modern future. Similarly, in India, the Latin script was alien and therefore unfettered

by divisive religious associations, unlike Devanagiri (“of the gods,” the script used

for Sanskrit and Hindi) and Persian (used for Urdu). The tensions about the script to

be used for Hindustani had unfailingly irritated Nehru, who considered it a

134 ———, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Vol. 10, 107. Bhikhu Parekh, "Nehru and the National Philosophy of India," Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 1/2 (1991). A detailed examination of the entrenchment of modernization as India’s national philosophy can be found in Gyan Prakash, Another Reason : Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton University Press, 1999).

135 Nehru, "The Question of Language." 247-248. 136 ———, Glimpses of World History Being Further Letters to His Daughter,

Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People. has an extended discussion of modern Turkey in several letters, including “Turkey becomes the Sick Man of Europe,” “A New Turkey Rises from the Ashes,” and finally “Mustafa Kemal Breaks with the Past,” which includes his most detailed examination of the twentieth-century reforms of the Turkish language. See also Charles F. Gallagher, "Language Reform and Social Modernization in Turkey," in Can Language Be Planned? Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice for Developing Nations, ed. Joan Rubin and Björn H. Jernudd (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1971).

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destructive non-issue blown out of proportion by vested interests: “I have no doubt

whatever that Hindustani is going to be the common language of India…Its progress

has been hampered by foolish controversies about the script, nagri or Persian, and by

the misdirected efforts of the two factions to use language which is either too

Sanskritized or too Persianized,” he wrote in 1937. Nevertheless, he clearly

considered the differences irreconcilable as he continued: “There is no way out of the

script difficulty, for it arouses great heat and passion, except to adopt both officially,

and allow people to use either;” here was a problem that could have been

circumvented by the use of the Latin script, one suspects Nehru intuited when

designing sister Krishna’s wedding invitations.137

Tellingly, the Hindi-Urdu issue, and the resultant communal tensions, was

ostensibly for Nehru the “real language question in India [which had] nothing to do

with [the] variety” of Indian languages, because it was wedded to the emerging

discourse of two separate nations – one Hindu, one Muslim – within India.138 Though

many including Nehru considered Hindi and Urdu to be “the two main aspects of [the

same] language” and different points on a single continuum, for the proponents of

“authentic” Hindi and Urdu each script was iconic of a specific identity that was

threatened by the existence and potential hegemony of the other.139 This identification

of a consciousness of community with script Nehru called the “part of the genius of

137 Nehru, An Autobiography. 471. 138 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004).

175-176. 139 Nehru, "The Question of Language." 246. In addition to previously cited

studied works on Hindi-Urdu, see Chand, The Problem of Hindustani.

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our language” upon which a community’s connections with its “old inheritance” was

founded because of the access provided or limited by (il)literacy. In addition, Nehru

argued that, at one level, the “problem of bringing Urdu and Hindi nearer to each

other…[was] the much vaster problem of bringing the town and village nearer to each

other,” because “Hindi is [mainly] the language of the villages…[while] Urdu is

almost entirely an urban language.” This conception of the matter typified his highly

analytical approach to issues, and enabled him to view the growing divergence of

Hindi and Urdu as “unfortunate in itself, [but] really a sign of healthy growth,”

wherein both communities had awoken from “a long period of stagnation… and

[were] pushing ahead…struggling to give expression to new ideas,…and leaving

behind the old ruts for new forms of literary expression.” Such a formulation

envisaged culture, and thereby identity, not as a static artifact but rather as an active

and continual process, much like how he viewed language itself: “A living language

is a throbbing vital thing, ever changing, ever growing and mirroring the people who

speak and write it. It has its roots in the masses, though its superstructure may

represent the culture of a few,” he maintained, stressing that rigid definitions of

particularly linguistic identity disguised deeper problems. “Scratch a separatist in

language and you will invariably find that he is a communalist, and very often a

political reactionary,” he declared unequivocally.140

The recognition that a script was the genius of a language, however, was in

direct opposition to some of the basic requirements of a functioning and united

140 Nehru, "The Question of Language." 245, 246, 248, 249, 242, 248.

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nation-state. The unity of India was, even in the comparatively less turbulent 1930s,

Nehru’s primary preoccupation, and the “separatist tendencies” of linguistic

nationalism was clearly a challenge to this.141 However, he pointed out in 1938, “In

the final analysis, freedom itself is a means to an end, that end being the raising of the

people in question to higher levels and hence the general advancement of humanity,”

thus summarizing what would prove to be the philosophy of a lifetime.142 The ideal

modern mind that he wished to recreate in every Indian was “practical and pragmatic,

ethical and social, altruistic and humanitarian.”143 Universal education was an

essential ingredient in his recipe for general advancement, particularly as “the real

problems of India, as of the rest of the world, [were] economic” and their solution

depended greatly on increased productivity and employment in both rural and urban

areas. He saw industrialization, land reform, education, and the social services in

general as interrelated and conditional to the ability to adapt oneself to one’s physical

and social environment. However, the Indian experience under a colonial regime was

such that resistance to change, especially in favor of anything that could be deemed

“western,” was natural. Even the Constitution ratified by the Government of India Act

of 1935, which gave a great deal of autonomy to the provinces compared to previous

Acts, was, as Nehru wrote, “essentially designed to protect [British financial and

industrial] special interests and keep British imperialism in India intact.” As a result,

he pointed out, “in the subconscious mind of India there is questioning, a struggle, a

141 Ibid. 248. 142 Jawaharlal Nehru, "The Unity of India," Foreign Affairs 16, no. 2 (1938). 231. 143 Nehru, The Discovery of India. 621.

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crisis” with respect to the subordination of tradition to modernity: “India seeks a

synthesis of the past and the present, of the old and the new. She sees the new

industrial civilization marching irresistibly on; she distrusts it and dislikes it to some

extent, for it is an attack against and an upheaval of so much that is old.”144

The reconciliation of the past with the present was nowhere more necessary

than in the realm of language in the dreamed-of free India, where the ideals of

universal education, universal opportunity, and equal rights were to be upheld.

Despite Nehru’s perturbation given the Hindu-Muslim tension, this aspect of the

language problem taxed his imagination more than others: “What policy shall we

adopt in a scheme of general mass education and cultural development of the people?

how shall we promote the unity of India and yet preserve the rich diversity of our

inheritance?” he questioned insistently.145 “The spirit of the age,” he emphasized, “is

in favour of equality…[and] will triumph. [It means] equal opportunities for all and

no political economic or social barrier in the way of any individual or group.”146 The

idea of imposing a top-down language policy was anathema to him, even in the case

of a single (if complicated) language like Hindustani, and certainly in the case of

other languages. “How…can we change [language] or shape it to our liking by

resolutions or orders from above?” he demanded testily. “And yet I find this widely

prevalent notion that we can force a language to behave in a particular manner if we

only will it so….Attempts to force the growth of a language in a particular direction

144 ———, "The Unity of India." 231, 239, 240, 243. 145 ———, "The Question of Language." 242. 146 ———, The Discovery of India. 580.

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are likely to end in distorting it and crushing its spirit….A language cannot be

imposed by resolution.” As far as he was concerned, “It [was] axiomatic that the

masses [could] only grow educationally and culturally through the medium of their

own language.” He was consistently critical of the diglossia that separated the

language of the educated from the language of the people, and wrote in 1937 that “the

use of any other language [than that of the masses] will result in isolating the

educated few from the masses and in retarding the growth of the people.” He repeated

ad nauseam that separating a language from the influence of the masses was to do

both people and language a disservice, and recommended that purists accept that

“Languages change organically when the people who speak them change.” “Culture

today must have a wider mass basis, and language, which is one of the embodiments

of that culture, must also have that basis,” he wrote as he exhorted Indian writers to

demystify their works and make them universally accessible.147

However, the practical problem of all-India communication remained, for

which Nehru’s proposed (and ultimately impractical) solution was the teaching of a

Basic Hindustani along the lines of Basic English. The latter had developed as an

experiment by researchers, and was a highly simplified form of English consisting of

minimal grammar and a vocabulary of approximately 850 words. Basic Hindustani

should be modeled along the same lines and have a simple, “almost non-existent,”

grammar, he suggested, and all non-native speakers of both languages in India should

learn both, the one in the interests of national consolidation and the other as a

147 ———, "The Question of Language." 242-243, 243, 248.

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concession to modern science and global politics. In addition, he toyed with the idea

of composite Indian scripts to facilitate language learning across various language

groups, and envisioned Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi, for instance, as developing a

single alphabet that would lend itself to “modern mechanical devices.” Further, he

suggested, “the possibility of approximating the southern scripts to Devanagiri should

be explored, [and if not found] feasible, then an attempt should be made to have a

common script for the southern languages.” Hindustani, however, was to retain both

the Devanagiri and the Persian scripts in this idealized scheme in the interests of

communal harmony.148 Robert D. King has described many of Nehru’s pre-

independence policy recommendations as linguistically “muddle-headed,” most

significantly his quixotic proposals on scripts.149

Nevertheless, even Nehru’s most cockeyed ideas never failed to take into

account the real human barriers to their implementation, unlike in the case of other

nationalists like Gandhi, and he did not seriously attempt to put them into effect once

he was head of state. He remained vehemently indifferent to the issue of linguistically

reorganizing internal state lines except insofar as they affected minority rights:

I am not greatly interested in where a particular state boundary is situated, and I find it very difficult to get passionate or excited about it. I have my preferences, naturally, but it does not make much difference to me where the internal boundary of a state is drawn. Infinitely more important is what happens on either side of the boundary, what happens within the state – more especially in the great multilingual or

148 Ibid. 253-261. 149 King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. 86-87, 194-195, 202.

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bilingual areas – and what happens to people inside a particular state who may, linguistically or in any other sense, form a minority.150

This vociferous indifference to the emotional bonds of language and identity was

especially daring in the light of Potti Sriramulu’s fatal fast for a separate Andhra in

1952, and the country-wide violence and demands for linguistic redefinitions of states

in the many months that followed.

6. In Support of Impurity

Nehru’s appreciation for the non-symbolic functionality of language appeared

in the attention he paid to scripts, education, and communication. A major part of his

predilection for English arose from what he saw as its compatibility with the goals of

independent India; this compatibility made it the basis of his prescription for the

necessary trajectory of the all-India link language in particular and all Indian

languages in general. Language in a democracy clearly had very different functions

and objectives from that of a more hierarchical era.151 For it to be suited to “a

150 “Various Aspects of Reorganization,” Speech in the Lok Sabha (the Lower

House of Parliament) during a debate on the Report of the States Reorganization Commission, 21st December 1955. Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Second Series (New Delhi; New York: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund; Distributed by Oxford University Press, 1984). Vol. 31, 170.

151 More extended discussions of differing functions and objectives of language(s), especially in its written form, may be found in John J. Gumperz, "Religion and Social Communication in Village North India," The Journal of Asian Studies 23, no. Aspects of Religion in South Asia (1964); ———, "Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities," American Anthropologist 66, no. 6 (1964); ———, "Supplement: Language and Communication," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 373, no. Social Goals and Indicators for American Society, Vol. 2 (1967); ———, "The Retrieval of Socio-Cultural Knowledge in Conversation,"

85

democratic age,” Nehru wrote, it had to meet at least two criteria: “it must base itself

on its ancient roots and, at the same time, vary and expand with growing needs and be

essentially the language of the mass of people and not a select coterie.” Further,

modernity had brought with it a more interdependent, interconnected world, and the

increased contact and dependency had significant consequences for a fledgling

postcolonial republic hoping to hold its own in the new age. It was tempting to

eschew English entirely as a reaction against a colonial past, but despite all its

associations, he maintained, the language was a fine example of egalitarian impulses

larger than the oppression of which it was a reminder:

What we must be clear about in our minds is the inner content of the language and the way it looks at the world, that is, whether it is restrictive, self-sufficient, isolationist and narrow, or whether it is the reverse of this. We must deliberately aim…at a language which is the latter and which has therefore a great capacity for growth. The English language, probably more than any other today, has this receptiveness, flexibility, and capacity for growth. Hence its great importance as a language. I should like our language to face the world in the same way.152

Nehru recognized instinctively that literacy, a crucial dimension of modern

language functionality, was, in Woolard and Schieffelin’s words, “not an

autonomous, neutral technology, but rather [was] culturally organized ideologically Poetics Today 1, no. 1/2 (1979). Charles A. Ferguson and John Joseph Gumperz, eds., Linguistic Diversity in South Asia: Studies in Regional, Social, and Functional Variation, vol. 26 (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics,1960). Pollock, Literary Cultures in History : Reconstructions from South Asia. and Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu.

152 Jawaharlal Nehru, "The Question of Language," National Herald, 13 February 1949. Reprinted in Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, an Anthology, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980). 516-519; and again in Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Second Series. Vol. 9, 130-131.

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grounded, and historically contingent, shaped by political, social and economic

forces.”153 He predicted, and intended, that “[M]ass education on behalf of the state”

would be the great leveler which would eventually establish a national language in

India, and thus produce the “standardization and unification” so necessary for a

united nation-state. Modern technology too, he argued presciently, would play an

important part: “[S]tronger than this [will be] the effect of rapid communications and

transport and interchange of ideas and revolutionary changes going on in our political

and social spheres.”154 Above all, however, education for him was about “the State

and the society we are aiming at,” he wrote, recognizing that it was no small

responsibility “to train our people to that end; … to decide what our citizens should

be like and what their occupations should be.” Nevertheless, in his mind, as with

language, so it was with education: the masses would have to direct the purpose and

the content of they studied. “[W]e have to fit in … education to their life and

occupations; we have to produce harmony and equilibrium in their private and social

and public life.”155 These convictions about the role of education and the

subordination of purity and authenticity to vigor, expressed in 1937-38, remained

unshaken even after independence. “No language can be a sort of made-to-order

business,” he reiterated.

[It] grows but it may be helped to grow in a particular direction by educational methods….Today in any democratic society language tends to change very greatly, sometimes it even deteriorates in the

153 Woolard and Schieffelin, "Language Ideology." 65. 154 Nehru, "The Unity of India." 239. ———, "The Question of Language." 250. 155 Nehru, "The Question of Language." 258.

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sense of purity but, at the same time, it becomes more vigorous….under democratic development, language gets a certain crudity but vigour and strength also. Take English…It is not as graceful as some other languages but it has a certain vigour.

From this side of the outsourcing that has thus far characterized the twenty-first

century, one recognizes the percipience in his subsequent flash of dry humor: “One of

the reasons of this is that [English] is progressively ceasing to be English and

becoming American.”156

In the meantime, Nehru made the case that English should be retained not

only in the interests of science, progress, and international relations, but out of respect

for India’s own past, as periods both agreeable and disagreeable had shaped its

present. The Indian languages, he contended, were for the moment “inadequate for

the proper expression of modern ideas, scientific, political, economic, commercial,

and sometimes cultural.”157 They had, he argued as late as 1963, become “static

because our lives were static,” and were still reinventing themselves in new (and not

always sensible) ways due to the “shock” of British rule. He acknowledged the

difficulty in accepting that the new India was multilingual and would remain

multilingual after the decades of asserting that Hindi was the national language, but,

he insisted, “We must realize that.”158 The place of English, he underlined, was an

156 “The Language Controversy,” Speech at a special convocation held by

Osmania University, Hyderabad, published in The Hindu, 27th December 1948. ———, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Second Series. Vol. 9, 115.

157 ———, "The Question of Language." 249. 158 Jawaharlal Nehru, "The Official Languages," in Jawaharlal Nehru's Speeches

(New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1958-1968). Also quoted in King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. 220. In this view, he is uncomfortably close to the nineteenth century Anglicist point

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aspect of the now-free nation’s past with which one needed to make peace: “[T]hough

English is not an Indian language, to some extent it has become a part of this

country.”159 It was, he urged, important not just because of its link to the “outside

world” but also because of “our past associations” with it.160 He considered a

conscious acceptance of historical events, “with all their depths and heights,”

fundamental to progress, as “the present and the future inevitably grow out of the past

and bear its stamp, and to forget this is to build without foundations and to cut of the

roots of national growth.”161 Yet, though English was inextricably intertwined with

what Nehru considered highly desirable changes to Indian society and thought,

making its retention essential, the foreignness of English, especially to the vast Indian

masses, was undeniable. This foreignness required that even he, for whom it was all

but a first language, “treat it as one of the fringe languages of India.”162 However, he

appears to have been keenly aware that such a treatment was not necessarily

of view (and I grossly simplify) that Indian languages were benighted, and that the salvation of India lay in the English language and the avenues to civilization that it opened up.

159 “The Place of English,” Speech at the Radio Literary Forum inauguration in New Delhi on 29th April 1956, originally in Hindi. Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Second Series. Vol. 32, 116.

160 ———, "The Question of Language." 244. An interesting discussion of changes in Nehru’s understanding of history and its relevance can be found in Balkrishna Govind Gokhale, "Nehru and History," History and Theory 17, no. 3 (1978). Sunil Khilnani, "Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English," in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)., on the other hand focuses on Nehru’s struggle to reconcile the flattening impulses of history with individual differentiation, while still retaining a sense of coherence in talking of the past.

161 Nehru, The Discovery of India. 572-573. 162 “The Place of English,” ———, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Second

Series. Vol. 32, 117.

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permanent, writing in 1937 that “It [was] not possible for us to think in terms of the

Latin script for our language, for the present at least,” (my emphasis), and then,

poignantly, in 1944, “My generation has been a troubled one in India and the world,”

suggesting that the new generations might make a new peace with themselves and

their collective pasts.163

Ultimately, Nehru’s final stance on the issue of language ideology in India

was entirely consistent with the philosophy that he had evolved for himself and his

homeland some twenty years previously when writing The Discovery of India. He

argued passionately in Parliament in 1963 that it was a mistake to consider either

language or community in a spatial and temporal vacuum and that contextualization

had to be holistic, which demanded, above all, tolerance:

[We must] consider the language issue not only in the limited sense in which we have been arguing it, but in its broader sense, in the wider context. We are passing through a difficult and delicate period of transition in many ways, and it requires wisdom and a capacity for flexibility in order to meet the demands of the times. Rigidity stops growth. The main question is of India’s growth in every way, materially, intellectually and spiritually. We must view every step that we take from the point of that major question.164

Part of such “wisdom,” he pointed out, entailed shunning the idea of language

hierarchies; because “India [wa]s a multilingual country,” state validation of the

claiming of a moral high ground by any spoken Indian language, be it Hindustani or

Hindi or Urdu or anything else, was fundamentally problematic because it sanctioned

163 ———, "The Question of Language." 259. ———, The Discovery of India.

631. 164 Nehru, "The Official Languages." Also quoted in King, Nehru and the

Language Politics of India. 222.

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discrimination on the basis of language, contrary to the objective of equality.165 Any

decree that enforced a hierarchy in which one native language was “national” while

others were relegated to a “regional” status would only place obstacles in the path of

the natural growth of the language that might eventually become a true linguistic link

across the country, he asserted: “No clerks and no government departments have ever

made a language grow.”166 “Language should not be invested with the duty of being a

marker of national belonging, with all the emotional freight this carried,” Khilnani

summarized Nehru’s views on the subject; “rather, it ought to have a [purely]

functional status;” attachment to and the retention of one’s native language were also,

one may add, basic fundamental rights, irrespective of their ramifications for the idea

of a homogenous nation-state.167 As Partha Chatterjee correctly notes, the autonomy

of the state was the organizing principle of Nehru’s ideology, but the real legitimizing

principle unwaveringly remained the concept of social justice.168

In the final reckoning, Nehru’s demands for a nuanced understanding of

freedom and equality and that one be open to change resonate powerfully with

thoughts he had penned earlier on national and cultural identity in general. In his

165 See A. H. Leibowitz, "Language and the Law: The Exercise of Political Power through the Official Designation of Language," in Language and Politics, ed. William O'Barr and O'Barr Jean F. (The Hague: Mouton, 1976). for a more detailed discussion of how valorization of language made acceptable specific kinds of discriminatory practices.

166 Nehru, "The Official Languages." Also quoted in King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India. 222.

167 Khilnani, "Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English." 155. Gopal, "The English Language in India since Independence, and Its Future Role." briefly discusses Nehru’s impact on the said policy of “clerks and…government departments.”

168 “The Moment of Arrival: Nehru and the Passive Revolution,” Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World : A Derivative Discourse.

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conclusion to The Discovery of India, he framed national and individual ambivalences

in a positive light that recalls his valuation of linguistic impurity, and clearly indicates

his comfort with the perpetuation of changeability:

There is no permanent stability or security or changelessness; if there were life itself would cease. At the most we can seek a relative stability and a moving equilibrium. Life is a continuous struggle of man against man, of man against his surroundings, a struggle on the physical, intellectual, and moral plane out of which new things take shape and fresh ideas are born. Destruction and construction go side by side and both aspects of man and nature are ever evident. Life is a principle of growth, not of standing still, a continuous becoming, which does not permit static conditions.” 169

To live was to change, and for unity as well as diversity to live in India, it was

important that differences be accommodated rather than erased despite any anxiety

that this inability to fix identity might produce. The Indian constitution today has

perpetuated both the comfort and the anxieties that come with the preclusion of

“permanent stability or security or changelessness” as regards national identity, much

as Nehru seemed to have hoped it would.

169 Nehru, The Discovery of India. 624.

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Chapter 3

Culture, Community, and Commitment: Gandhi and Linguistic Anti-Colonialism

A language mirrors the character of the people who use it.

- Gandhi, Speech At Second Gujarat Educational Conference170

I speak to you, brothers, in that broken Hindi of mine, because even if I speak a little of English, I have the feeling that I am committing a sin.

- Gandhi, Speech at All-India Common Script and Common Language Conference171

A spirit that is so exclusive and narrow as to want every form of speech to be perpetuated and developed is anti-national and anti-universal. All undeveloped and unwritten dialects should, in my humble opinion, be sacrificed and merged in the great Hindustani stream.”

- Gandhi, “A Common Script”172

It is argued that Hindi and Urdu are two different languages. But this is incorrect. … Hindus Sanskritize their Hindi with the result that Muslims cannot follow it. Muslims of Lucknow Persianize their Urdu and make it unintelligible to Hindus. - - Gandhi, Speech At Second Gujarat Educational Conference173

170 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Speech at Second Gujarat Educational

Conference (Broach, October 20, I917)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 16 (1917). 73

171 ———, "Speech at All-India Common Script and Common Language Conference (Lucknow, December 29, 1916) " The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 15 (1916). 283

172 ———, "A Common Script,' from Young India, 27-8-1925," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 32 (1925). 346

173 Gandhi, "Speech at Second Gujarat Educational Conference (Broach, October 20, I917)." 86

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1. Nationalist and Ideologue

The previous chapter discussed in some detail the views of the most

influential pragmatic liberal in the history of modern India, Jawaharlal Nehru. My

discussion demonstrated that while Nehru, like most others of his time and calling,

subscribed to the view that an independent India needed one of its own languages to

fill the role of official language, he was less committed to a culturally-coherent nation

than he was to principles of democracy and development. The Indian constitution, I

pointed out, reproduces many of the very same cognitive dissonances that Nehru

experienced with respect to multilingualism, nationhood, and democracy.174 That

said, one must take half a step back in history in order to understand the power of the

view that India’s official language should be indigenous.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Mahatma Gandhi’s views on language

greatly influenced Nehru’s advocacy of the use of Hindi / Hindustani as the national

language of India.175 This chapter will actively discuss Gandhi’s contribution to

language ideology and linguistic nationalism in India in order to fill an important

argumentative gap about the place of English (or the absence thereof) in the Indian

sociopolitical landscape. The political significance of his views can be estimated

174 See Part XVII of the Indian Constitution, “Official Language.” Government of

India, "Constitution of India," ed. Ministry of Communications & Information Technology Department of Information Technology (New Delhi: National Informatics Centre (NIC), 2010).

175 Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru : A Biography. Nehru, Toward Freedom; the Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru.

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when one notes that, unlike Nehru’s self-conscious political suavity and Ambedkar’s

trenchant social criticism, Gandhi’s advocacy of language loyalties was driven by a

recognition of the scale of its populist appeal. Indeed, the very populism of his

politics led to the Indian National Congress speedily adopting resolutions that

facilitated the transformation of the organization from one representative of middle-

class interests to one with a mass appeal and base once he emerged upon the Indian

political scene. Primarily a nationalist and an ideologue despite some tendencies

towards being a social reformer, Gandhi has left an indelible mark on postcolonial

India through his interventions on the intersecting issues of language use, linguistic

identity, and national identity even though little of what he advocated has been

translated into legislation. This chapter thus forms a natural progression in my

examination of the dynamic between linguistic identity and national identity, as it

enables an explanation of not just the political rejection of English but also its alleged

“neutrality” in a complex set of regional and national constructs about language.

In 1924, Gandhi wrote of language that it was “a great instrument in [his]

work,” as it enabled him not only to formulate and convey his ideas on British rule in

India and the mechanics of nationalist struggle, but also to engage a wide audience.176

A native speaker of Gujarati, he had famously struggled with the English language

from the age of twelve. By the time he was fifteen, English became his sole language

of instruction, an experience that he described as gradually cutting him off from his

family, who did not know the language. “Th[e] English medium created an

176 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "My Language,' from Navjivan, 27-4-1924," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 27(1924). 303.

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impassable barrier between me and the members of my family,” he wrote. “My father

knew nothing of what I was doing…. I could not, even if I had wished it, interest my

father in what I was learning. …I was fast becoming a stranger in my own home. I

certainly became a superior person,” he later recalled.177 This alienation was not

unusual in a society in flux, in which tradition cohabited with what was essentially a

foreign education. What had been true in 1835, when William Adam wrote his report

on the alienation of English-educated Bengalis from their roots and their disconnect

from the larger society around them, continued to be pertinent even when Gandhi

penned his autobiography.178 An English-educated middle-class had emerged that

shared little, if anything, with the more numerous traditional sections of society, or

even, as in Gandhi’s case, of a family.

The alienation of the English-educated could be traced to multiple factors. As

Adam wrote in 1835, the “attainments” of an English education did little to “fit them

for the ordinary pursuits of native society,” leaving them in a cultural limbo of sorts

wherein there was a “want of sympathy between them and their countrymen,” as well

as with the foreign rulers.179 Macaulay had envisioned the hybrid nature of such

individuals as essential for a class of intermediaries, “Indian in blood and colour, but

English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Both instances described the

effects of a non-traditional, “modernizing” education. Gandhi, on the other hand,

177 ———, "Higher Education,' from Harijan, 9-7-1938," The Collected Works of

Mahatma Gandhi 73 (1938). 280 178 Adam, Report on the State of Education in Bengal. Published by the Order of

Government. 179 Ibid. 191.

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considered how such a result was obtained, and concluded that it was due to the re-

presentation of familiar practices in what were, to an Indian, unfamiliar terms:

It has remained for our Western visitors to acquaint us with the obscenity of many practices which we have hitherto innocently indulged in. It was in a missionary book that I first learnt that Shivalingam had any obscene significance at all and even now when I see a Shivalingam neither the shape nor the association in which I see it suggests any obscenity. It was again in a missionary book that I learnt that the temples in Orissa were disfigured with obscenities. When I went to Puri, it was not without an effort that I was able to see those things.180

Gauri Visvanathan elaborates on Gandhi’s point: “in the name of separating fact from

legend, British readings had introduced a literalism that was paradoxically allegorical

in effect, for it assumed that every sign had to have a meaning, whereas for Hindus

this was not necessarily true. Instead, a sign could easily do no more than suggest

another sign, which in turn might suggest yet another, and so on.”181

Gandhi’s ideology, thus, was unquestionably and explicitly “rooted in or

responsive to the experience of a particular social position,” both in India and other

parts of the British Empire.182 Extrapolating from his own experience, he came to

argue that he was representative of an entire class in society, all of whose members

180 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Drain Inspector's Report,' Young India, 15-9-

1927," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 40 (1927). 113. The Shivalingam is the form of Shiva that Hindus most commonly worship, and is, it is argued, a phallic symbol. Whatever be the accuracy of this assertion, Gandhi has a point when he says that the literal nature of the object of worship is immaterial to what the object of worship means to the worshipper: it continues to just be the preferred form of worship for Shiva the Destroyer, Shiva the Innocent.

181 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. 126.

182 Woolard and Schieffelin, "Language Ideology." 58

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were products of “schools of cultural conquest by the English.”183 This view was

shaped significantly by his experiences in South Africa, where the authorities amply

demonstrated that neither education nor linguistic facility would establish the

different races on an equal footing. Even those Indians who used English as their

native language were disbarred from basic facilities like schools despite being

children of contributing members of society.184 Gandhi’s response to this institutional

exclusion was to vigorously embrace his cultural identity, and to urge all his fellow

Indians also to do so. As a result of the combination of alienation and systematic

discrimination, English education – and the English language by extension, since the

two were not separable in the Indian experience – came to represent for him

everything that was antithetical to the principles of self-determination and self-

representation.

Gandhi’s stint in South Africa brought home to him the potential for political

negotiation by cultivating a unified voice for a community, but it also underlined for

him the differences among Indians. The development of cultural pride was the first

step towards the eventual creation of a sense of national identification as far as he was

concerned, and he recognized early the importance of language as the first marker of

community:

Personally, …I think it a welcome development that everyone in India, young or old, is beginning to turn his attention to his own language. We find a desire being expressed that the people of India should have

183 Gandhi, "Higher Education,' from Harijan, 9-7-1938." 280 184 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Petition to Chamberlain (Durban, December

27, 1902) " The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 3 (1902). 9

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one single language. That may, perhaps, happen in future. Everyone will admit that such a language must be an Indian language. But that stage is yet to come. As the basis of my pride as an Indian, I must have pride in myself as a Gujarati. Otherwise we shall be left without any moorings.185

This view explicitly captured his disillusionment with Macaulay’s notions on

education, which had thus far influenced him considerably. “If only we make on

Indian languages half the effort that we waste on English, thanks to certain notions of

ours, the situation will change altogether. India’s uplift is, to a very considerable

extent, bound up with this,” he wrote in 1909. “I had been under the sway of

Macaulay’s ideas on Indian education. Others, too, are. I have now been

disillusioned. I wish that others should be.” The impact of an English education was

such that even native speakers of the same language often preferred (and continue to

prefer) to use English, either due to a greater fluency in it or from a sense of

discomfort in using what had come to be seen as lesser languages. Gandhi observed

that this practice was a sign of cultural decline: “One cannot help saying that the fact

of Gujaratis using English among themselves is an indication of their degraded state.

This practice has impoverished the mother tongue. We ourselves despise it and, as a

result, lose our self-respect.”186 As the recent Abu Azmi incident illustrates, this view

– that the use of one language in preference to another is a sign, politically, of

accepting a degraded position with respect to the first – persists in India over a

century later.

185 ———, "Speech at Gujarati Meeting (London, October 5, 1909)' from Indian

Opinion, 20-11-09," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 10 (1909). 145. 186 Ibid. 146.

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Gandhi had admitted in the Indian Opinion in 1906 (and it is perhaps the only

time he did so) that the diversity of India rendered it incompatible with the concept of

a culturally coherent nation: “No one can say that India is today the home of a single

people, but all of us wish it were.” This recognition, however, did not preclude either

the desire or the attempt to bring about a degree of homogeneity. A suggestion that a

common language would act as the glue to bind together the different peoples, put

forward by the editor of Indian World (a Calcutta monthly), appealed greatly to him.

One must note, however, that his initial rejection of English in 1906 was less for

ideological reasons than for strategic ones: the English language was an unsuitable

candidate for lingua franca because of its association with the colonizers, but rather

because so few people spoke it and even fewer had opportunities to learn it. Because

English was “a foreign language and a difficult one at that, the common people will

not be able to learn it,” Gandhi mused in the article. “There is therefore little

likelihood of India achieving nationhood through that language.”187 Yet this statement

was only partially correct, on more than one level: not only did he use English for the

bulk of his journalistic writing in order to reach multiple linguistic communities

within the country, his efforts at nation-building also relied heavily on a complex

linguistic nationalism that consistently framed English as both privileged and foreign.

Strategically speaking, however, English had great emotive potential as the

enemy: it lent itself neatly to a logic that established language as an actual index of

187 ———, "India for Indians,' from Indian Opinion, 18-8-1906," The Collected

Works of Mahatma Gandhi 5 (1909). 309

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collective identity, and also as a “metalinguistically created symbol of identity.”188

Gandhi began to point out repeatedly that it was clearly neither “us” nor “ours,” a

much more definitive statement than any claim about who “we” were could be. His

early admonitions regarding the use of English were comparatively gentle: “some

Indian youths, having acquired a smattering of English, use it even when it is not

necessary to do so, as if they had forgotten their own language or wanted to suggest

how much more difficult it was to speak English, or for some similar reason,” he

wrote in 1909.189 But his criticism could also be extremely harsh: “It will not be an

exaggeration to say that those who give up that language are traitors to the country,

that is, to their own people;”190 and by 1916, he was writing, “To those young men

who argue that they cannot express their ideas in their own language, I can only say

that they are a burden to the motherland.”191 His “disillusionment” with English

combined with increasingly political objectives, giving rise to statements like, “To

give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them.”192 His stance on English

eventually evolved to include the untranslatability of culture and expectations of

racial and cultural loyalty: “We decline to believe that our children can be taught

[Hindu] epics through English translations, however accurate they may be,” he

188 Woolard and Schieffelin, "Language Ideology." 61 189 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "English Influences in the Air,' from Indian

Opinion, 30-1-1909," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 9 (1909). 286 190 Gandhi, "Speech at Gujarati Meeting (London, October 5, 1909)' from Indian

Opinion, 20-11-09." 146 191 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Speech at Surat on Place of English (January

3, 1916)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 15 (1916). 128 192 “On Education,” Gandhi and Anthony Parel, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings

(Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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asserted. “We consider it to be impossible for us to exist as independent, self

respecting human beings if we forget the poetry of the race to which we belong. We

can never learn it through a foreign tongue.”193 The argument followed naturally that

English education and the associated acceptance of the English language, removed as

they were from the everyday realities of Indians, effectively denationalized them.194

2. The Metaphor of the Mother

The multiple definitions of language ideology currently extant serve as useful

lenses through which to examine Gandhi’s, and indeed anybody’s, linguistic

nationalism. At its broadest, language ideology is a conglomeration of “shared bodies

of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world.”195 S. B. Heath

has described it as being those “self-evident ideas and objectives a group holds

concerning roles of language in the social experiences of members as they contribute

to the expression of the group.”196 J.T. Irvine, on the other hand, has referred to it as

193 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "For Indian Parents,' from Indian Opinion, 19-

8-1911," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 12 (1911). 31 194 ———, "For Colonial-Born Indians,' from Indian Opinion, 28-5-1910," The

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 11 (1910). 55 ———, "For Christian Indians,' from Young India, 20-8-1925," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 32 (1925). 317 Gandhi, "The Curse of Foreign Medium,' from Young India, 5-7-1928." 207 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "A Christian Letter,' from Harijan, 30-1-1937," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 70 (1937). 365 Gandhi, "Speech at Prayer Meeting (Goriakhari, March 19, 1947)." 152

195 Alan Rumsey, "Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology," American Anthropologist 92, no. 2 (1990). 346.

196 S.B. Heath, "Social History," in Bilingual Education : Current Perspectives (Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1977). 53.

102

“the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with

their loading of moral and political interests.”197 The Macaulayan construct of the

social and linguistic relationship between the indigenous languages of India and

English was the culminating point of a complex current of evangelical, utilitarian, and

progressive Indian thought. Bound as this language ideology was to education, it

became, in its turn, part of the nationalizing mission of Gandhi and other nationalists /

language loyalists, in the form of providing the antithesis to which a national thesis

would be formulated. Citing Macaulay and his rhetoric of civilizational hierarchies

strengthened the argument that English as a language was denationalizing and gave it

a powerful emotional appeal. The explicit allusion to racial and cultural loyalties only

heightened this appeal, as the identification of language with culture and community

enabled the reshaping of historical memory, and quickly established the two clear

poles of self and stranger that were necessary for the national movement to reach the

larger populace. However, the metaphor of the mother proved to be the most

unequivocal icon in the ideological framework of what was owed to the native

languages, and the (non-)claims of English.

Gandhi quickly discovered the syntactic shorthand that the naturalistic

element of nationalism contained. The publication and ensuing popularity of Bankim

Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath in 1882 had proven beyond all doubt the power of

religion and allegory, and had successfully conflated the notion of both motherland

and mother goddess. The partition of Bengal in 1905 had made his song Vande

197 Judith T. Irvine, "When Talk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy," American Ethnologist 16, no. 2 (1989). 255.

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Mataram a virtual battle cry, and consolidated the hold of Bharat Mata, Mother India,

over the national imagination. The image of native language as woman, mother, and /

or goddess thus became an important component of Gandhi’s rhetoric on language,

for their associated subtexts of reverence, vulnerability, and potential strength.198

“[T]he mother tongue is as natural for the development of the man’s mind as mother’s

milk is for the development of the infant’s body,” he wrote.199 The metaphor of

mother’s milk allowed the casting of Macaulay’s English as anything but:

The educated classes…have unfortunately fallen under the spell of English and have developed a distaste for their own mother tongue,. The milk one gets from the former is adulterated with water and contaminated with poison, while that from the latter is pure. It is impossible to make any advance without this pure milk. But a blind person cannot see and a slave does not know how to break his fetters. We have been living under the spell of the English now for the past fifty years. In the result our people have remained steeped in ignorance.200

Any neglect or rejection in favor of English reduced these native languages to “the

position of a widow with no one to look after her,” he declared, alluding to the

198 Indian languages were almost always female for Gandhi — they were

consistently “mother tongues,” “sister languages,” and “daughter languages.” The tendency to feminize language was a common practice of the time; more about this feminization can be found in Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970; King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India; Sarangi, "Languages as Women: The Feminisation of Linguistic Discourses in Colonial North India."; Gupta, "The Icon of Mother in Late Colonial North India: 'Bharat Mata', 'Matri Bhasha' and 'Gau Mata'." Geetha, "Gender and Political Discourse."

199 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Foreword to the Medium of Instruction' (March 18, 1942)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 82 (1942). 126

200 ———, "Speech at Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Indore, March 29, 1918' from Thoughts on National Language," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 16 (1919). 373.

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profound pathos associated with orthodox Hindu widowhood.201 In contrast, when

nurtured, they became powerful and took on “the brilliance of gold, like the current of

the Ganga [river, worshipped also as a goddess] blazing like gold in sunshine as it

pours down from lake Manasa.”202

This naturalization was important, as it enabled Gandhi to appeal to visceral

affiliations based in biology and religio-cultural practices. The figure of the mother

had, as earlier mentioned, cultural associations of reverence, vulnerability, and

strength at many levels, all features that made it a common nationalist trope by the

late nineteenth century. The subcontinent had a long tradition, arguably dating as far

back as the Indus Valley Civilization (~3000 BCE), of worshipping mother

goddesses, seen as life-giving and therefore tremendously powerful. This tradition

had a peculiar flexibility that lent itself to nationalist iconography and the colonial

context. Feminine entities deified by Hindus included personifications of such

abstract concepts as knowledge (Saraswati), love (Rati), and power (Shakti) as well as

such material realities as wealth (Lakshmi) and food (Annapurna). Further, the

identity of the more culturally ubiquitous figures were surprisingly fluid: for instance,

Lakshmi, the consort of the divine preserver Vishnu, was the goddess of wealth, but

she was also the embodiment of the earth, Bhoodevi (significant particularly in

showcasing how seen / unseen land and water was traditionally imagined as part of a

unified, sacred body). Similarly, Parvati traditionally personified the gentle aspects of

201 ———, "Speech at Gujarat Political Conference—Iii (November 5, 1917)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 16 (1917). 133

202 ———, "Speech at Bihar Students’ Conference (Bhagalpur, October 15, 1917)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 16 (1917). 59

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wifehood (especially in the avatar of the self-immolating Sati / Dakshayani),

motherhood (as the virginal mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya), and daughterhood (as

the daughter of Himalaya) in a way that no other deity did; nevertheless, mythology

also cast her as the awe-inspring Durga and the terrible, blood-thirsty Kali.

The fluid form and content (for the lack of a better word) of the various

goddesses coalesced around the emergent literary and iconic narratives of the second

half of the nineteenth century about colonial domination and exploitation and the duty

of patriotic sons. Poetry, plays, and novels all contributed to a common theme of

rights, duties, and loyalties through their portrayal of the present.203 The formula was

203 Dinabandhu Mitra’s Neel Darpan is an early example of such a literary work.

Amiya Rao, B. G. Rao, and Dinabandhu Mitra, The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal, with an English Translation of Neel Darpan by Dinabandhu Mitra (Delhi: New York, 1992). Nationalists and litterateurs as varied as Bhudev Mukhopadhyaya, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Aurobindo Ghosh, Subramanya Bharati, Tagore, and Nehru contributed to the concept of Mother India over the years; a compelling discussion of the deification of India appears in Ramaswamy, "The Goddess and the Nation: Subterfuges of Antiquity, the Cunning of Modernity." The body of scholarly work on “Bharat Mata” is large but not comprehensive, and includes colonial contributions: Valentine Sir Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910); James Campbell Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907-1917 (Calcutta: Editions India, 1973); Bruce Tiebout McCully, English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism (Gloucester: Mass., P. Smith, 1940). Patricia Uberoi, "Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art," Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 17 (1990); S. Theodore Baskaran, The Message Bearers : The Nationalist Politics and the Entertainment Media in South India, 1880-1945, 1st ed. (Madras: Cre-A, 1981); Manu Goswami, "Producing India : From Colonial Economy to National Space," In Chicago studies in practices of meaning;. (London, 2004). Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered : Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: New York, 1988); Tanika Sarkar, "Nationalist Iconography: Image of Women in 19th Century Bengali Literature," Economic and Political Weekly 22, no. 47 (1987); Jasodhara Bagchi, "Representing Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal," Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 42/43 (1990). C. S. Lakshmi, "Mother, Mother-Community and Mother-Politics in Tamil Nadu," Economic and

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fairly simple. Foreign rule had stripped the land of its wealth and shipped it away,

which was not merely a crime but also a sin because of cultural conflations of the

sacred and the secular: Lakshmi, wealth, was Bhoodevi or Vasundhara, the earth, the

soil from which all wealth was generated, and was therefore divine as both giver and

sustainer of life. The mistreatment of her children had further weakened her, as did

the submissiveness of those who could have resisted. The show of strength on part of

loyal sons, the narrative went, would restore the browbeaten mother to her former

glory wherein she was the embodiment of Shakti.204

These larger sociocultural and political contexts ensured that Gandhi’s

invocation of Ganga immediately appealed to the cultural reverence of the river-

goddess as a powerful sustainer of life in an agricultural economy at the mercy of the

annual monsoon, and on the premise that the allusion would be readily recognized.

Further, his rhetoric on language loyalty relied heavily on the image of the mother,

overlaying divinity with filial intimacy. Indeed, one observes that, even more than

reminders of sanctity and sustenance, his comparison of the native language to

mother’s milk successfully “remind[ed] the citizenry of the bonds of birth, of the

sharing of substances, of the very commonalities that emerge from belonging to…the

Political Weekly 25, no. 42/43 (1990). ———, "Seeing in Gestalt," Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 24 (1991).

204 This explicit conceptualization of Mother India as Shakti (or Durga) first appeared in Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s “Bande Mataram,” or “Salute to the Mother,” and was quickly co-opted into popular iconography. The above reference to Shakti is from Bipin Chandra Pal, The Soul of India: A Constructive Study of Indian Thoughts and Ideals (Calcutta: Choudhury & Choudhury, 1911)., also quoted in Ramaswamy, "The Goddess and the Nation: Subterfuges of Antiquity, the Cunning of Modernity." 560.

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‘imagined’ community of the nation,” to use Sumathi Ramaswamy’s words from a

slightly different context. In other words, the mother metaphor ensured, as

Ramaswamy so succinctly points out, that not only did the “[n]ation and citizen-

patriot…relate to each other politically, materially, and emotionally, but [also]

somatically,” thereby making the abstract connections of nationality both physical

and fundamental.205

A significant difference, however, existed between the broader discourse of

nation-as-mother / language-as-mother and the rhetoric as Gandhi deployed it. The

broader discursive practice, which implicitly or explicitly compared indifference to

the nationalist cause to matricide, tended to return to the physical attributes of the

mother, whose “appearance ha[d] changed” under colonial rule.206 This was

especially true of the literature in Indian languages, which was more freely peppered

with visual imagery and “tropes of intimacy” than writings in English, whose literary

practices relied more on the abstractions of liberal philosophy. Sumathi Ramaswamy

describes how the trope of mother was ubiquitous yet selective:

the effectiveness of somatic imagery in nationalist discourses [lay] in its strategic, rather than random or thoughtless, deployment. … [A]llusions to Tamilttay [Mother Tamil] or Bharat Mata [Mother India], or to the piteous state of their bodies, punctuated the flow of prosaic discourses, rather than flooded them; they were often made in

205 Ramaswamy, "Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India."

78, 80. 206 T. V. Kalyanasundaram, quoted in Ibid. 83. Also see Bagchi, "Representing

Nationalism: Ideology of Motherhood in Colonial Bengal." and Sarkar, "Nationalist Iconography: Image of Women in 19th Century Bengali Literature."

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opening comments; at strategic break-points in an argument that was being developed; or at the conclusion of an essay or speech.207

Gandhi, no less than others, relied on this punctuation for his punch. But his

naturalistic imagery depended less on metaphors of the body than on those of filial

relationships and broader geopolitical affiliations so as to ensure the breadth of the

imagined community. The linguistic diversity of the subcontinent made this

vagueness a necessity.

Where the feminized national discourse of mother and goddess had ensured

the exclusion of the English colonizer, Gandhi’s rhetoric of the mother tongue

extended this exclusion to the English language, which, as a foreign interloper, could

be neither mother nor goddess. It became instead a “curse” that made “sons” who

claimed greater facility in English than in their native language “a burden to the

motherland.” Gandhi’s harsh criticism of the use of English by even bilinguals or

trilinguals undercut his disclaimers that said, “We do want the English language, but

we do not want it to destroy our own language.”208 In contrast, Sanskrit was the

mother of all the regional languages as far as Gandhi and many other linguistic

nationalists were concerned, a “grand-mother tongue” of sorts. “Sanskrit is like the

river Ganga in our languages. I feel that if it were to dry up, the regional languages

also would lose their vitality and power,” Gandhi asserted, adding that at least a basic

207 Ramaswamy, "Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India."

83, 84-85. 208 Gandhi, "Speech at Surat on Place of English (January 3, 1916)." 128

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knowledge of the language was essential for every Indian.209 Because it also figured

as the repository of Hindu values and spirituality, it found a place in all his schemes

for providing national education, though as the conflict between the Hindu and

Muslim communities escalated, he revised his plan so that all Muslim students would

learn Arabic.

3. Religion and the Mother(-Tongue)

Religious overtones naturally surrounded the linguistic nationalism that

viewed language as mother, as goddess, and as the Ganga, and the mere mention of

Sanskrit only exaggerated them. Sanskrit had long occupied a sacrosanct place in

Gandhi’s scheme of things, even though it was far from being central to his mission

of nation-making. It had historically been a language of privilege and social control

even among the Hindus because of the Brahmin monopoly over literacy and its close

association with scriptural texts and their interpretation; the latter aspect gave it

problematic associations as far as Muslims were concerned. The question of national

language, however, was the most incendiary issue, and it increasingly became a point

of contention in both the north and the south, though for different reasons. Because of

India’s linguistic diversity, it was practically a given that no language would be

entirely satisfactory as a national language, or even a link language. Linguistic and

literary pride was already deep-rooted in various regions of India, and especially

209 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Letter to Kishorelal G. Mashruwala (September 21, 1932)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 57 (1932). 100

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picked up momentum in Bengal and the southern areas (particularly among native

Tamil and Telugu speakers). English too had its proponents. India’s most widely

spoken language, native to the northern plains, was the most natural candidate for

national language, but it was quite literally the most difficult to name. This language,

some contended, was called Hindi, others, Urdu. Yet others said that its name was

Hindustani, while some more suggested that all these titles referred to entirely

different things. The one thing that all its advocates were agreed upon was that it

should be the national language, though the problem with mere naming – predicated

as it was on the choice of lexical source – clearly indicated that the semantic conflict

was an ideological disguise for a deeper religious dispute.210

The Hindi-Urdu debate underlined the fact that the phrase “national language”

had (and continues to have) a specific yet ambiguous meaning in the Indian context.

Like other “national languages” across the world, it did not refer so much to a pre-

existing lingua franca that unified a people, but rather to the aspiration that a

language native to the subcontinent, so linguistically diverse, would eventually take

on this role. Hindi, Urdu, and less frequently, Hindustani had been put forth as a

210 Plenty has been written about the controversy of Hindi-Urdu, or Hindi-Urdu-

Hindustani (Hindi-Hindustani was also the preferred hyphenated phrase of a few others – Gandhi, for instance). A few representative works are Ganguli, "Hindi, Hindustani and the Behar Dialects."; Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu; King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India; Majumdar, Problem of Hindi: A Study; Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940 : Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism; Rai, Hindi Nationalism; David Lelyveld, "Colonial Knowledge and the Fate of Hindustani," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 4 (1993). See Yapp, "Language, Religion, and Political Identity: A General Framework." for more on language conflict as ideological disguise.

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potential national language from the mid- to late-nineteenth century onwards because

of its comparative ubiquity as the language of traders and fakirs.211 However, there

was minimal agreement on issues of standardization, whether of register, lexicon, or

script. The complicated semantics baffled Gandhi no less than the others, as did the

associated controversies. Nevertheless, as far as he was concerned, developing a

national language was a matter of great urgency. “Hindustani,” the most inclusive

(because most ambiguous) signifier, was his candidate for this position as early as

1906, for its impressive geographic spread as well as for its vague religious

affiliation: “Hindustani… is spoken by North Indians. Derived as it is from Sanskrit

and Persian, it suits Hindus and Muslims alike. Moreover, since the fakirs and the

sanyasis both speak it, they help to propagate it throughout the land…. It is thus

spoken over an extensive area. The language itself is very sweet, polite and spirited,”

he wrote even as he advocated its adoption as national language and “greater” mother

tongue.212

The case Gandhi made for Hindustani was founded on certain important

characteristics that he deemed essential to the fledgling nation. He conceived the

national language as being the indigenous replacement for English: it would be, he

proposed, the official language for provincial and federal business, and would also

serve as the link language between different linguistic groups. Having defined the

purpose of the national language, he outlined what he termed as its “requirements:”

211 Ganguli, "Hindi, Hindustani and the Behar Dialects." Gandhi, "India for Indians,' from Indian Opinion, 18-8-1906." refers also to the fakirs (Muslim) and sanyasis (Hindu).

212 Gandhi, "India for Indians,' from Indian Opinion, 18-8-1906." 309

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1. It should be easy to learn for Government officials. 2. It should be capable of serving as a medium of religious, economic and political intercourse throughout India. 3. It should be the speech of large numbers of Indians. 4. It should be easy for every Indian to learn. 5. In choosing such a language, considerations of temporary or passing circumstances [did] not count.213

Because of the alien-ness of the English language, Gandhi implied, English could

never be “capable of serving as a medium of religious…intercourse,” even if it

currently served as the medium of economic and political intercourse. He saw

western education and the English language as undercutting spiritual and cultural

values, so central to the national consciousness he envisioned, and that English could

even be considered a potential unifying language was an accident of history, the result

of a temporary aberration that would soon be corrected. However, the ideological

rationale was not his only objection to English; he also had a serious strategic

complaint: “The patriotism induced by the knowledge of English has not been

infectious. Real patriotism is an expanding force which is ever propagating itself. The

patriotism of English-knowing people lacks this quality.”214 Hindi-Hindustani, he

argued, was the sole language that could fulfill all five requirements and kindle “real

patriotism.”

This view, however, was far from universal, as native speakers of the

language were themselves divided over what register of the language should be

standardized, recognizing intuitively that the choice of name and the form would be a

213 ———, "Speech at Second Gujarat Educational Conference (Broach, October

20, I917)." 86. 214 Ibid. 85-87, 79

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recognition of social dominance, a speech act of sorts that perpetuated a particular

historical memory. “Hindi,” its strongest supporters claimed, evolved directly from

Sanskrit and the regional dialects, and any Persian and Arabic it had were corruptions

introduced by invading Muslims and settlers descended from them. “Urdu” was more

ambiguous, referring either to the hybrid language really spoken by the people, laced

with Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, or to the form purged entirely of Sanskrit.

“Hindustani” on the other hand was somewhere in between, and could take on either

Hindu characteristics or Muslim depending on the speaker’s religious affiliation, a

rudderless vessel dependent on its user for identity and direction.215

However, the designation of “Hindustani” or “Hindi-Hindustani” was, in

Gandhi’s view, a solution to the growing Hindu-Muslim conflict about language in

the subcontinent, but this opinion was not universal. It was Gandhi’s preferred title,

and clearly so because it could passively include the Muslim community, by virtue of

not being overtly Hindu: “The Hindi movement was conceived in the interests of

millions of Indians. Hindi or Hindustani was spoken by 21 crores of people and it was

the mother tongue of many Mussalmans,” he wrote, and “Hindi also means

Hindustani. To me a language which deliberately discards Arabic and Persian words

is not Hindi.”216 His refusal to include Urdu in his pet hyphenated formulation,

215 King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth

Century North India; Majumdar, Problem of Hindi: A Study; Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940 : Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism; Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Urdu; ———, Hindi Nationalism; Ganguli, "Hindi, Hindustani and the Behar Dialects."

216 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Speech at Khadi and Hindi Exhibitions (Madras, December 23, 1927)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 41 (1927).

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however, offended Urdu advocates (even those who advocated Hindi-Urdu as

opposed to Urdu).217 Alok Rai points out that the problem lay in the quality of

compromise he appeared to offer by persisting with the use of “Hindi-Hindustani:” it

“could connote either alterity or identity. It could mean either that Hindi was the same

as Hindustani, in which case the mullah was up in arms; or that Hindustani was an

alternative to Hindi, in which case the pundit, quite as suspicious and pugnacious,

concluded that Hindustani was camouflage for Urdu!”218 Further, even Gandhi’s

inclusive formulation periodically returned to a cultural identity that was less about

language and more about religion: “…How am I to find Tulsi’s Ramayana [in a

language other than Hindi]?…When I was reasoning this out, let me tell you that I did

not know the actual number of people speaking Hindi, and yet I instinctively felt that

only Hindi could take that place, and no other.”219 This elaboration, reinforced rather

than alleviated doubts that linguistic nationalism was a cloak for an attempt to

establish irreversibly religious and regional hegemonies.

Not surprisingly, Gandhi’s line of reasoning deepened suspicion among both

regional language groups who had their own revered works of literature as well as

Muslims. As a result, English often became the “safe,” uncontroversial option in

61 ———, "The National Language,' from Hindi Navajivan, 26-12-1929," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 48 (1929). 145

217 See David Rahbar, "Gandhi and the Hindi-Urdu Question," in Indian Critiques of Gandhi, ed. Harold G. Coward (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

218 Rai, Hindi Nationalism. 16 219 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "'Speech at Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar

Sabha, Madras,' the Hindu, 27-3-1937, and Harijan, 3-4-1937," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 71 (1937). 72.

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sensitive situations, a preference that he bitterly condemned. The Leader reported on

Gandhi’s evident displeasure when asked to address a composite audience at

Lucknow University in 1929:

Mahatma Gandhi…regretted that the address was in English and not in Hindustani. Lucknow being a seat of Urdu culture, the address should have been in Devanagari and Urdu scripts which would have shown perfect amity and concord between the Hindu and Muslim boys of the University. He deprecated the attitude of those who neglected the mother-tongue and concentrated on learning a language which was foreign. He himself edited an English newspaper which decidedly proved that he was not against the English language as such. What he wanted was the proper thing in the proper place. … Mahatma Gandhi hoped that in future greater stress would be laid on the cultivation of the national language in the Lucknow University.220

The response described here, one observes, does credit to Gandhi’s single-mindedly

passionate devotion to the idea of the national language, but not to his ability to

acknowledge sociopolitical realities that threatened the possibility of “amity and

concord” between the two communities on the subject. His simplistic reference to the

neglect of the “mother-tongue” failed to take into account the different religious

affiliations it (she!) professed.

4. The Many Mothers Problem

The dissemination of the proposed national language ran into a roadblock

practically at the outset because of religious difference. The discourse of the mother-

tongue also enabled a glossing over of a more significant issue. Gandhi thought that

220 ———, "Speech to Lucknow University Students, Lucknow (from the Leader, 2-10-1929)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 47 (1929). 165.

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the Indian struggles to master English made it unacceptable as the projected lingua

franca of the country, but the same argument did not hold water for him in the case of

Hindi, because a sizable population already spoke some variation of it. Indeed,

Gandhi actively envisioned Hindi as a replacement for English, because it conformed

to the discourse of matribhasha (mother tongue) in a way that English never could,

and it conformed to the principle of swadeshi, the directive to be-Indian-buy-Indian.

This reasoning, while logical, exposes the flawed nature of the language ideology: it

reduced language to a commodity consumed by speakers, without considering the

subjective complexities of language use, affiliations, and counter-affiliations. It was

not long before Gandhi declared that “Our mother tongue is Hindustani, which is

spoken by 210 million people,” apparently oblivious to the hegemonic overtones of

his statement.221 Unlike Nehru and Ambedkar, he refused to consider how

multiculturalism, and particularly multilingualism, made the democratic goals of

equality of access, opportunity, and treatment extremely complex. That Hindi(-Urdu)-

Hindustani would produce social and political inequalities similar, if not identical, to

that of the English language was unimportant to him, because this possibility was

ultimately and unyieldingly secondary to the icon of the nation central to his creed.

The model that he envisioned replaced class dominance with regional dominance,

which he considered more acceptable largely because existing class hierarchies had

221 This figure involved counting Hindi and Urdu speakers as using the same language, as well as including all the various dialects, which varied considerably from both “high” Hindi and Urdu. ———, "Speech at Founding of Kashi Vidyapith (Banaras, February 10, 1921)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 22 (1921). 334. A trenchant criticism of Gandhi’s treatment of language appears in Majumdar, Problem of Hindi: A Study.

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resulted partly from economic considerations and partly from ideologies of the

colonial government. Ultimately, Gandhi’s vision of language loyalty was similar to

the conceptualization of Bharat Mata, in that the principle of greater geopiety

(sacredness of the homeland) and the expectation of devoted service were meant to

override lesser differences of region and community.222

Gandhi adopted a three-pronged approach to cultivating popular linguistic

nationalism, all of which engaged in one way or another with the metaphor of the

mother and thus generated a fundamental tension. The ultimate goal, he consistently

emphasized, was to eliminate the use of English within India, develop the regional

languages and powerful loyalties, and “create” a national language. All three

components as he saw them were geared towards achieving the common objectives of

preserving the cultural integrity of India, so neatly encapsulated within the

naturalizing narrative of parent and child, and towards producing “educated,

enlightened and nationally conscious members of a free India.”223

To this end, Gandhi not only promoted the cause of the vernaculars in his

speeches and journalism, but also suggested that the subcontinent be divided along

222 Sumathi Ramaswamy has written about the notion of geopiety in various

pieces, including Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970; ———, "Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India." ———, "The Goddess and the Nation: Subterfuges of Antiquity, the Cunning of Modernity." Sumathi Ramaswamy, "Visualizing India's Geo-Body: Globes, Maps, Bodyscapes," Contributions to Indian Sociology 36, no. 1 & 2 (2002).

223 Peter Brock, "Gandhi and the Cause of the Vernaculars " in Mahatma Gandhi as a Linguistic Nationalist (Columbia, Mo.: distributed by South Asia Publications, 1995). 16

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linguistic lines. Doing so would enable more effective and meaningful administration,

he argued, and declared his personal commitment to the cause:

To ensure speedy attention to people’s needs and development of every component part of the nation, I will strive to bring about a linguistic division of India… I will exert myself to get separate provinces for the Telugu, Sindhi, Marathi, Oriya and Gujarati-speaking peoples and will do all I can…to plan the means…for the full development of each.224

The Indian National Congress, which had reinvented its identity under his leadership,

adopted a corresponding official line, which reflected many of the same

contradictions. The INC had accepted the principle of linguistic states in theory in

1917, and made language the primary organizing principle for its provincial divisions

by 1921. Thus, its political activities frequently cut across the Raj’s administrative

divisions, and realigned communities and their affiliations in significant ways.225 At

the same time, Hindi became the means within certain forms of public discourse —

224 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Why I Have Joined the Home Rule League,' from Navajivan, 2-5-1920," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 20 (1920). 267

225 More detailed examinations of the recasting of the Indian National Congress and its negotiations of the subcontinent’s multilingual milieu can be found in P. D. Kaushik, The Congress Ideology and Programme, 1920-1985 : The Ideological Foundations of Indian National Congress under Gandhian Leadership and After, [2nd edition]. ed. (New Delhi: Gitanjali Pub. House, 1986); Brass and Robinson, The Indian National Congress and Indian Society, 1885-1985 : Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Dominance. Y. D. Phadke, Politics and Language, 1st ed. (Bombay: Himalaya Pub. House, 1979); Pran Nath Chopra and Xavier Arakal, India's Struggle for Freedom : Role of Associated Movements (Delhi: Published by Agam Prakashan on behalf of the Centenary Celebrations Committee of the Indian National Congress, New Delhi, 1985); Hill and Conf Author: Canadian Conference on the Centenary of the Indian National, The Congress and Indian Nationalism : Historical Perspectives; B. N. Pande, A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress, 1885-1985 (New Delhi: All India Congress Committee (I) : Vikas Pub. House, 1985); Nisith Ranjan Kumar Ravindrer Das Manmath Nath Ray, Concise History of the Indian National Congress, 1885-1947 (New Delhi: Vikas Pub. House, 1985).

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especially those that viewed the category of “nation” as essentially homogenous — to

“increase unity in the country and to spread nationalist feelings,” by means of a

common tongue and a common script.226 Both developments were in keeping with

Gandhi’s populist agendas of swadeshi and loyalty to one’s mother tongue, but also

made starker the inevitable tensions given the specific multilingual context.

The tensions between the discourses of national language (rashtrabhasha),

official language (rajbhasha), and mother tongue (matribhasha) were obvious in

practically all non-Hindi speaking regions. As I mentioned in the previous chapter,

Bengal was the birthplace of nationalism, linguistic and otherwise. The character of

the Bengali language had transformed as a result of its “revival” in the nineteenth

century, well before Hindi became a serious candidate for national language: the

literary form was heavily Sanskritized, and so formal as to be entirely divorced from

the more rustic spoken dialects.227 The new “high” idiom was already quite alien to

the majority rural population of Bengal, and was generating resentment among

Bengali Muslims.228 The promotion of Hindi here therefore was problematic for

multiple reasons, not least of which were that it was entirely alien to the masses

(rather than being just somewhat alien), and it contradicted preexisting regional

sentiments that proclaimed Bengali pride.

226 From a resolution from Abhyuday in Sammelan Patrika, quoted in Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940 : Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. 137.

227 J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (Oxford University Press, 1948). 167. East India (Census): General Report of the Census of India, 1901, (London: Printed for H.M. Stationery Office by Darling & Son, 1904). 321

228 Anil Seal, "The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century." (Cambridge U.P., 1968). 46-50

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The conflation of discourses of geopiety, mother tongue, and national

language and the resulting tensions, however, were most prominent in Madras

province, in the South. As with Bengali, Tamil-related linguistic nationalism predated

Hindi nationalism. The language-as-mother-goddess discourse, in particular, was

extremely well established in the region by the 1920s and 1930s. The mother tongue

was already the object of semi-religious devotion in 1879, when Gandhi was just ten

years old:

Tamil gave birth to us; Tamil raised us; Tamil sang lullabies to us and put us to sleep; Tamil taught us our first words with which we brought joy to our mothers and fathers; Tamil is the language we spoke as infants; Tamil is the language which our mothers and fathers fed us along with milk; Tamil is the language that our mother, father, and preceptor taught us…[T]he language of our home is Tamil; the language of our land is Tamil.229

Linguistic identity had undergone a significant conceptual transformation in the

region in the later nineteenth century, which had strengthened collective attachment

to linguistic identities, and therefore increased the resistance to the Hindi “outsider.”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, language had been thought of in

conjunction with the land (or as desabhasha or “language of the land”), and “had

been characterized as a natural feature of the local territory…comparable to local soil,

water, crops, flora, and fauna.”230 Evidence of this association with a realm rather

than a people, Lisa Mitchell points out, is available in travel narratives that

229 Vedanayakam Pillai, quoted in Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue:

Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. 11 230 Lisa Ann Mitchell, "Parallel Languages, Parallel Cultures: Language as a New

Foundation for the Reorganisation of Knowledge and Practice in Southern India," Indian Economic & Social History Review 42, no. 4 (2005). 448

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considered language no more remarkable a cultural feature than diet, clothing, or

local custom. These texts mentioned the multiple languages spoken in a single town

only in passing, and with no elaboration or surprise, with wonder being reserved for

other observations.231

By the later nineteenth century however, language was qualitatively different,

no longer just a “medium” but an active “marker:”232 “modern [South Indian]

intellectuals ha[d] read into their literary history a sustaining love of language as a

means of establishing national identity and ha[d] at the same time erased all existing

relationships with neighbouring languages,” Velcheru Narayana Rao notes.233 This

qualitative change had tangible consequences: “Each language began to be accepted

as complete in and of itself, sufficient for any and all tasks and contexts, be they

literary, administrative, pedagogical or colloquial. And no longer did one need to be

able to demonstrate skills in a variety of tasks in multiple languages to be regarded as

a literate person.”234 But even more significantly, language distinctions shifted from

being between devabhasha (“language of the gods,” the title for Sanskrit) and

desabhasha (“the languages of the land,” all languages that were not Sanskrit) to

those of matribhasha, mother tongue, establishing putative, intimate relationships

231 Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India : The Making of a

Mother Tongue. 52-56 232 ———, From Medium to Marker: The Making of a Mother Tongue in Modern

South India. 233 Velcheru Narayana Rao, "Coconut and Honey: Sanskrit and Telugu in

Medieval Andhra," Social Scientist 23, no. 10/12 (1995). 25 234 Mitchell, "Parallel Languages, Parallel Cultures: Language as a New

Foundation for the Reorganisation of Knowledge and Practice in Southern India." 448.

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between languages and their speakers.235 Thus, by the last decades of the nineteenth

century, the combination of language devotion among Tamils in Madras and their

socioeconomic and political dominance in the province had resulted in language

chauvinism. This chauvinism was exacerbated by the fact that the city of Madras was

the main urban center of the province, and retained a Tamil majority; in addition, the

Tamil-majority areas also had better developed systems of western education,

resulting in major regional inequalities. These conditions in turn stimulated other

discourses of language solidarity, so that by the time Gandhi and the INC became

significant presences on the political landscape, the Tamil language undeniably

constituted a separate political identity, as did Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam, and

Kannada.

Linguistic nationalism in Madras state was thus a complex force. Even Tamil

nationalism itself, the oldest and most vociferous of the prevailing language

nationalisms, was many-layered and variable, as Ramaswamy and others repeatedly

point out: it was a “melange of shifting ideologies and practices which…changed

through time; of many contradictory and conflicting positions on the relationship

between the Tamil community, the colonial state, and the Indian nation; and even of

contrary takes on the place of Tamil itself within the imaged community of

speakers.”236 Nevertheless, a unique feature of Tamil nationalism was that caste

235 Rao, "Coconut and Honey: Sanskrit and Telugu in Medieval Andhra." 25 236 Ramaswamy, "Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India."

81. See also ———, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. M. S. S. Pandian, S. Anandhi, and A. R. Venkatachalapathy, "Of Maltova Mothers and Other Stories," Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 16 (1991);

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identity played a significant role in how compatible or incompatible regional and

national loyalties were. The Brahminical register of Tamil was heavily laced with

Sanskrit, with the result that many supporters of the dual-language-loyalty model

were (unsurprisingly) Brahmins.

Even so, developments in legal apparatus under colonial administration in

addition to the inequitable distribution of social, professional, and political clout

among Brahmins and the lower castes ensured disharmony between the two groups,

especially where language was concerned. Colonial scholars (and administrators)

generally divided ancient Indian history and religion into two separate streams,

Dravidian and Aryan. The Dravidians they construed as the original inhabitants of the

land, physically smaller and darker, and civilizationally undeveloped. The Aryans, on

the other hand, were the tall, fair people who brought with them a highly developed

philosophy and civilizing impulses, knowledge, and skills.237 Even religious reform

movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned only to Sanskrit

scripture — an “Aryan” legacy — in their attempts to reinvent and revalorize the

cultural past.238 These developments collectively worked in favor of the Brahmins, as

Geetha, "Gender and Political Discourse."; Anandhi S. Bharadwaj, "Women's Question in the Dravidian Movement C. 1925-1948," Social Scientist 19, no. 5/6 (1991).

237 Vincent Arthur Smith, The Oxford Student's History of India, 5th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London, New York [etc.] H. Milford, 1915). is a very typical example.

238 Eugene F. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India : The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916-1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). R. Suntharalingam, Politics and Nationalist Awakening in South India, 1852-1891 (Tucson1974). See also the development of the Arya Samaj movement, the most important of the Hindu revivalist movements in the late 19th and

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did “the colonial legal structure which institutionalized Brahminical social theory as

the very foundations of the Raj.”239 Many practical subtleties of social differentiation

vanished in the process, with the result that all non-Brahmin groups of the presidency

were unilaterally classified as “Shudra,” the lowest order of the hierarchical system,

which directly and immediately affected three quarters of the region’s population.

Unsurprisingly (again), a powerful polarization between Tamil and Sanskrit resulted,

which extended to Hindi, partly because of the predominantly Brahmin support for

Hindi in the region and partly because the “non-Brahmin” register of Tamil had no

commonality whatsoever with it.

This history of language ideology in the South clearly left little room for the

induction of Hindi as the official language. Even the upper castes were ambivalent

about the elimination of English, as it would instantly set them on par with the rest of

the non-Hindi speaking populations and nullify the cachet that their facility in the

colonial language had given them. Tamil nationalism gained momentum as the

prospect of Hindi as an official language came closer to realization, and the gendered

early twentieth centuries. J. T. F. Jordens, Dayananda Sarasvati, His Life and Ideas (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). Lala Lajpat Rai, The Arya Samaj; an Account of Its Origin, Doctrines, and Activities, with a Biographical Sketch of the Founder (London: New York [etc.] Longmans, Green and co., 1915). Gulshan Swarup Saxena, Arya Samaj Movement in India, 1875-1947, 1st ed. (New Delhi, India: Commonwealth Publishers, 1990). Kripal Chandra Yadav and Krishan Singh Arya, Arya Samaj and the Freedom Movement (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1988).

239 Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. 27. Also see J. Duncan M. Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber, 1968); David Washbrook, "Caste, Class, and Dominance in Modern Tamil Nadu: Non-Brahminism, Dravidianism, and Tamil Nationalism," in Dominance and State Power in Modern India : Decline of a Social Order, ed. Francine R. Frankel and Rao M. S. A. (Delhi: New York, 1989).

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languages increasingly became associated with a polarized discourse of what was

worthy and unworthy. The personification of Tamil as queenly, motherly, and divine

intensified, even as Hindi was portrayed as a demoness, a whore, a maid, and (oh, the

horror!) a false mother.240 Nonetheless, the INC, guided by Gandhi, committed itself

to the promotion of Hindi as the national language, and in 1937, the elected provincial

government under C. Rajagopalachari carried out its promised agenda, and introduced

Hindi as a mandatory subject in educational institutions. Resistance was immediate

and dramatic, and public protests were very effectively supplemented by images in

the print media. Brahmin Rajagopalachari became the hapless subject of a series of

political cartoons, one of which portrayed him as a hired goon in dark glasses

stabbing a woman in royal attire - Tamilttay “Mother Tamil” - with “the knife of

Hindi.” Another, and even more loaded, depiction alluded to a central episode in the

Hindu epic Mahabharata. The original incident was about a man staking and losing

his wife to his sinful cousins at a game of dice, who then attempt publicly to disrobe

her. The honor of the woman is, however, kept intact by the invisible intervention of

Krishna, who magically transforms her robe into an unending strip of cloth: the evil

cousins finally give up their attempt out of sheer exhaustion. This universally

recognizable story was drafted into the service of Tamil nationalism: Rajagopalachari

(again) was the perpetrator, trying to rip the sari off the haloed Tamilttay, while his

fellow politicians - both aghast and ashamed - stood passively by. The implications

were clear — Rajagopalachari was committing a sin and a crime (as were the

240 Ramaswamy, "The Demoness, the Maid, the Whore, and the Good Mother: Contesting the National Language in India." 3.

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unprotesting spectators), and their dishonorable attempt was bound to fail despite no

lack of trying.241 The cartoon predicted events correctly: after two protest-related

deaths and over a thousand arrests, Rajagopalachari and his government eventually

reversed the decision to mandate Hindi in educational institutions in 1940.

The looming failure of Hindi in Madras presidency marked a turning point in

Gandhi’s language politics. Up until the late thirties, he had declined to acknowledge

that linguistic nationalism could be anything but unifying. He had consistently denied

that certain sociopolitical realities could be antithetical to the goal of constructing a

culturally coherent nation, either from sincere belief or a strategic recognition that

such an acknowledgment would weaken the case for self-rule that was based on a

traditional idea of nation-state. In any case, he understated the very real difficulties in

promoting Hindi(-Urdu)-Hindustani as the national language all through the 1920s

and through the early thirties. Instead, in his early years on the Indian political scene,

he attributed the continued use of English for the conduct of legislative and political

business to “cowardice, lack of faith and ignorance of the greatness of the Hindi

language,” and declared that the simple solution was to “give up our cowardice,

cultivate faith and realize the greatness of the Hindi language.”242 Yet even this

“greatness” was to be standardized in a carefully controlled form, so as to alienate

neither Hindus nor Muslims, nor the various non-native peoples who were to make

this watered down excuse for a language their adoptive mother tongue. David

241 Both cartoons appear in ———, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970.

242 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Spreading Hindi,' from Pratap, 28-5-1917," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 15 (1917). 407

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Lelyveld notes exactly how vexed Gandhi’s early position was: “There is no

recognition…that there might exist significant linguistic variation aside from class or

religion, or that ‘simplification’ might also restrict the range of what people might

want to say—when they are not speaking English.”243 In his attempts to negotiate a

middle path that all contending parties found satisfactory, Gandhi failed to satisfy any

one of them completely.

Gandhi’s rhetoric in the years before the Madras fiasco was also marked by

alternating attempts to shame different language groups into learning Hindi, and to

inspire them. So as to not alienate his non-native audiences, he periodically included

praise for the vernaculars and mentioned his efforts to learn them. He deployed the

organizational apparatus of the INC as well as the various Hindi associations that had

sprung up for the dissemination of Hindi, and also repeatedly used his journals and

the many public fora he addressed to exhort non-native speakers to promote his cause.

However, the years made it apparent that this combination was less than completely

effective, with the result that his attempts to shame groups out of their “laziness”

became increasingly frequent, as did his exhortations to people to keep faith that

making Hindi as the national language did not mean North Indian hegemony. The

speech below is fairly representative of both tendencies:

It is always a matter of deep grief to me that, whenever I go to the South or I come to Bengal, I am obliged in order to be able to make myself understood by my educated countrymen to speak in English. I wish that the people of the South and the people of Bengal would rid

243 David Lelyveld, "Words as Deeds: Gandhi on Language," Annual of Urdu

Studies (2001). 73

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themselves of this laziness and make up their minds once for all to add to a knowledge of their own mother tongue a passable knowledge of Hindi or Hindusthani which, and which alone, can become the language of internal commerce in India. Let English be, as it ought to be, language of international diplomacy, the language of intercourse between all the different nations of the world. But English can never usurp the function that specially belongs to Hindi or Hindusthani….Let it not be said that ten crores of India want to impose their speech or English speech on the twenty crores of India.244

Then again, he sometimes appealed to a community’s patriotic spirit and pride in

linguistic accomplishment, and at others, to its pride in being Hindu to motivate

participation in nation building:

I am sorry that in this province you will not take the trouble of learning what is the lingua franca of India or should be. I have been obliged always, whenever I have come down to the South, to remark upon this deficiency…. Had I seen in front of me only my Mussalman brethren I know that I could have spoken to them in Hindi. They are preserving the prestige of the lingua franca but the Hindus are lagging far behind in the South.245

Though he was aware of the complexities of resistance to the idea of a single national

language, the cause remained close to his heart. His insistence, he reiterated, stemmed

from a belief that it was “a powerful means of achieving national unity, and [that] the

more firmly it is established the broader based will be our country.”246 However, he

conceptualized a top-down model of unity with citizens as relatively passive

recipients, with government programs and Congress initiatives propagating the

244 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Speech at Public Meeting (Calcutta, May 1,

1925)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 31 (1925). 238-239. One crore is equal to ten million.

245 ———, "Speech at Opening of Khadi Exhibition (Bangalore, July 3, 1927)," The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 39 (1927). 155-156

246 ———, "Speech at Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad, Madras Ii (Harijan, 3-4-1937) " The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 71 (1937). 83.

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desired vision and the people working to translate it into reality. His mistake however

lay in the fact that he envisioned language as a straightforward means to uniting a

diverse people against the English language and the English administration while

simultaneously leading to a consistent idea of the self. Linguistic nationalism did

(somewhat) effectively achieve the first objective, but it failed signally in the second.

The development of regional linguistic identities made Gandhi belatedly conscious of

the risks of the discourse of the mother tongue in his later years. It had amalgamated

with the anthropomorphization of the homeland in various regions, and created an

exaggerated regional consciousness and persistent demands for separate

linguistically-defined provinces, and there was no going back.

Gandhi was too savvy a politician to not recognize this fact, but his rhetoric

made little accommodation for anything but Hindu-Muslim difference. “There is

nothing wrong in making a knowledge of Hindustani compulsory, if we are sincere in

our declarations that Hindustani is or is to be the Rashtrabhasha [national language]

or the common medium of expression. … The cry of ‘mother tongue in danger’ is

either ignorant or hypocritical,” he rebuked readers in 1938, refusing to acknowledge

that the cry essentially mirrored his earlier call for Indians to rally against English. “Is

India one county and one nation or many countries and many nations? Those who

believe that it is one country must lend [the Congress] their unstinted support,” he

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restated adamantly.247 The many-mother problem however was now irreversibly a

part of the Indian socio-political landscape.

5. The Incompatibility of Ambiguity and Homogeneity

The extract in section 3 above from the news report on the Lucknow event

also calls one’s attention to the matter of script, and gives a brief insight into

Gandhi’s views on it. In the previous chapter, I addressed what were for Nehru the

primary stakes of script: the inheritance of a literary past, and the development of an

enlightened society. Nehru had demonstrated a sophisticated, if not universally

acceptable or even accessible, understanding of the various ramifications of any

action on the matter of script. His sensitivity to and his emphasis on the principles of

democracy provide a stark contrast to Gandhi’s rather more heavy-handed approach

to the issue.

Gandhi’s idea of the nation was predicated on the overriding principle of

homogeneity, as he stated in 1925:

If we are to make good our claim as one nation, we must have several things in common. We have a common culture running through a variety of creeds and sub-creeds. We have common disabilities. I am endeavouring to show that a common material for our dress is not only desirable but necessary. We need also a common language not in supersession of the vernaculars, but in addition to them.248

247 ———, "Congressmen Beware!,' Harijan, 10-9-1938," The Collected Works of

Mahatma Gandhi 74(1937). 4. 248 Gandhi, "A Common Script,' from Young India, 27-8-1925." 345.

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This language, of course, was to be the negatively-defined Hindustani, “neither highly

Sanskritized, nor Persianized or Arabianized.”249 The religio-linguistic tensions that

prevailed, however, meant that a fundamental flaw remained even within Gandhi’s

framework of homogeneity: the “common language” he envisioned would not

necessarily have a single script. “As things are, Muslims will patronize the Arabic

script, while Hindus will mostly use the Nagari script,” he wrote matter-of-factly.

“Both scripts will therefore have to be accorded their due places. Officials must know

both scripts. There is no difficulty in this.” His certainty clearly stemmed from the

belief that the Arabic script would eventually fade away due to its level of difficulty,

a stance that one suspects did not in any way reduce the unease to which a culturally

biased linguistic nationalism was giving rise: “In the end, the script which is the

easier of the two will prevail,” he reiterated.250

David Lelyveld suggests that Gandhi’s linguistic concessions to religion

formed a significant feature of his attempts to demonstrate Hindu-Muslim integration,

but Peter Brock notes that his dance around the intersections of language and religion

in fact proved otherwise.251 “Gandhi seems to have feared that [even] recognizing

Urdu as a separate language would entail the separation of Indian Muslims from the

unitary Indian nation,” Brock writes, “though he did not think that recognition of the

vernaculars would have a similar effect with respect to the regional groups that spoke

249 Ibid. 345. 250 ———, "Speech at Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Indore, March 29, 1918' from

Thoughts on National Language." 374. 251 Lelyveld, "Words as Deeds: Gandhi on Language."

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them.”252 Nevertheless, Gandhi readily made allowances for the “Muslim brethren,”

finding nothing problematic in sanctioning the use of two scripts for what he said was

a single language, but his accommodations also suggested the condescension of a

tolerant majority: “why should we quarrel with our Muslim brethren? They may use

the Persian script,” he urged his readers.253 Statements like, “The distinction made

between Hindus and Muslims is unreal. The same unreality is found in the distinction

between Hindi and Urdu,” exacerbated Muslim fears of a loss of identity through a

negation of difference.254

The fear of the loss of identity and history as a result of language ideology

transcended the Muslim community. The metaphor of the mother had been critical in

consolidating the sense of origins that different linguistic groups developed by the

mid-twentieth century, and Gandhi's contribution to its ubiquity was far from

negligible. Yet his pronouncement on regional languages was a product of his

framework of commonality, and made a startling contrast to his proposal for two

scripts for the “single” national language. “The greatest obstacle in the way,” he

wrote, “are the numerous scripts we have for the vernaculars. If it is possible to adopt

a common script we should remove a great hindrance in the way of realizing the

dream which, at present, is of having a common language. A variety of scripts is an

obstacle…” His point, that “if a great deal of time had not to be wasted in mastering

252 Peter Brock, "Gandhi's Path to Rashtrabhasha," in Mahatma Gandhi as a Linguistic Nationalist (Columbia, Mo.: distributed by South Asia Publications, 1995). 65. See the previous section, and Rahbar, "Gandhi and the Hindi-Urdu Question.".

253 Gandhi, "Spreading Hindi,' from Pratap, 28-5-1917." 409. 254 ———, "Speech at Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, Indore, March 29, 1918' from

Thoughts on National Language." 374.

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the different scripts, we should all know several languages without much difficulty,”

overstated the case yet retained a core of truth in it. As one sees with the Romance

and even Germanic languages, the common Roman script eases some of the

difficulties of learning a new language, especially when they are of a common

language family. Gandhi used similar reasoning in arguing his case for a common

script for the “Aryan languages” of India: “A common script for all those who speak

the Indo-Sanskrit languages…is a practical ideal, if we can but shed our

provincialisms.”255 This claim, by rejecting the possibility of the inherent worth of

non-Nagri scripts, clearly undermined his other mission of generating pride in the

various mother tongues.

Particularly provoking was the charge of “provincialism” with regard to the

sentimental attachment to native scripts was, and it drew the ire of several critics. One

detractor’s reaction summed up the entire case against Gandhi’s language ideology so

comprehensively that the latter felt compelled to respond. This exchange is worth

quoting extensively, as it exemplifies both criticism and response. The critic had

written:

You want to destroy the scripts of all Indian languages derived from or largely influenced by Sanskrit and substitute Devanagari for them for the sake of those who want to learn the various languages You want to preserve the two scripts, Devanagari and Urdu, for one and the same language spoken by Hindus and Muslims. Others, who also number millions and who have the misfortune of speaking different languages, should allow their scripts to be destroyed and displaced by Devanagari, learn Hindi-Hindustani and also learn Urdu script in order

255 ———, "A Common Script,' from Young India, 27-8-1925." 345, 346, 345,

346.

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to understand and come into contact with 130 million Hindus and 70 million Muslims! Does this not sound ridiculous and represent the highest from of tyranny? … Before you propose to destroy the various scripts, should you not attempt to destroy one of the scripts, Devanagari and Urdu, for one and the same language? Why should Muslims and Hindus speaking the same language use two different scripts?256

Gandhi’s answer to the criticism is particularly interesting in ways that I will

elaborate after the quote below.

On the question of script …I [do not] apologize for the opinion I hold.…Different scripts are an unnecessary hindrance to the learning by the people of one province the language of other provinces. Even Europe which is not one nation has generally adopted one script. Why should India, which claims to be and is one nation, not have one script? I know I am inconsistent when I tolerate both Devanagari and Urdu scripts for the same language. But my inconsistency is not quite foolish. There is Hindu Muslim friction at the present moment. It is wise and necessary for the educated Hindus and Muslims to show mutual respect and toleration to the utmost extent possible. Hence the option for Devanagari or Urdu scripts. Happily there is no friction between provinces and provinces.257

The most obvious aspect of the above passage is the overt privileging of religious

identities over regional identities. Gandhi’s question with regard to the various

provincial languages, “Why should India, which claims to be and is one nation, not

have one script?” essentially challenged the very premise that literary languages were

inseparable from their scripts, even though the latter contained the repertoire that

gave the languages their history as well as identity. His comparison with European

languages did not take into account the different evolution of languages and scripts,

mainly because, one suspects, as a nationalist (and not a linguist or historian) it did

256 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "More Cobwebs,' from Harijan, 15-8-1936,"

The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 69 (1936). 304. 257 Ibid. 305-306.

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not need to: in Europe, the daughter languages of Latin had retained the parent script,

whereas the subcontinent had an ancient “tendency to modify and customize the

alphabet” originally derived from the Brahmi system.258

The other significant section in the above passage is Gandhi’s buoyant

declaration, “Happily there is no friction between provinces and provinces,” which

was hardly supported by evidence.259 The year was 1936: barely a year later, a slew

of anti-Hindi protests began in the southern province of Madras, as a result of which

at least 2 people died and nearly 1,200 people were imprisoned by 1940.260 The

Congress government’s mandatory inclusion of Hindi as part of the local curriculum

for secondary education triggered the demonstrations, even though the legislation had

declared that “It will not interfere in any way with the teaching of the mother tongue

in the secondary schools.”261 Protesters and a certain group of politicians viewed

Hindi as such a significant threat to the Tamil language and culture that what started

out as a “self-respect movement” escalated into more organized opposition, and even

became the basis for a separatist agenda after independence.262 As long as the project

of promoting Hindi remained within the purview of party workers and volunteers,

suspicion and resistance (and success) had remained limited; however, as

258 Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. 202-203. 259 Gandhi, "More Cobwebs,' from Harijan, 15-8-1936." 306. 260 Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India,

1891-1970. 170. 261 Government of Madras Order No. 1343 (Education and Public Health), 14 June

1938, quoted in Ibid. 169-170. 262 A. R. Venkatachalapathy, "Dravidian Movement and Saivites: 1927-1944,"

Economic and Political Weekly 30, no. 14 (1995). A constitutional amendment in 1963 eventually prohibited political parties with separatist agendas.

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Ramaswamy points out, “the extension of state patronage to what had hitherto largely

been a civic and Congress party activity completely changed the stakes in the Hindi

game, especially in the face of complaints of Tamil’s devotees that the state was not

doing much to promote the study of Tamil.”263 Government patronage of a northern

language, instituted with Gandhi’s blessing, had ensured that opposition became the

default local sentiment in the south.

Cartoonist R.K. Laxman’s observations regarding the government’s Hindi

policy in the 1950s and 1960s and its effects might have well captured some of the

anxieties of the 1930s:

India was a subcontinent with [many major languages], which had no relation to Hindi… The people who spoke these languages had no clue to Hindi. But the Hindi enthusiasts imagined, in all innocence, that the moment the Union Jack was brought down and our national tricolor went up, everyone would immediately forget all traces of the English that they had learned over two hundred years and begin to talk and think in Hindi. Overnight, names of public places, postal addresses, and railway signboards were changed to the national language and the English script was wiped out. This tactless act created in turn anti-Hindi fanatics…264

Gandhi’s urging the use of a single script for all languages on the basis of an absence

of conflict thus did not take into account the fears of regional dominance that

informed significant non-native-Hindi speakers. It also failed, more culpably, to

consider seriously the impact of the adoption of a new script on the populace, which

would transform overnight previously literate individuals into illiterates. Gandhi was

263 Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India,

1891-1970. 172. 264 R. K. Laxman, "Freedom to Cartoon, Freedom to Speak," Daedalus 118, no. 4

(1989). 79.

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not unaware of this dimension to the problem. A proposal had come up in 1927 that

he publish his Gujarati journal Navjivan in the Devanagiri script, but he had declined

to do so, pleading that practical considerations validated his choice: “I have a large

number of women readers and Parsis and Mussalmans who can struggle even through

Gujarati with some labour. They find it difficult even to understand the moderate

number of Sanskrit words that have got to be used in editing Navajivan. If I adopt

Devanagiri, all these would be helpless and give up Navajivan and me in sheer

disgust,” he wrote.265And yet his awareness of both the emotive and practical

considerations of script did not prevent him from advocating a hierarchical model of

identification wherein a regional identity was to be subordinate to a national identity,

which would be demonstrated through the acceptance of one native link language as

national language. The hegemonic bent of his thinking, at least as far as “Hindu

India” was concerned, was most clearly visible in the following statement, which

advocated the “sacrifice” of lesser tongues in “the great Hindustani stream” and

condemned resistance as “antinational” and “anti-universal:”

A spirit that is so exclusive and narrow as to want every form of speech to be perpetuated and developed is antinational and anti-universal. All undeveloped and unwritten dialects should, in my humble opinion, be sacrificed and merged in the great Hindustani stream. It would be a sacrifice only to be nobler, not a suicide. … We must promote a common language. The beginning must naturally be made with the script, and until the Hindu-Muslim question is solved, confined perhaps to Hindu India.266

265 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, "Letter to S. D. Nadkarni, July 29, 1927," The

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi 39(1927). 308. 266 Gandhi, "A Common Script,' from Young India, 27-8-1925." 347.

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Multiculturalism, he seemed to say, was acceptable as long as it referred to religion,

but not when it came to language.

6. The Law of Unintended Consequences

In retrospect, one sees the complicated political negotiations that Gandhi was

undertaking with his rhetoric on language. Talking about the problems of language

use provided an effective way of translating political ideas to the masses, and

unifying entire linguistic communities. The casting of English as a medium of

oppression rather than a medium of advancement suggested the opening up of new

alternatives to the bulk of the population, by implying that they already had the

linguistic resources for their social development. An emphasis on the use of local

languages was a politically pragmatic choice as it eased some of the administrative

and strategic difficulties of the Indian Nation Congress. The (proposal for the)

development of a national language put into place a readymade substitute for English

as the official language of administration, which was symbolically important in

making the case that indigenous self-rule was possible and plausible. At the same

time, a simultaneous focus on all the above elements gave rise to more than what was

intended, in the form of linguistic rivalries, regional tensions, and the simultaneous

legitimization of arguments for conservative revivalism and “modern” liberal

“English” neutrality. At this point in 2010, it is apparent that while much of the

external forms of language ideology and language conflict have changed since

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Gandhi, there is also a noteworthy continuity in how they have evolved, as the Abu

Azmi incident testifies.

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Chapter 4

Empowerment or Identity: Ambedkar on English and Indian Nationhood

The only class of Hindus who are likely to welcome th[is] book are those who believe in the necessity and urgency of social reform.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Who Were The Shudras? (1946)267

Nationality is a social feeling. … It is a feeling of “consciousness of kind” which on the one hand binds together those who have it, so strongly that it over-rides all differences arising out of economic conflicts or social gradations and, on the other, severs them from those who are not of their kind.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States (1955)268

1. Activism, Criticism, and the Search for Sustainable Solutions

This chapter examines some of the writings of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, architect

of the Indian constitution and independent India’s first Law Minister. In it, I

comprehensively assess for the first time his contribution to the political discourse on

language in modern India. I argue in my analysis of Who were the Shudras? that

267 B. R. Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society (Bombay,: Thacker, 1947). x.

268 ———, Thoughts on Linguistic States, 1st ed. (Aligarh: Anand Sahitya Sadan, 1989). 49.

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Ambedkar constructed a narrative of historical wounds that established English as a

language of power, comparable to Sanskrit but empowering because it lay beyond the

ambit of traditional paradigms of caste and religion. Through a close reading of

Thoughts on Linguistic States, I demonstrate, on the other hand, that he considered

the limited recognition of distinct linguistic identities as necessary to maintain the

unity of the Indian federation. I further argue that despite his acknowledgement of the

power of cultural identifications, his conception of the nation was far from

ethnocentric and privileged instead the goals of liberty and equality.

The two chapters preceding this one discussed how India’s first Prime

Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and India’s most powerful politician during the national

movement, Mahatma Gandhi, engaged with the different questions about language

that India’s multilingual and multicultural society generated. I demonstrated in

Chapter 2 that Nehru primarily engaged with the language issue at two levels,

namely: (i) language as it shaped and was shaped by ideology, and as it related to

identity, and (ii) language as it affected the unity, functionality, and objectives of a

sovereign state. These two rubrics effectively include the phenomena and processes

of linguistic and cultural nationalism and sub-nationalism in India, as well as the

issues of official language(s) and delineation of internal state borders. Language, thus,

was for Nehru a question of ideology and identity, as well as logistics. Gandhi, on the

other hand, adopted a faith-based approach and treated language as a purely

ideological question, contingent on interpretation and will: the Indian nation-state was

the God simultaneously to create and uphold, largely by participating in acts of

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nation-building as if the Indian nation already existed in its ideal form. This chapter

offers an important third perspective in the multi-layered language politics of India,

as Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar remained throughout his career a leader of all political

and cultural minorities, a vociferous defender of civil liberties. He also left the mark

of his activism on postcolonial India in his capacity as President of the Drafting

Committee of the Indian constitution and independent India’s first Law Minister.

Ambedkar’s perspective on language politics in India is important not only in

establishing an alternate ideological and operational perspective to that of Nehru and

Gandhi — the voices of liberal statehood and devoted nationalism respectively — but

also in reassessing his contribution to the political definition of modern India. The

predominant tendency of both academic and popular discourses has been to focus on

Ambedkar’s role in the empowerment of lower castes, his sustained battle for the civil

liberties of oppressed communities in social, religious, and political contexts, and his

contribution to caste politics in India.269 However, this emphasis has meant that

269 To name only a few: Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution : Dr.

Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India (Newbury Park, 1994); Eleanor Zelliot, "Dr. Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement" (Thesis, University Microfilms, University of Pennsylvania, 1969., 1970); ———, From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1992); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2001); Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); G. S. Lokhande, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar: A Study in Social Democracy (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1977); Vasant Moon and Asha Damle, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, National Biography (New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 2002); Sukhadeo Thorat and Narender Kumar, B.R. Ambedkar: Perspectives on Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies (Oxford University Press, 2009); S. M. Michael, ed. Untouchable : Dalits in Modern India (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner,1999); ———, ed. Dalits in Modern India: Vision and Values (Sage

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discussions of what he bequeathed to legal and political discourse in terms of the

definition and objectives of democratic governance have generally not included his

take on the interplay of languages with power.270 The discussion in this chapter, one

hopes, will demonstrate that Ambedkar’s contribution to the place of the English

language in modern Indian political discourse was far from negligible, and will

provide avenues to complicate, and hopefully enrich, how historical analyses frame

him. The analysis in this chapter is also essential to a discussion of language politics

and particularly the politics of the English language in independent India, as it

establishes some of the less obvious complexities resulting from the operation of

caste in Hindu society.

Finally, this chapter serves an important function in the dissertation as a

whole: it underlines the pitfalls and the potential inherent in both the current and the

proposed language policies of India. It does so by focusing on the figure behind the

Publications,2007); Surendra Beltz Johannes Jondhale, ed. Reconstructing the World : B.R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,2004); M. S. Gore, The Social Context of an Ideology : Ambedkar's Political and Social Thought (Thousand Oaks, 1993); Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, "Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945-47," Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (2000); Shabnum Tejani, "From Untouchable to Hindu: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the Depressed Classes Question 1932," in Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890-1950 (Bloomington, Ind., Chesham: Indiana University Press, 2008); Meera Nanda, "A Dalit Defense of the Deweyan-Buddhist View of Science," in Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Rutgers University Press, 2003); Gauri Viswanathan, "Conversion to Equality," in Outside the Fold : Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton University Press, 2001); Anupama Rao, Gender & Caste, Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism; Variation: Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism (London, England) (New York, 2005).

270 A notable exception is Asha Sarangi, "Ambedkar and the Linguistic States: A Case for Maharashtra," Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 2 (2006).

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two texts I shall study, as well as the logic of the texts themselves. India presently has

what is known as the “Three Language Formula,” wherein the State requires all

schools of all regions to teach (i) the dominant local language, (ii) Hindi (or, where

Hindi is the local language, another Indian language), and (iii) English.271 This

ponderous scheme was meant to ensure what Jyotirindra Das Gupta calls “equality

among all the language communities of India in respect of the distribution of the

burden of language learning.”272 However, as has been noted several times over

decades, the formula either has been misapplied or, on occasion, failed outright.273

The National Knowledge Commission has recently recommended that the state focus

on educating all its citizens in the English language, in an attempt to take into account

the history and rate of success of the three-language formula as well as the

constitutional objective of establishing an inclusive, egalitarian state.274 This

recommendation stems from the urgent need to educate Indian citizens capable of

participating in a global economy while simultaneously erasing class- and caste-based

differences. I argue that Ambedkar viewed English as a language through which

271 Ministry of Human Resource Development Govt. of India, Department of

Education, "Three Language Formula," Nationali Informatics Center, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India, http://www.education.nic.in/cd50years/u/47/3X/473X0I01.htm.

272 Jyotirindra Dasgupta, Language Conflict and National Development; Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). 244.

273 Report of the Committee on Emotional Integration, Publication of the Ministry of Education, Govt. Of India (New Delhi: Ministry of Education, Govt. of India, 1962); Pitroda, "National Knowledge Commission: Report to the Nation, 2006 - 2009."

274 "National Knowledge Commission: Compilation of Recommendations on Education."

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power is both achieved and balanced in India, because of its political dynamic with a

historically symbolic and traditional language of power among Hindus, Sanskrit, as

well as with the various languages of the subcontinent. However, preserving cultural

diversity continues to pose a piquant problem today, as it did sixty-five years ago

when Ambedkar wrote Who were the Shudras?.

2. Language, Oppression, and Empowerment

Ambedkar wrote extensively on a number of topics, but only occasionally

intervened on the subject of language. He most frequently engaged with the issue of

language and its politics in the context of the delineation of internal state boundaries

along linguistic lines, which he favored in the interests of reconciling cultural

pluralism with political democracy.275 This aspect most compelled his attention in the

years before his death, when he wrote his best-known pieces on the topic, of which

Thoughts on Linguistic States (1955) is the most important. Thoughts is a surprisingly

provocative tract considering the subject matter, and merits an extensive discussion of

its own for what it reveals about the writer’s views on the potentially conflicting

claims of linguistic identity and national affiliation. It also is an important text in

establishing Ambedkar’s views on the place of English in independent India, as the

later portion of this chapter will demonstrate. Even more compelling, however, is his

work Who were the Shudras?, written in 1947, which he deems a “social history of

275 Sarangi, "Ambedkar and the Linguistic States: A Case for Maharashtra." 151.

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the Hindus.”276 Ancient Sanskrit scriptures – rendered through English translations –

are central to this text, which not only ruthlessly criticizes the Hindu caste system, but

also the traditional Brahman monopoly over Sanskrit literacy.277 The introduction to

this work, ostensibly separate from the text itself, is, I argue, a critical component in

his deconstruction of rigid traditionalism and the cultural cachet of Sanskrit scripture.

I will argue that, for a self-proclaimed historical project, Who were the Shudras? is

extremely ahistorical, and that it relies heavily on the use of subtext and literary

maneuvering to make its case.

The content of Who were the Shudras? is in keeping with quite a few other

notable pieces by Ambedkar, being about the culture of caste-based oppression in

India. “Castes in India,” “Annihilation of Caste,” The Untouchables: Who were They

and Why They became Untouchables, “Philosophy of Hinduism,” “The Hindu Social

Order - Its Essential Features,” “The Hindu Social Order - Its Unique Features,” and

Who were the Shudras? between them arguably encapsulate Ambedkar’s views on

traditional Hindu society and its caste hierarchies.278 What sets Who were the

Shudras? apart from the other works and renders it particularly useful in

understanding Ambedkar’s views on the relationship of language and power,

however, is its introduction, in which he suggests that the ultimate objective of his

276 Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in

the Indo-Aryan Society. x-xi. 277 The Brahman monopoly with respect to Sanskrit in fact did not extend only to

literacy: it was spoken and understood by mainly the elites and well-educated as early as the second century BCE.

278 Introduction to Thorat and Kumar, B.R. Ambedkar: Perspectives on Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policies. 3.

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project is to recover a forgotten, or neglected, social history obscured by the systemic

stifling of voices capable of recording it. As I will demonstrate through my close

reading of both the introduction and the text in the following pages, his prefatory

remarks about the sociological and historical value of his study subtly yet powerfully

make a statement about the suprahistorical potential of restricting (or providing)

access to literacy in languages of social power.

In framing Who were the Shudras? as an instance of historical analysis,

Ambedkar sets himself up within an existing colonial and nationalist tradition of

literary-historical writing, of which texts like Mill’s History of India, Nehru’s

Discovery of India and Veer Savarkar’s The Indian War of Independence, 1857 are

famous instances. Throughout Who were the Shudras?, Ambedkar adopts the line of a

historian examining factual evidence, even as he launches on a project of literary

analysis and constructs an ahistorical political argument through a close-reading of

(translated) Hindu scriptural materials. The choice of the mantle of historian is

obviously deliberate, as it enables him to make a highly desirable claim to objectivity

and authority that render him comparatively impervious to critics claiming textual

expertise:

As has been well said an historian ought to be exact, sincere, and impartial; free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection; and faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history, the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future. In short he must have an open mind though it may not be an empty mind and readiness to examine all evidence even though it be spurious. … I feel certain that in my research I have kept myself free from such prejudice. In writing about

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the Shudra I have had present in my mind no other consideration except that of pure history.279

Dipesh Chakrabarty has framed similar claims combining history with cultural

memory in terms of Charles Taylor’s theory of the politics of recognition in

multicultural societies, wherein the discussion revolves around how claims of

representation and self-representation affect democratic functioning and the discipline

of history itself. “The spread of anti-colonial rhetoric …gave rise to a broad

consensus in particular democratic polities that some marginal and oppressed social

groups owed their present disadvantages in the main to discrimination and oppression

suffered in the past,” Chakrabarty writes, citing Dalits, or “formerly ‘untouchable’

groups in India” specifically as examples. The combining of history with memory

emphasizes a distinction between historical truth and what Chakrabarty calls

“historical wounds”: historical truth is verifiable through factual research even though

interpretation may be subjective, whereas “historical wounds” usually are not. An

emotional intensity quite separate from historical fact and event characterizes the

latter, and directly affects and is affected by at least two communities, the receiver

and the giver of the historical wound.280 Ambedkar’s work clearly sets out to correct

the Hindu cultural narrative designed to lead to such misrecognition as might “inflict

a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred,” and his prefatory

statement serves as an armor against criticism by the givers of the historical wound

279 Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in

the Indo-Aryan Society. xii-xiii. 280 Dipesh Chakrabarty, "History and the Politics of Recognition," in Manifestos

for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (New York, 2007). 77-78.

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that his text will construct.281 He not only challenges his would-be critics, but also

criticizes at the very outset of his project the bias of the long line of scriptural

interpreters responsible for upholding the narrative of discrimination over centuries:

“The damage done by the Brahman scholars to historical research is obvious…In the

first place being the production of his forefathers his filial duty leads him to defend it

even at the cost of truth. In the second place as it supports the privileges of the

Brahmins, he is careful not to do anything which would undermine its authority.”

“Literature which is the main source of the material for the study of the problems of

the social history of the Hindus” becomes thus for Ambedkar the documentation of a

historical memory of oppression and suffering.282

In his treatment of Hindu scriptures as the source material for the social

history of Hindus, Ambedkar mirrored the European point of view to the extent that

the stability of Hindu society was a premise of both.283 Both, though coming at the

topic from different directions, privileged the written word — scriptural laws and / or

religious dogma — despite Hinduism being primarily (if not entirely) an oral

performance-based culture based on social usage and custom.284 The nuances in the

281 Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of

Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 26. 282 Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in

the Indo-Aryan Society. xi-xii. 283 Shabnum Tejani, "Reflections on the Category of Secularism in India: Gandhi,

Ambedkar, and the Ethics of Communal Representation, C. 1931," in The Crisis of Secularism in India ed. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 53.

284 For more on Hinduism, see Wendy Doniger, The Hindus : An Alternative History (Penguin Press, 2009); C. J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame : Popular Hinduism and Society in India, Princeton Paperbacks (Princeton University Press, 1992);

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treatments, however, were far from identical. Textuality (as opposed to orality)

defined not just religion for the British colonizers, but also culture and law.

Documents were considered the source of “authentic” culture, even when

contemporary practice was palpably different; Bernard Cohn considers this practice

an attempt to superimpose an order onto an unfamiliar chaos, as the written word had

an immutability absent in the spoken moment.285

Indeed, the authority of Sanskrit documents – typically the repositories of

recommendations of social praxis in the guise of religious dictates – was an inevitable

corollary for the British because of their uncritical acceptance of the social status of

scripture as sacred texts. Sir William Jones, in fact, categorically asserted that “texts

[would] provide a true picture of the law of the land, i.e. of law as it was actually

practiced in classical India.”286 Thus, the colonial administration, in its treatment of

Sanskrit scriptures, attempted to replicate two separate cultural systems: the concept

of religion as they knew it, and the way it operated locally. The fact that religious

tenets were codified and recorded suggested possibilities (however flawed) of

translation, which made Sanskrit scripture pregnant with potential. Bernard Cohn

notes that the British in India “believed that they could explore and conquer this space

through translation: establishing correspondences could make the unknown and the Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron, Representing Hinduism : The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1995).

285 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India The Bernard Cohn Omnibus (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

286 Ludo Rocher, "Law Books in an Oral Culture: The Indian 'Dharmaśāstras'," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137, no. 2 (1993). 256.

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strange knowable.” A defining feature of this process of translation (literal in the

sense of translating a text, and figurative in the sense of translating a culture) was a

linear directionality based on a comparative method that “classif[ied], bound, and

control[led] variety and difference,” an approach that disregarded the possibility of

difference in the definition of factuality in dissimilar cultural spaces.287 The British

decision in 1772 to administer their Indian territory in accordance with local, and

authentically “Hindu,” law is an example of such a move, resulting in the

administrative erasure of differences in an attempt to articulate a singular category of

uniqueness.

However, cultural translations left out what was undocumented, or what may

have been an unstated premise in a different paradigm. The colonial administration’s

belief that scriptures were consistent, complete, or even particularly important to

anyone other than the literate Brahmins was misplaced, as travelers’ records showed

time and again. Megasthenes wrote in 300BCE in his lost text Indica that Indian

“laws, some public and some private, are unwritten,” a sentiment echoed over two

thousand years later by a French Jesuit missionary: “They have neither codes nor

digests, nor do they have any books in which are written down the laws to which they

have to conform.” Sir Henry Sumner Maine noted the cognitive dissonance for

historians and lawmakers resulting from the mismatched paradigms of orality and

literacy as early as 1861: “the opinion of the best orientalists is, that [a text on ancient

Hindu law] does not, as a whole, represent a set of rules ever actively administered in

287 Cohn, "The Command of Language and the Language of Command." 55.

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Hindostan.” He even questioned the validity of terms: “Has such a thing as ‘Hindū

Law’ at any time existed in the world? Or is it that ‘Hindū Law’ is a mere phantom of

the brain, imagined by Sanskritists without law and lawyers without Sanskrit?” Father

Jean Venant Bouchet, the Jesuit, recorded that the oral transmission of culture was

important for the people whereas written documentation of cultural mores was largely

irrelevant: “Their answer [to inquiries] is that, if these customs were entered into

books, only the learned would be able to read them, whereas, if they are handed down

orally from generation to generation, everyone is fully informed.”288 The Christian

experience of religion and scripture thus ultimately resulted in the British

administrators creating a system with only a cursory resemblance to the original

native way of life. The colonial government privileged literacy, but failed to

appreciate how literacy operated in the socio-cultural milieu.

Like that of the colonial rulers, Ambedkar’s experience of religion shaped his

perception of the stability of Hindu society and scriptural texts. He was born into the

Mahar community, a caste group that Eleanor Zelliot describes as doers of “necessary

duties for the village as watchmen, wall-menders, street-sweepers, removers of cattle

carcasses, caretakers of the burning ground, servants of any passing governmental

official.”289 As was not uncommon, the Mahar community in its assigned caste roles

was essential to the smooth functioning of the society that excluded it in all but

peripheral ways. R.J. Miller cites Mountstuart Elphinstone’s 1872 Report on the

288 Rocher, "Law Books in an Oral Culture: The Indian 'Dharmaśāstras'." 260, 262,

258, 264. 289 Zelliot, "Dr. Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement". 4.

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Territories Conquered from the Peshwas to highlight how the community as a whole

was central to the security of the villagers and their property and the prevention of

crime in the community, in return for the “privilege” of receiving payment in cash or

kind. That this hereditary community be excluded in all but selected points of

interaction was, Miller argues, critical for the village setup as well as for the Mahars

and how they viewed themselves:

The primary task of the Mahar politically was to contribute to his “external” position vis-à-vis the rest of the system: he was a spy, an expert witness with the ability to harm others’ interests, a tool of the Patil [the village head or primary land owner] and beholden to the Patil for favors, and contaminated not only by birth but by contact with dead animals and persons. His “aloof” position was symbolized by his being allotted space outside the village as living quarters. What the Mahar did was not his freely to arrange: There was no threshold, or “input,” other than those noted above, through which he could enter the system. … Like land, the Mahar was a resource to be used by others but not able to use others for his own interests.290

The Mahars were generally considered Shudras, or members of the lowest

rung of the Hindu caste order. However, the term “caste” as generally used in English

incorrectly suggests neat stratifications within Hindu society of priestly, warrior,

merchant, and peasant classes, and does not reveal the extent of its ramifications.291

The Sanskrit word for this simple classification is varna, class; jāti instead is more

suggestive of the complexities of caste in its operational form. Jāti denotes “birth or

origin; the form of existence according to birth,” evolving from the Sanskrit root for

290 R. J. Miller, ""They Will Not Die Hindus": The Buddhist Conversion of Mahar

Ex-Untouchables," Asian Survey 7, no. 9 (1967). 638-639. 291 The names of the four castes (chaturvarna) are as follows: Priest = Brahman /

Brahmin; Warrior = Kshatriya; Merchant and trader = Vaishya; Peasants = Shudra.

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“birth;” the word is clearly related to genesis.292 It refers to “hereditary groups

arranged hierarchically with unequal rights, a separation based on taboos of marriage

rules, food and custom, and a resistance to unification with others,” Romila Thapar

explains; varna on the other hand is a “ritual status, viewed in terms of Brahminical

culture.”293 In terms of varna, Mahars were lowly, but the praxis of jāti consigned

them, like many others, to the category of untouchables because of the menial and

potentially unclean nature of their “customary” occupations.

These complexities of orthodox Hindu social stratification, an “essentially

local, small-scale system,” were interpreted and enforced by a powerful Brahmin

caste that monopolized literacy.294 This group was the only section of society with a

facility in Sanskrit, the language of the scriptures and exclusive dominion of the

highly literate. As early as the second century BCE, Sanskrit grammarian Patanjali

highlighted how closely the linguistic and socio-religious dimensions of the language

were intertwined: “there were five reasons for studying [Sanskrit] grammar: to

preserve the Vedas, to be able to modify formulae from the Vedas to fit a new

situation, to fulfil a religious commitment, to learn the language as easily as possible,

and to resolve doubts in textual interpretation.”295 The sole mediators between sacred

text and social life, Brahmins were for all practical purposes universally accepted as

the ultimate authority regulating societal roles and interactions, with politics and the

292 Vaman Shivram Apte, "Jāti," in Sanskrit-Hindi Kosh, ed. Vaman Shivram Apte (Delhi: New Bharatiya Book Corporation, 2005).

293 Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to Ad 1300 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002). 9.

294 Khilnani, The Idea of India. 18, 19. 295 Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. 180.

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details of governance remaining generally unattached to everyday social life. This

group could command a religiously sanctioned social ostracism in case of violations,

and as a class were a tangible (and formidable) manifestation of the power of

language and literacy in a system that sustained and reproduced itself.

Such systems of social differentiation, though not static, influenced how

different communities were integrated into society even in the twentieth century. By

the eighteenth century, the Mahar community had come to be associated with military

service, first under local rulers less interested in caste distinctions than in troops and

then later under the British. However, young Bhimrao experienced opposition and

segregation from orthodox upper castes when his father’s job as a soldier in the

British Indian army based in a cantonment town allowed him to receive a formal

education. Bhimrao and other low-caste students were physically segregated in all

kinds of ways from the upper castes out of a fear that the former would pollute the

latter either through touch or by sharing resources. Ancient Sanskrit scriptures were

said to explain the social hierarchies and validate such discriminatory practices

through theological justifications.

Thus, the Sanskrit sourcebooks that contemporary society believed its societal

practices to be based on became iconic of the social behavior that they condoned,

especially for the traditionally non-literate low-caste communities that Ambedkar

called “the depressed classes.” Consequently, for him, the same Hindu treatises that

sanctioned untouchability and segregation served as sociological records, storehouses

of evidence of class- and caste-conflict, self-interest, and the machinations of priestly

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promulgators. As a consequence, his approach in Who were the Shudras? is self-

consciously secular, even as he positioned himself as within the same cultural

framework that he meant to redefine:

[I]n my research I have been guided by the best tradition of the historian who treats all literature as vulgar – I am using the word in its original sense of belonging to the people – to be examined and tested by accepted rules of evidence without recognizing any distinction between the sacred and the profane and with the sole object of finding the truth. … [T]his sacred literature…is the main source of the material for the study of the social history of the Hindus.296

The ostensibly sacrosanct and genealogical quality of the discrimination Ambedkar

and others like him experienced left no room for relief or change in social status. His

critique of the perpetuation of hierarchies in Hindu society, which compared so

unfavorably with even ancient Roman law, located the blame squarely and

unmistakably in “the Brahmanic Law books”:

[T]he disabilities under the Roman Law were only contingent. So long as certain conditions lasted, they gave rise to certain disabilities. The moment the conditions changed, the disabilities vanished and a step in the direction of equality before law was taken. [Also,] Roman Law never attempted to fix the conditions for ever and thereby perpetuate the disabilities. … If these two points about the disabilities are borne in mind, one can at once see what mischief the Dharma Sutras and the Smritis have done in imposing the disabilities upon the Shudras. … [W]hat the Brahmanic Law does is not merely impose disabilities but tries to fix the conditions by making an act which amounts to a breach of those conditions to be a crime involving dire punishment. … The whole thing is arbitrary. The disabilities of the Shudras have no relation to his personal conduct. It is not the result of infamy. The Shudra is punished just because he was a Shudra.297 [my emphasis]

296 Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in

the Indo-Aryan Society. x-xi. 297 Ibid. 54-55.

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The “Brahmanic Law books” were also unique in their attempt to explain not

only the origin of man but also their rationale for the existing social order, as he

observed: “No [other] theology has made it its purpose to explain the origin of classes

in society.”298 The (translation of) a hymn called Purusha Sukta from the Rig Veda

identified the moment of origin of the hierarchical principle of the four castes

(Chaturvarna) as one that simultaneously established the Shudras as literally below

all others and as figuratively unclean:

11. When (the gods) divided Purusha, into how many parts did they cut him up? What was his mouth? What arms (had he)? What (two objects) are said (to have been) his thighs and feet? 12. The Brahmana was his mouth, the Rajanya was made his arms; the being called the Vaishya he was his thighs; the Shudra sprang from his feet.299

Ambedkar also extensively referred to (translations of) the Manu Smriti to

indicate the workings of social hierarchy in Hindu society and the distribution of

rights, privileges, and labor, foregrounding particularly the difference in the treatment

of Brahmins and Shudras. He particularly highlighted the circular line of reasoning

that established the knowledge of the Vedas as the badge of greatness, and the pursuit

of knowledge as the exclusive purview of Brahmins.

[N]ot by years, nor by grey hair, not by wealth, nor kindred (is superiority); the seers made the rule – Who knows the Veda completely, he is great among us. Of Brahmans, superiority (is) by knowledge, but of Kshatriyas by valour; of Vaishyas by reason of property (and) wealth, and of Shudras by age. One is not, therefore,

298 Ibid. 10. 299 Muir’s Original Sanskrit Texts, Vol. 1, p. 9, quoted in Ibid. 2.

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aged because his head is grey; whoever, although a youth, has perused (the Vedas), him the gods consider an elder.300

Directives about the division of labor across society in the Manu Smriti were also

unquestionably biased, making privilege and comfort the lot of the Brahmins, and

risk, labor, and service, that of the rest, as Ambedkar noted:

Now, for preserving all this creation, the most glorious (being) ordained separate duties for those who sprang from (his) mouth, arm, thigh and feet. For Brahmins he ordered teaching, study, sacrifices and sacrificing (as priests) for others, also giving and receiving gifts. Defence of the people, giving (alms), sacrifice, also study, and absence of attachment to objects of sense, in short for a Kshatriya. Tending of cattle, giving (alms), sacrifice, study, trade, usury, and also agriculture for a Vaishya. One duty the Lord assigned to a Shudra – service to those (before mentioned) classes without grudging.301

Historically, Manu Smriti was a compendium of (mostly draconian) Brahmanical

precepts written sometime between 200BCE and 200CE, the product of a period that

Romila Thapar identifies as one of turmoil within Vedic Hinduism and backlash

against Brahmanism.302 The early colonialists had identified this text as an important

source of Hindu culture despite its relative obscurity, however, and ensured its speedy

translation from Sanskrit to English. The context that produced the text – a period of

social flux, wherein a class was fighting tooth and nail to retain the power that was

threatening to slip from its grasp – was not taken into account, resulting in this work

being used to prepare English judges to preside over native litigation. In contrast, for

Ambedkar, the very point was that literacy and its associations with authority were

being used as instruments of social manipulation.

300 Ibid. 34. 301 Ibid. 38-39. 302

Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to Ad 1300. 260-263, 279.

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As sourcebooks went, Manu Smriti was particularly useful in constructing a

narrative of historical wounds: it was the source of historical truth not so much in

terms of literal practice, but for demonstrating how literary facility and claims of

religious sanction were deployed to manipulate societal mores. The Rig Veda and the

various Dharmaśāstras (law books) also listed a “deadening” tally of “disabilities,

accompanied by a most dire system of pains and penalties to which the Shudra is

subjected by the Brahmanic law-givers.” A list of “illustrative statements” helped

Ambedkar “trace the origin of the Shudras and discover the causes of their

degradation,” enabling him to argue that the Shudras were consistently posited as

active and integral members of society, but entirely deprived of rights or privileges.303

The discourse of exclusion portrayed the Shudras as criminals, deviants, or beasts,

and brought into its ambit social interactions including ritual, food, sharing of

resources, touch, and even mere presence.

The most categorical imperatives, however, were with respect to education, as

Ambedkar noted. Not only were the harshest punishments reserved for Shudras who

might lay claim to education (or, indeed, any sort of equality with Brahmins), but

even potential high-caste violators of caste prohibitions were discouraged with threats

of everlasting suffering:

A Shudra teaching the precepts of religion or uttering the words of the Veda, or insulting a Brahmin shall be punished by cutting out his tongue. …if he listens intentionally to (a recitation) of the Veda, his ears shall

303

Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society. 29, 30, 239.

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be filled with (molten) tin or lac. If he recites (Vedic texts), his tongue shall be cut out. If he remembers them, his body shall be split in twain. …(a Shudra) teacher and one who learns from him are unfit for being invited at the performance in honour of the Devas [gods] and Pitris [forefathers]. One may not give advice to a Shudra… And one may not teach him the law or enjoin upon him religious observances. For he who tells him the law and he who enjoins upon him (religious) observances, indeed he together with that (Shudra) sinks into the darkness of the hell called Asamvrita.304

The proposed punitive measures thus effectively discouraged the dissemination of

literacy and knowledge, as well as the participation without prior sanction in social

dialogue about the distribution of power and labor. Law, literacy, and language thus

were inextricably fused in both texts, the one cited by Ambedkar and the one he

wrote.

Ambedkar’s experience of the religio-social interpretation of the practice of

jāti coupled with his focus on Hindu scriptures added a distinct iconic dimension to

Sanskrit literature, and by extension the Sanskrit language. The Sanskrit language

was not just what we might call a Saussurian signifying system but rather a Barthian

“myth” that was a token for something beyond itself, largely because it was no longer

spoken but rather restricted to texts, and those primarily liturgical.305 Sanskrit “the

myth” potentially always already incorporated the experience of social exclusion and

exploitation. For Ambedkar particularly, Sanskrit literature was less than rich and

varied. It was the language of the Vedas, Dharmaśāstras, and the Smritis, and such

304

Ibid. 37. 305 Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," in Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980).

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Hindu literature was the literature of the hated Brahmins, as Ambedkar points out in

his preface:

Respect and reverence for the sacred literature of the Hindus is natural to a Brahmin scholar. But it is quite unnatural in a non-Brahmin scholar. … It is a literature which is almost entirely the creation of the Brahmins. … its whole object is to sustain the superiority and privileges of the Brahmins as against the non-Brahmins. … the very reason that leads the Brahmin to uphold it makes the non-Brahmin hate it. Knowing that what is called the sacred literature contains an abominable social philosophy which is responsible for their degradation, the non-Brahmin reacts to it in a manner quite opposite to that of the Brahmin. That I should be wanting in respect and reverence for the sacred literature of the Hindus should not surprise any one if it is borne in mind that I am a non-Brahmin, not even a non-Brahmin but an Untouchable. My antipathy to the sacred literature could not naturally be less than that of non-Brahmins.306

Though Sanskrit literature did not entirely consist of scripture (despite its

iconicity), Ambedkar in his preface called attention to the possibility of a discursive

conflation of language and textual content in contemporary politics:

[S]ome may question my competence to handle the theme [of the origin of the Shudras]. I have already been warned that while I may have a right to speak on Indian politics, religion and religious history of India are not my field and that I must not enter it. … If the warning is for the reason that I cannot claim mastery over the Sanskrit language, I admit this deficiency. But I do not see why it should disqualify me altogether from operating in this field. There is very little of literature in the Sanskrit language which is not available in English. The want of knowledge of Sanskrit need not therefore be a bar to my handling a theme such as the present. For I venture to say that a study of the relevant literature, albeit in English translations, for 15 years ought to be enough to invest even a person endowed with such moderate intelligence like myself, with sufficient degree of competence for the task.307

306 Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in

the Indo-Aryan Society. xi. 307 Ibid. iii-iv.

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This series of statements, one recognizes particularly from our contemporary

postcolonial vantage point, is politically charged, and claims for the act of translation

a transparency that belies the ideological frameworks within which such translation

occurs. The self-deprecating statement, “The book is loaded with quotations, too long

and too many,” and “Those to whom I have shown the manuscript have insisted upon

retaining the quotations,” both contain no indication that Ambedkar considered the

status of his texts as mere translation at all significant. Indeed, he only acknowledges

that an original existed in passing: “[The readers’] avidity for such material is so great

that some of them went to the length of insisting that besides giving translations in

English in the body of the book I should also add the original Sanskrit texts in an

Appendix,” he writes, and disposes of their non-inclusion with a cursory “I had to

deny their request for the reproduction of the original Sanskrit texts.”308 Whether or

not monetary considerations were behind the exclusion of the Sanskrit originals, the

implicit endorsement of the translations clearly challenged those ideologues whose

vantage points denied entirely the possibility of translation through the privileging of

an original.

Ultimately, however, Ambedkar’s decision to work with texts-in-translation

was undeniably strategic, as it established that the logical content of a text had an

308 Ibid. xiii. Interestingly, he ends his introduction with a hat-tip to acknowledged

Sanskrit expertise by giving thanks to Prof. Kangle of Ismail Yusuf College in Bombay: he “has come to my rescue and has checked the translation of Sanskrit shlokas which occur in the book. As I am not a Sanskrit scholar, his help has been to me a sort of assurance that I have not bungled badly in dealing with the material with is in Sanskrit.” ———, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society. xiv.

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independent and secular existence apart from its language, an important step in

making the text the subject of rational scrutiny. By doing so, he established a

paradigm heavily influenced by the model of pragmatic philosophy (embodied for

him by Dewey) that valued a rational approach to religion, culture, and society, very

different from that of his orthodox critics, and replaced uncritical faith with critical

reason.309 This move allowed him to claim agency in the process of representation,

which a privileging of an authentic text might have prevented.

Another strategic decision was Ambedkar’s identification of himself as a

“student of history who is in search of a natural explanation of a human problem.”310

This framework further secularized his material and shifted it from the untouchable

realm of the sacred to the more vulnerable world of the profane. More importantly, it

gestured toward the universality of the problem of ignorance, oppression, and

exploitation and reiterated its importance in the context of a broader fight for

democracy. “[This] book is written for the ignorant and the uninformed Shudras, who

do not know how they came to be what they are,” he wrote disingenuously, even as

he acknowledged that his audience was likely to include scholars, orthodox Hindus,

“Arya Samajists,” “a class of Hindus who will admit that the Hindu social system is

all wrong, but who hold that there is no necessity to attack it,” “politically-minded

309 His final conversion to Buddhism in 1956 was motivated by his desire for a religious identity whose values were amenable to rational scrutiny. A more detailed analysis of Ambedkar’s desire for a rational religion can be found in “A Dalit Defense of the Deweyan-Buddhist View of Science.” Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (Rutgers University Press, 2003). and in Viswanathan, "Conversion to Equality."

310 Ambedkar, Who Were the Shudras? How They Came to Be the Fourth Varna in the Indo-Aryan Society. 28.

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Hindus,” and “the rationalists.”311 The apparently blithe tone of the preface

imperfectly conceals the urgency of the call for socio-cultural introspection and

reform in the emergent democracy beneath the deliberate provocation of both text and

introduction.

The framework of history that Ambedkar used and the problem of oppression

/ emancipation becomes further significant in light of the repeated references

throughout the preface and the text to ignorance, scholarship, and education. Sanskrit

scriptures were admittedly the focus of Ambedkar’s antipathy, but the Sanskrit

language occupied a more problematic space. His consciousness of his untouchable

background and lack of facility in Sanskrit indicated an awareness that orthodoxy

recommended his social exclusion and denial of education. For centuries, the latter

directive had referred primarily and simultaneously to the Sanskrit language and its

entire literary repertoire. Even after Persian became the court language in the Mughal

era, Sanskrit remained important, as was evidenced during the Orientalist-Anglicist

debate on education in India.312 As the idea of the Indian nation evolved over the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a significant portion of the national movement

even began to adopt Sanskrit as the signifier of a glorious past that it was trying to

recover. This was especially true of linguistic nationalists, many of whom defined the

311 Ibid. 28, xiii. 312 The debate, of which Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education is the most

famous example, was centered around whether traditional languages and systems of education should be retained by the colonial government, or if modern English education should replace it. The Orientalists favored the retention of native systems, whereas the Anglicists, influenced greatly by the Utilitarians and Christian missionaries, wished to replace them with a western one. Chapter 1 of this dissertation goes into this debate in greater detail.

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Indian nation in unmistakably ethnocentric terms.313 Ambedkar’s decision to use only

texts in translation was arguably a refusal to subscribe to such an ethnocentric (or

lingua-centric) understanding of Indian nationhood; though the claim is speculative, it

is suggestive that ethnonationalism and linguistic nationalism derive much of their

power from original claims to authenticity. More significantly, however, his decision

was an implicit critique of the discourse of the “glorious past” as it underscored the

imperfections of a systematically differentiated society that restricted knowledge of

the language of power to the privileged few lucky enough to have been born into the

right circumstances.

I conclude this analysis by underlining that, for all the claims that Ambedkar

made about reconstructing an erased history in Who were the Shudras?, his real

contribution to political discourse concerned literacy, education, and sociopolitical

equality. His use of translation as opposed to the original texts achieved multiple

goals. It made a clear distinction between the logical content of texts that retained a

certain degree of transparency and translatability, and their untranslatable cultural

connotations. By doing so, he emphasized the functionality of language in encoding

knowledge, and thus made a case for the power of literacy and the empowering

potential of education. The unstated is also important here, as only the fact that

English translations were available enabled him to imply that the inclusion of Sanskrit

313 Sanskrit itself was never seriously considered for adoption as the national

language, but a register of Hindi-Urdu infused with Sanskrit went on to become the official language of independent India.

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originals was unnecessary: literacy alone was insufficient if it did not bring with it an

access to an empowering body of knowledge.

Thus, it is possible to argue that Ambedkar saw English as a language of

power with tremendous democratic potential within Hindu society, partly because its

colonial iteration had brought with it vast amounts of translation as well as an

unprecedented ubiquity in terms of geographical and societal distribution. It was also

located outside native cultural paradigms and thus allowed room for self-reinvention

by those fluent in it, as his own praxis within this text demonstrated. His decision to

work with translations was designed deliberately to undercut potential criticism that

might have located the authenticity and authority of social codes unyieldingly within

a particularly exclusionary language and its associated literary repertoire. This tactic

allowed him to claim a voice of authority, however temporary and limited, based on

reasoning and a textual transparency born of the logic of signification and

communication rather than the logic of culture. His use of the English language and

references to “modern commentators” and “modernity” also suggest that he embraced

the status of the objective man of reason, reminiscent of the discourse of

enlightenment associated with English in the nineteenth century; the same discourse,

mobilized by the colonial political apparatus, had instituted English in India as a

language of power as well as rationality.314

314

Chapter 1 of the dissertation examines the history of English education and the English language in India, while comparing it with the classical system of education that it replaced and the vernaculars that it accompanied and challenged.

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Some of the more recent, self-consciously Dalit, interpretations of Thomas

Babington Macaulay and his famous Minute on Indian Education strongly support

this interpretation of Ambedkar’s deployment and deconstruction of the languages of

power, English and Sanskrit.315 Sanskrit had a cosmopolitan character no less than

English, as Sheldon Pollock points out, but it both constituted and signified exclusion

for different castes, whereas English was unmarked.316 Thus, by talking about

Sanskrit texts in the English medium, Ambedkar underlined the point that the

knowledge of a particular language was neither sufficient nor necessary for claiming

authority, depth of knowledge, or right to dialogue in a society seeking democracy,

but the knowledge of text and the ability to argue logically was necessary. In the

context of modern India, thus, his paramount concern was that all citizens,

irrespective of genealogy or occupation, should have access to a useful education, and

be able to embrace a voice to frame their own narratives and direct their own future.

His critical focus on the dialectic of literary productions and social institutions, and

his construction of historical memory through a narrative of the historical wounds

inflicted by the caste system underscore the critical importance in how languages of

power are politically and socially deployed.

315

See especially Chandra Bhan Prasad, "Reinventing Lord Macaulay," http://www.countercurrents.org/dalit-prasad271004.htm., and ———, Dalit Diary, 1999-2003: Reflections on Apartheid in India: Selected from the Weekly Column in the Pioneer (Pondicherry: Navayana, 2004).

316 Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. 49

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3. Multiculturalism and the Definitions of Nationhood

Ambedkar’s intervention on the subject of language and its repercussions on

democratic objectives was not always as subtle as my argument about Who were the

Shudras? might suggest. In contrast to the earlier, more literary, project of recovering

historical memory and political agency, Thoughts on Linguistic States deals directly

with the issue of identity as constituted and signified through language. Much like

Pakistan or The Partition of India, written fifteen years previously in 1940, Thoughts

dealt explicitly with questions of national identity, and of accommodating a

multiplicity of comparatively rigid identifiers like those of religion or language within

national borders. Unlike Pakistan, however, it focused on the sharing of power

between majorities and minorities defined in terms of larger linguistic communities

and the more fractured caste communities, rather than religion.

In contrast to Who Were the Shudras?, Thoughts on Linguistic States is a

purely political tract, consisting of a technical discussion of the main concepts that

preoccupied Ambedkar, as well as of the ways in which real world conditions

challenged, and could be reconciled with, the ideals contained by these concepts. As I

will show in the coming pages, Ambedkar examined the concept of nation as it

tended to appear in political discourse and the nuances it elided, comparing it with his

own preferred definition. He was also preoccupied with the problem of how

democracy might operate in a heterogeneous and traditionally unequal society, and

how the mapping of internal boundaries might alleviate or exacerbate these

difficulties. Ultimately, despite the differences in method, style, and content between

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Thoughts on Linguistic States and Who were the Shudras?, the focus of both texts is

unyieldingly on the means to attain genuine social and cultural equality in a fledgling

democracy.

Thoughts on Linguistic States, a generally neglected work, is important in

scholarly terms for what it contributes to the discourse of language politics in India

and to the range and depth of Ambedkar’s thought, but suddenly it seems also very

topical. December 2009 saw a series of violent protests, extremely reminiscent of

those that led to the initial formation of linguistic states, demanding that a separate

state of Telangana be carved out of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.317 Tentative

federal approval of the proposal has met with a strong political and public backlash

against the imminent breaking up of a linguistically-defined political unit.318 The

reaction and clash of opinions has generally followed two trajectories: the

“separatists” cite the economic backwardness of the area and their distinct culture and

history under the Nizam of Hyderabad’s rule, whereas those in favor of a “united

Andhra” frame their case in terms of Telugu unity and a one-language-one-state

principle.319 The ongoing altercation thus illustrates many of the complexities that

Ambedkar underlined, and provides evidence of his prescience in urging a nuanced

approach to the issue.

317 Sreenivas Janyala, "Students’ Agitation Adds Force to Telangana Movement,"

Indian Express, December 7th 2009. 318 D K Singh and Sreenivas Janyala, "Centre Says a Guarded Yes to Telangana,"

Indian Express, December 10th 2009; Sreenivas Janyala, "Day After: Telangana Is Easier Said Than Done," Indian Express, December 11th 2009.

319 Agencies, "Jagan Calls for 'United Andhra'; Telangana Cong M.P.S See Red," Indian Express, 15th December 2009.

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Thoughts on Linguistic States is particularly important to this chapter and to

the dissertation because of the clarity with which Ambedkar broke down the issues

needing resolution. That language could be double-edged, unifying and dividing

groups, was something he noted time and again: “A linguistic State with its regional

language as its official language may easily develop into an independent nationality,”

he wrote. “The road between an independent nationality and an independent State is

very narrow. If this happens, India will cease to be [the] Modern India we have and

will become the medieval India consisting of a variety of States indulging in rivalry

and warfare.”320 Language could be potentially empowering, yet capable of

disempowerment; it could be symptomatic of hegemony, or the means to it: these

facts too he recognized, as I will soon show through a close reading of the text. Most

importantly, he synthesized the usually separate discourses of national identity,

regionalism, and caste in his discussion of the geographic demarcation of states along

linguistic lines. In doing so, he made a powerful argument that because “majority”

and “minority” populations were not stable referents that signified the same groups in

all contexts but were in fact subject to change according to the superset in question,

the path of internal boundaries would have a direct impact on the distribution of

resources and power across the cross-section of citizens that the lines enclosed. Thus,

Ambedkar’s analysis makes clear that defining state boundaries was not merely a

question of establishing political – and possibly cultural and / or linguistic – identities

320

Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 51, 14.

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and borders, but also one of safeguarding the concerns of more interest groups than

could be represented through the act of mapping.

Ambedkar wrote Thoughts at an important juncture of independent India's

history. In 1955, the report of the States Reorganization Commission had just been

released in the aftermath of the demands that internal boundaries of states should

follow linguistic, and by extension, cultural, borders. The issue of redefining

domestic margins along linguistic lines was highly polarizing in the decade from

1946 to 1956, largely due to the bloody partition of India in 1947. Even before the

release of the 1955 report, the linguistic states issue had become, in its most anxious

iterations, one of choosing between the “security and stability of India” and (the

denial of) cultural recognition.321 In fact, after the violent rending of British India into

independent India and East and West Pakistan, a committee formed at the behest of

the Constituent Assembly in 1948 recommended categorically that “no new provinces

should be formed for the present. All things considered, the consideration of linguistic

provinces should be postponed for ten years.”322 Subsequently, the JVP Committee

— thus named after its members, Jawaharlal (Nehru), Vallabhbhai (Patel), and

Pattabhi (Sitaramayya) — explicitly warned against the linguistic principle,

suggesting that it harbored potential “separatist” and “disruptive” tendencies, and was

more a “separating” force than a “binding” one.323 Yet the state of Andhra,

321 Nehru’s address to the Constituent Assembly on 27th November 1947, quoted

in Report of the States Reorganization Commission, 1955, (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1955). 14.

322 Shiva Rao et al., The Framing of India's Constitution. Vol. 4, p. 439f. 323 Report of the States Reorganization Commission, 1955. 16.

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comprising the Telugu-speaking regions of the Madras presidency, was created in

1953 after years of political strife between the Tamil and Telugu speakers of the

region.

The federal government had resisted calls for this linguistically-defined

political unit because of post-partition fears of the newly-independent country

disintegrating, but only until the high profile demise of Potti Sriramulu, who had

undertaken a fast-unto-death in support of the demand. His death sparked the Telugu

community’s fury at the federal government’s seeming insensitivity to a regional

icon’s well-being, and added to the passions already raging.324 As a result,

accommodating demands for the political recognition of linguistic identity finally

seemed potentially less damaging to national unity than the refusal to create a new

state: “[C]omplete frustration will grow among the Andhras, and we will not be able

to catch up with it,” Prime Minister Nehru wrote at the time of the inevitable outcome

of a continued refusal.325 However, the formation of Andhra proved, naturally, to be

only a precursor to similar demands by other linguistic groups in India, which

324 Chapter 2 of this dissertation goes into greater detail on the Tamil-Telugu conflict, the federal response to the crisis, and the series of events leading up to the birth of the Andhra state. A detailed history of the Andhra movement and the formation of modern Andhra Pradesh can be found in Raghunadha Rao, History of Modern Andhra Pradesh. G. V. Subba Rao and d, History of Andhra Movement (Hyderabad: Committee of History of Andhra Movement, 1982). More on Potti Sriramulu can be found in Chippada Suryanarayana Murthy, Andhra Martyr Amarajeevi Potti Sriramulu, 1st ed., Iti Monograph Series (Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India: International Telugu Institute, 1984). B. Sreeramulu, Socio-Political Ideas and Activities of Potti Sriramulu, 1st ed. (Bombay: Himalaya Pub. House, 1988).

325 Subject File 123, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Installment, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, cited in Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. 197.

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repeatedly raised specters of separatism. It was in this context, with controversy rife

about whether a self-proclaimed nation could possibly be culturally heterogeneous

and survive, that Ambedkar wrote his piece. It was one of his last monographs before

his death in December 1956, and arguably his most important work on the vexed

issue of domestic mapping, which his “Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province” had

previously addressed in 1948. It also marks the culmination of his prolonged

examination of the meaning of nationhood and its building-blocks, of which Pakistan

was such a fine, and early, example.

The violence of partition also generated widespread apprehension that any

political conflation of land and culture (whether religion or language) could lead to

some sort of ethnic cleansing or genocide. Prime Minister Nehru vocalized these fears

loudly and repeatedly, making clear how the two situations were comparable:

[I]ndependence was accompanied by a partition of the country and tremendous upheavals which shook the entire fabric of the State…A narrow provincialism became a menace to the progress and development of our great country. …This partition has led us to become wary of anything that tends to separate and divide. It is true there can be no real comparison between this partition and the linguistic regrouping of India. But it is also true that in the existing fluid state of India, even small things in themselves may lead to evil consequences and let loose forces which do injury to the unity of India.326

Ambedkar, no less than Nehru, shared this suspicion born out of the experience of

partition. A comparison of “Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province” and Thoughts on

Linguistic States shows a distinctly bitter overtone in the latter text: “The genius of

326 Jawaharlal Nehru, "Linguistic Provinces," in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Second Series (New Delhi; New York: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund; Distributed by Oxford University Press, 1984). 130-131.

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India is to divide,” he wrote in 1955.327 He had long since recognized the similarities

between the rhetoric of a culturally defined nation and the demands for recognition at

the regional level, and the possible implications for the unitary identity of the Indian

federation: “Linguistic provinces will result in creating as many nations as there are

groups with pride in their race, language and literature. The Central Legislature will

be a League of Nations and the Central Executive may become a meeting of separate

and solidified nations filled with the consciousness of their being separate in culture

and therefore in interests.”328 He summed up the fears for the survival of the

federation succinctly in a rhetorical question in a 1953 newspaper article: “If

consolidation creates a separate consciousness we will have in course of time an India

very much like what it was after the break-up of the Maurya empire. Is destiny

moving us towards it?”329

Even as early as Pakistan or The Partition of India (1940), Ambedkar argued

that the Muslim League’s call for a separate Pakistan and the demand for

linguistically defined provinces were related manifestations of an identical process:

It is no use saying that the separation of Karnatak and Andhra is based on a linguistic difference and that the claim to separation of Pakistan is based on a cultural difference. This is a distinction without difference. Linguistic difference is simply another name for cultural difference. If there is nothing shocking in the separation of Karnatak and Andhra,

327 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 51. 328 B. R. Ambedkar, "Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province," in Dr Babasaheb

Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Bombay: Education Dept., Govt. of Maharashtra, 1979). 102.

329 ———, "Need for Checks and Balances: Article on Linguistic States, Published: Times of India, Dated 23rd April 1953," in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (Bombay: Education Dept., Govt. of Maharashtra, 1979). 135.

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what is there to shock in the demand for the separation of Pakistan?…Pakistan is merely another manifestation of a cultural unit demanding freedom for the growth of its own distinctive culture.330

Thus, by 1955, he was able to argue with confidence in Thoughts that people longed

to belong exclusively to a single cultural group and to be the official arbiters over

their own destinies, and that conflict resulted when significant populations of

different (in this case, linguistic) communities officially formed a part of a single

state: “It is not because there is any natural antipathy between the two,” he reasoned.

“The hatred is due to the fact that they are put in juxtaposition and forced to take part

in a common cycle of participation, such as Government.” History had validated this

belief in 1947, as far as he was concerned. “[T]he compulsory division of India into

India and Pakistan [is an]other illustration of the impossibility of having democracy

in a mixed State,” he concluded, adding that “As long as this enforced juxtaposition

remains [between linguistic communities], there will be no peace between the

two.”331 Thus, as Asha Sarangi notes, for Ambedkar, the political recognition of

linguistic borders was a way to “reconcile the tension between cultural pluralism and

political democracy, as well as between social heterogeneity (multilingualism) and

political authority (federalism).”332

Ambedkar, in keeping with the prevalent political discourse of the nation at

the time, considered monolingualism fundamental to the political stability of any

state. He regarded Germany, France, Italy, England, and even the United States of

330 B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India, 3rd ed. (Bombay: Thacker

and Company Limited, 1946). 10. 331 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 14. 332 Sarangi, "Ambedkar and the Linguistic States: A Case for Maharashtra." 151.

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America as prime examples of the “One State, one language” principle, and the

Turkish and Austro-Hungarian empires as their multilingual (and therefore inevitably

doomed) antitheses.333 The reason for the stability of monolingual states, he

suggested, was the sense of kinship both created and fostered by having a common

language: “A State is built on fellow-feeling. What is this fellow-feeling? …it is a

feeling of a corporate sentiment of oneness which makes those who are charged with

it feel that they are kith and kin.”334 Commonality of language was important as it

both constituted and signified inclusion (and by extension, exclusion), by establishing

what Benedict Anderson has more recently termed a “deep horizontal comradeship”

among people.335 Ambedkar considered it an important motivation behind the will of

a people to unite under a single government.

4. On the Meaning of Democracy

Ambedkar recognized that politicizing language endowed it with a powerful

symbolism, but, more importantly, he knew that being a part of a language

community was essential to a citizenry’s ability (or inability) to participate in

democratic processes.336 Because of the language demographics of India, this point

333 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 13, and ———, "Maharashtra as a

Linguistic Province." 104. 334 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 13. 335 Benedict R. O'Gorman Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the

Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London; New York: Verso, 2006). 7. 336 One aspect of this ability to participate in democratic processes has already

been discussed in the first section of this chapter.

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was critical. As he noted, Hindi was the language of the entire northern belt,

representing approximately forty-eight percent of India’s total population.337 It was

the most widely spoken language in terms of numbers, and as such had been the

natural choice of nationalists in quest of a native lingua franca to uphold as the

national language of the country.338 Yet Article 115 — the clause establishing Hindi

as the national language in the draft constitution — encountered stiff resistance,

especially from representatives of the southern states, which had seen the evolution of

their own versions of linguistic nationalism in the decades leading up to

independence.339 This opposition originated from a variety of reasons that I have

already described in the previous chapters, all of which can be condensed (with some

oversimplifications) into a refusal to accept the prospect, real or perceived, of

northern hegemony.

Ambedkar considered northern hegemony over other regions, and especially

the south, a real threat in more ways than one. It had the potential to lead to what he

called “the consolidation of the North and the balkanization of the South,”

337 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 20. 338 Chapter 2 of this dissertation talks about the national language issue in India in

greater detail. Further readings on the subject include King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in the Nineteenth Century North India; Dwivedi, Hindi on Trial; Rai, Hindi Nationalism; Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940 : Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. among others.

339 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 20; Constituent Assembly Debates 1946-1950: Official Report, (New Delhi: Reprinted by Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1999). Vol. 9. Tamil nationalism is described in exhaustive detail in Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, I address the evolution of linguistic nationalism at a regional level in some detail. I make the case that this phenomenon is a manifestation of protonationalism, and that language conflict at this level arises from different protonationalisms coming up against each other.

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undoubtedly an undesirable conclusion by any standards. However, the set of cultural

contrasts he established suggests that he thought this possibility was detrimental to

the long-term interests of the newly independent state. The North, he stated, was

conservative, superstitious, educationally backward, and bound to an ancient culture;

the South, on the other hand, was progressive, rational, educationally forward, and

modern. The imbalance in the linguistic demographics, he thought, would potentially

stifle the voice of the South in a system of equal representation. This fear, as he

noted, was already clearly prevalent among prominent southern statesmen,

strengthening his case that a poorly executed reorganization of states could lead not to

democracy but to majoritarianism.340

A clear distinction existed for Ambedkar between democracy and

majoritarianism, which he recommended that the federal government take into

account when considering the reorganization of states. He defined democracy as “a

form and method of government whereby revolutionary changes in the economic and

social life of the people are brought about without bloodshed,” wherein these changes

resulted from an inclusive dialogue and were all directed towards the establishment of

a more egalitarian society.341 He outlined conditions necessary for the successful

working of democracy in Indian society in a speech that he gave in 1952; these found

their way into Thoughts in the form of principles and safeguards that he considered

340 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 20, 21, 22 341 B. R. Ambedkar, "Conditions Precedent for the Successful Working of

Democracy: Taken from a Speech Delivered by Dr. Ambedkar before Members of the Poona District Law Library on 22nd December 1952," (Nagpur: Y. M. Panchbhai, 1976). 3

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essential to any plan. That he thought that equality at multiple levels, the primary goal

of democracy, could only be the product of a series of checks and balances is clear

from the stipulations that he lists. “[T]here must be no glaring inequalities in the

society….There must not be a class which has got all the privileges and a class which

had got all the burdens to carry,” he said. The existence of opposition was

indispensable, as was equality in law and administration. Lawmakers needed to abide

by a clearly defined constitutional morality, and society itself needed to have what he

called a functioning moral order, a “public conscience.” But the most important

clause, according to him, was that there should be no “tyranny of the majority” over

the minority, defined in any terms.342

Ambedkar provided a very useful working definition of “majority” in

Thoughts to establish beyond doubt what he considered acceptable and what was

unacceptable in a democracy.

[M]ajorities are of two sorts: (1) Communal majority and (2) Political majority. A political majority is changeable in its class composition. A political majority grows. A communal majority is born. The admission to a political majority is open. The door to a communal majority is closed. The politics of a political majority are free for all to make and unmake. The politics of a communal majority is made by its own members born in it.343

Caste clearly fell under the “communal” category for Ambedkar, but language was

more problematic. It had the potential to be a purely “political” label as long as the

question was one of proficiency; however, political discourse often treated it in

“communal” terms, locating in it a signifier of ethnicity. The entire issue of

342 Ibid. 3-4, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 11. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 45 343 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 51

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delineating internal state boundaries along linguistic lines, in particular, was based on

the premise of language being equivalent to ethnicity, or something that functioned

like it. This being the case, safeguards were essential, not only for linguistic

minorities but also for such other groups as might be subject to the whims of more

powerful groups.

Thus, as far as Ambedkar was concerned, the mapping of internal boundaries

bore the potential to solve two major problems of modern India. Firstly, it solved the

problem of conflict resulting through the patent heterogeneity that he had written

about so extensively, by accommodating cultural differences. Such a compromise

ensured that there was no “denial of the federal spirit of the equality of units,”

through ostensibly combining what we might today call, after Charles Taylor, a

“politics of universalism” with a “politics of difference.”344 The politics of

universalism in the national movement had established expectations for the

“equalization of rights and entitlements,” and the hope of equal participation in

political processes. Identity politics, on the other hand, had nurtured local pride,

generating a politics of difference. As Taylor puts it, “The universal demand powers

an acknowledgement of specificity;” the desire for both “equal respect” and “equal

recognition” translated materially into border (re-)definitions as different linguistic

identities called to be represented on the map of India.345

344 Ibid. 21. Taylor and Gutmann, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of

Recognition. 345 Taylor and Gutmann, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition.

37-38, 39.

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Mapping could also, in theory, restrict the possibility of a “communal

majority” abusing “its power under the garb of a linguistic State,” through restricting

the size of the linguistic units so that the proportion of minorities to the majority

would be reasonable.346 The States Reorganization Commission report had rejected

the theory of “one language, one state,” on the basis that such a principle was “neither

justified on grounds of linguistic homogeneity, because there can be more than one

State speaking the same language without offending the linguistic principle, nor

practicable, since different linguistic groups, including the vast Hindi-speaking

population of the Indian Union, cannot always be consolidated to form distinct

linguistic units.”347 Ambedkar in his turn identified this principle of one state, one

language as serving his purpose adequately. He identified the principle of one state,

one language – as opposed to one language, one state – as serving this purpose

adequately.348 Ultimately, thus, Ambedkar recommended that the redrawing of the

domestic map of India be an exercise in potentially contradictory objectives, and

preserve the unity of the republic through adequately differentiating linguistic groups

from their neighbors.

346 Ambedkar, "Need for Checks and Balances: Article on Linguistic States,

Published: Times of India, Dated 23rd April 1953." 135. 347

Report of the States Reorganization Commission, 1955. 46 348 ———, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 18-19.

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5. The Nation-State and Linguistic State Apparatus

The problem of separatist impulses possibly strengthening, however, could

not be neglected. Ambedkar, in Thoughts, located the moment of coincidence of land,

culture, and official language as the greatest threat: “A linguistic State with its

regional language as its official language may easily develop into an independent

nationality,” he stated.349 The solution he proposed accordingly focused on the

deployment of the official language of administration as an instrument of control

against any fissiparous tendencies: “This danger [of disintegration of the state] is of

course inherent in the creation of linguistic States…How can this danger be met? The

only way…is to provide in the Constitution that the regional language shall not be the

official language of the State. The official language of the State shall be Hindi and

until India becomes fit for this purpose English.” This portion of Ambedkar’s

argument is extremely significant, as it states baldly the urgency underlying the case

for a single national language, Hindi in this case, even while recognizing its

inadequacy. He, like other nationalists, thought that a unifying official language was

critical for the infant democracy to grow to maturity. A native language was

necessary “Since Indians wish to unite and develop a common culture,” and thus

transcend their colonial subjugation, making it therefore “the bounden duty of all

Indians to own up Hindi as their language.” At the same time, Hindi was problematic

in all kinds of ways, necessitating the inclusion of English as an alternative official

349 Ibid.15.

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language.350 While not ideal even in Ambedkar’s own eyes, this proposal provided an

avenue for linguistic states to demonstrate that their regional identity was subsidiary

to their national identity. He pointed this out with characteristic brutality: “Any

Indian who does not accept this proposal as part and parcel of a linguistic State has no

right to be an Indian. He may be a hundred per cent Maharashtrian, a hundred per

cent Tamil or a hundred per cent Gujarathi, but he cannot be an Indian in the real

sense of the word.”351

The manner in which Ambedkar engaged with the issue of language in India

— whether in the context of the formation of linguistic states, choice of official

language, or status of English — begs the question of how he reconciled

multilingualism and its related identity politics with the concept of nation and

national identity. Thoughts on Linguistic States suggests that his theoretical resolution

is focused on the process of nation-making rather than the fact of preexisting

cohesion, but Pakistan or The Partition of India contains a clearer statement of his

views on the matter. Rather than locate the essence of identity in the static,

unchanging absolutes of ethnicity in what Benedict Anderson calls “homogenous,

empty time,” he considered nationhood and national identity functions of a

combination of the dynamic forces of history and human agency.352 Ernest Renan’s

350 Chapter 2 of this dissertation goes into this aspect of language in India in detail. 351 Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. 16. 352

Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 145.

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formulation appealed most to him over the years, and was referred to in passing in

Thoughts but expounded in detail in Pakistan:

A nation is a living soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the common possession of a rich heritage of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down.353

Thus, nationhood for Ambedkar did not have an independent existence outside social

processes, but was rather the very articulation of those processes, both past and

ongoing. He argued in Pakistan that only political expediency had produced an

ethnically-defined incarnation of the nation in India, based (incorrectly, he reiterated)

on racial similarity, supposed linguistic unity, and commonalities of cultural life

drawing on pre-conversion practices or syncretism through contact. He contended

that Renan’s view of the nation more accurately described India, as it discounted

claims of racial purity, and even the importance of land or language in nation-

formation. Instead, memory (a narrative about the past, as opposed to mere historical

experience) and the will to unify were central. This formulation demoted language to

a mere medium that allowed the construction and eventually dissemination of

historical memory, and the communication of the will to unity, and denied it any

significant materiality of its own: “Language invites re-union, it does not force it….In

man there is something superior to language – will. The will of Switzerland to be

353 Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India. 17. The original work (Ernest

Renan, Qu'est-Ce Qu'une Nation? : Confèrence Faite En Sorbonne, Le 11 Mars 1882 (Paris: Calmann LÈvy, 1882).) has been widely translated, and is considered a classical text in the theorizing of the nation.

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united, in spite of the variety of her languages, is a much more important fact than a

similarity of language, often obtained by persecution.”354

I would like to conclude this chapter by briefly encapsulating my argument

about Ambedkar and his interventions on the language politics of India. A close

reading of the two texts, Who were the Shudras? and Thoughts on Linguistic States,

allows us to infer that nationalism for him meant the active pursuit of social justice,

whether at the level of the individual, the community, or the state. He found

genealogical formulations of community that affected sociopolitical behavior and

choices unacceptable, as in the cases of the traditional impact of caste order on

education and regional hegemony. Finally, Thoughts on Linguistic States makes clear

that Ambedkar considered the division of states along linguistic lines a necessary step

towards securing the larger goals of equality and freedom from domination for all the

citizens of the state, even if this step seemed contrary to the discourse of a culturally

coherent union of states. The protection of individual freedoms and sociopolitical

equality comprised for Ambedkar what Dworkin would term the constitutive

positions of the independent Indian nation, “political positions that [we]re valued for

their own sake,” whereas the concession of linguistically defined states within the

largest unit of administration was clearly one of the “derivative positions that are

valued as strategies, as means of achieving the constitutive positions.” 355 Ultimately,

nationhood and national identity were clearly processes for him rather than ideals,

354

Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India. 14, 16. 355

Ronald Dworkin, "Liberalism," in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 116

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whereas the principle of equality was the overriding objective that he considered as

directing these processes.

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Conclusion

This dissertation is a step in a personal journey that has focused on the

compatibilities and incompatibilities in India of linguistic identity and national

identity. The government of India presently has in place the Three Language Formula

of education, a scheme originally proposed in 1949 and formalized in 1968 in the

wake of anti-Hindi protests in non-Hindi speaking areas as a way to ensure “equality

among all the language communities of India in respect of the distribution of the

burden of language learning.”356 The Formula provides, in theory, for the teaching of

Hindi, English, and the local language in the non-Hindi speaking states of India, and

for Hindi, English, and a south Indian language in the Hindi-speaking regions.357

Many schools of the all-India boards of education (as opposed to state-specific boards

of education), however, teach English, Hindi, and Sanskrit within the framework of

the Three Language Formula. This choice has not infrequently resulted in generations

of students illiterate in their native languages, even while living in regions where that

language is spoken.

My own experience of language is fairly representative of that of a significant

section of my generation in India, products of an educational system based on the

Three-Language Formula and the successful spawn of private “English-medium”

schools. My first language is English, insofar as proficiency goes, which has

356 Dasgupta, Language Conflict and National Development; Group Politics and National Language Policy in India. 244.

357 Govt. of India, "Three Language Formula."

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consistently been a ticket to the sort of privilege and opportunity that the National

Knowledge Commission (NKC) seeks to universalize. Yet using this first language in

the United States has made me realize that English is very much my second language

in an Anglophone environment, as the language I know is a peculiarly Indian English

in not just accent but also syntax and vocabulary: this has resulted in my learning a

new language, a more culturally “neutral” academic English. This education has

made Nehru’s statement “[I am] a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of

place everywhere, at home nowhere” more meaningful to me than ever, and his

description could sum up my own consciousness:

[M]y thoughts and approach to life are more akin to what is called Western than Eastern, but India clings to me…in innumerable ways… I cannot get rid of either that past inheritance or my recent acquisitions. They are both part of me… I am a stranger and alien in the West. I cannot be of it. But in my own country also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.358

The above feeling is exacerbated not only by the fact that I am less fluent in Hindi,

India’s national language and my second language, than I am in English, but also by

the fact that I am an illiterate in my native language Telugu by virtue of never having

lived in the region and not attending a Telugu School in Delhi. Yet, despite the

multiple disconnections, I unfailingly consider myself Indian not just due to my

citizenship but also my culture, and no one would disagree. This personal history laid

the foundations for this research project, the first phase of which now draws to a

close.

358 Nehru, An Autobiography. 616.

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The writing of this dissertation has enabled me to explore, in a preliminary

way, how the founders of postcolonial India framed the relationship of language to

national identity, an important question in resolving the many linguistic paradoxes

that I described above. While this project has attempted to be comprehensive in

addressing the stakes of this relationship, more work remains to be done in terms of

examining later developments in the subcontinent with respect to language and

identity politics. The liberatory discourse surrounding English, in particular, is far

from straightforward in twenty-first century India, because it conceals differentiations

of class and privilege, thus ultimately perpetuating them, as it opens up opportunities

for social and economic advancement. Importantly, the NKC’s proposals for

universal English education ignores a basic problem of language acquisition in a

bilingual context: that schools can at best offer an immersion program, and that real

language learning happens through everyday usage outside of the classroom. For the

majority of Indians, English is not used in the home at all even today and is still in

many cases a foreign language. This reality raises the question of whether

development of meaningful knowledge (as opposed to algorithmic, exam-directed

knowledge) is really possible through English, or whether the language will merely

continue to increase social and economic inequalities.

The issue thus becomes one common to multicultural democracies

everywhere, rather than being peculiarly Indian: what is the more responsible policy

with regard to language in a diverse society? Does one, to paraphrase Charles Taylor,

aim for a “substantive” equality, by identifying a way of life as more desirable, and

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put into place the means to achieving it? Or should a state aim for “procedural”

equality and the recognition of difference, and restrict itself to promising equal

treatment without necessarily assuring equal opportunity to all citizens? This is not an

easy question to answer, because of the difficulties inherent even in reaching a

consensus on what might be universally desirable “ends of life,” linguistically

speaking.359 As the case of India demonstrates, political decisions that must negotiate

between freedom, equality, and difference confront a perplexing predicament to

which any solution can only be less than perfect.

In the context of this dissertation alone, one sees that three nationalists had

three very different perspectives as to the place of language in defining a modern

nation-state, with corresponding differences in their characterizations of desirable

“ends of life.” For Nehru, the “central organizing principle” of nationalism was, to

use Partha Chatterjee’s words, “the autonomy of the state; the legitimizing principle

[was] a conception of social justice.”360 Neither of the two principles justified the

imposition from above of a single national language or even the removal of English, a

colonial artifact, without the consensus of the people, particularly as Nehru privileged

social justice as the ultimate goal of the postcolonial state. Legislation on language,

thus, became merely a means to an end (or the means to many different ends), and

needed to be treated as such within this framework. For Gandhi, on the other hand,

359 Taylor and Gutmann, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition.

56. 360 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative

Discourse?, The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus (New Delhi ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 132.

191

subscription to a particular language ideology was an end in itself, as it ostensibly

reflected the relationship between the citizen and the state, and articulated what was

to him the only acceptable hierarchy of cultural and national loyalties. The

introduction of compulsory Hindi education in the interests of creating a more

homogenous “national” culture was the natural corollary of such a view. Ambedkar’s

views offered an alternate approach to the question of language and legislation of

identity. Dominant social groups, he suggested, could manipulate ideologies and

socioeconomic mechanisms so that their effect on non-conformist individuals and

non-dominant groups were immediate and far-reaching, especially within the realm of

language and education. Any legislation that aspired towards an egalitarian society,

therefore, necessarily had to take into account individual rights and differences, and

had to actively strive towards limiting the tendency towards majoritarianism.

The Indian constitution, a document that simultaneously bears the mark of

Nehru, Gandhi, and Ambedkar, has attempted to provide some resolution to the

problem of language in India by putting in place a policy that presupposes a lack of

linguistic order or predictability, even while indicating what the ideal should look

like. Its opening provision states that “The official language of the Union shall be

Hindi in Devanagari script,” but with English “to be used for all the official purposes

of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement,”

for a period of fifteen years that ended in 1965, and even longer if approved by the

Parliament. The next provision allows for states to adopt one or more languages used

therein as their official language(s), with the language of inter-state and state-center

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communication being any one language or combination of languages approved by

legislation. The language of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, however, was to

remain English, with the qualification that Hindi or any other authorized Indian

language could also be approved.361 These series of provisions have, theoretically,

provided safeguards against hegemony and linguistic unfairness, but have in practice

led to some significant instances of systemic imbalances. For instance, the

requirement that English be the language of High Court proceedings has meant that,

even though a cross-regional link language of the upper classes is in place, many

millions who understand only Hindi (or other regional languages) have to depend on

a miniscule proportion of English-speaking lawyers to be represented in the upper

echelons of the judicial system.362 Even more disconcerting are incidents like the one

recently reported by the BBC: a Cabinet Minister in the present ruling coalition

government, M. K. Alagiri spoke in Parliament for the first time in the fifteen months

since his election, because, as a native speaker of Tamil with no knowledge of either

Hindi or English, he was effectively gagged.363 The latter case has been particularly

contentious politically, raising as it does the question of whether the nation is a sum

of its parts, or more than just the sum of its parts. One school of thought argues that,

in order to be a political leader at a national level, knowledge of a regional language

(or the language of a single state) is not enough, as one would not be able to engage

361 India, "Constitution of India." 149. 362 There have been attempts of late to have this requirement overturned, though

with limited success. See Jyotsna Singh, "India Lawyers Want to Speak Hindi," BBC (bbc.co.uk), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8255620.stm.

363 See Thangavel Appachi, "India Cabinet Minister Breaks His Parliamentary Silence," BBC (bbc.co.uk), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-10884125.

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with people and problems outside of that region. The other group, unsurprisingly,

questions if the insistence on either Hindi or English is not just another form of

discrimination. Yet one might interpret the efforts of parliamentary parties and

authorities to find a workable (though popularly ridiculed) solution as a sign of the

determined multiculturalism so central to independent India.364

The political accommodation of multiple linguistic identities thus remains a

vexed issue in India. The fundamental dilemma of multiculturalism persists here as

elsewhere, with the state trying to negotiate a fine line between being sensitive to the

diversity of the country while also taking its different elements closer to the common

goal of empowerment and economic prosperity. The latter goal is easiest achieved in

an integrated society into which heterogeneous elements have been assimilated, but

the extreme diversity of a democratic India precludes the possibility of conflict-free

homogenization directed by the state. However, the political choice to allow the

retention of English in the 1960s has combined with the economic liberalization of

India in the 1990s to undercut some of the old differences, by increasing the

momentum of urbanization and bringing previously unaffected parts of the country

under the influence of larger regional, national, and global currents. The spread of

education and changing employment opportunities together have led to a weakening

of the hold of traditional divisions of caste and region. Inter-state and inter-caste

marriages are increasingly common in urban centers, even though inter-religious

364 As a solution to the problem, Alagiri was allowed to read the answer to the

parliamentary question from a previously prepared script; his deputy minister fielded the follow-up questions.

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marriages continue to be less so. As a result of the former trend, a new generation of

native-speakers of Hindi and English – often with a different “mother tongue”

altogether – is growing; so is the much-vilified hybrid, Hinglish. At the same time,

the social changes and differential economic progress that have resulted from the

opening up of the Indian market has had its effect on identity politics and language

ideology today.

Finally, Granville Austin’s claim that “Language, as a nationally disruptive

issue, has progressively disappeared, although sensitivities persist” appears overly

simplistic from this side of India’s economic liberalization.365 The linguistic

reorganization of states in the 1950s was followed by the fizzling out of the official

language controversy with the constitutional amendment that retained English

indefinitely, towards the end of the 1960s. These events certainly marked the end of a

particular phase of language ideology that revolved around the definition of the

constitutional relationship of the states with a federal center. One must recognize,

however, that this phase merely marked the beginning of a larger process

interrogating how regional identities relate to other regional and national identities.

While the specific issue of the relative constitutionality of Hindi and English has died

out, larger anxieties about regional dominance, economic opportunities, and equality

have not. In Mumbai, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) and its supporters

periodically target wage-earning migrants from the Hindi-speaking areas of Bihar and

Uttar Pradesh in a campaign of intimidation and violence, as part of a larger

365 Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution : The Indian Experience. 155.

195

campaign for more “rights” for the local Marathis.366 In and around Bangalore, on the

other hand, the hostility is directed not so much towards Hindi-speakers but towards

the Hindi and English languages. Prior to economic liberalization, when employment

opportunities were more limited, the population tended to be less mobile. The late

1990s and the 2000s, however, have been characterized by the growth of new

economic hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, etc., in addition to the

burgeoning of older metropolises like Mumbai and Delhi. The new centers of

development have seen a corresponding growth in population, drawn from different

parts of the country. The resulting pressure on local infrastructure and reduction in the

quality of life in such areas have combined with highly publicized instances of

cultural insensitivity to give rise to local dissatisfaction with the presence of

“outsiders.”367 This discontent has generated a sustained wave of neo-conservatism in

the state of Karnataka, similar to those in other regions of the country, directed

against the English language as well as “westernization.”368 The neo-conservatism

366 "Indian Labourer Killed on Train," BBC (bbc.co.uk),

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7699074.stm. Prachi Pinglay, "India Leader Charged with Rioting," BBC (bbc.co.uk), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8367661.stm. Swatee Kher, "Mills Gone, No Jobs in Malls: Mns Workers Justify Protest in Mumbai," Indian Express, 14 February 2008.

367 Sanjana, "Here Comes the Kannadiga Sena," Tehelka, http://www.tehelka.com/story_main38.asp?filename=Ne220308here_comes.asp#.

368 See for instance "Indian Row over English Teaching," BBC (bbc.co.uk), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6046350.stm. "Arrests in India Women Bar Attack," BBC (bbc.co.uk), http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7852837.stm.

196

(and its associated cultural protectionism) has periodically included in its ambit

opposition to Hindi.369

Ultimately, it would not be incorrect to say that linguistic identity is

increasingly interchangeable with ethnic identity in twenty-first century India, due to

which qualitatively different language-related conflicts have arisen. English continues

to be the insider-outsider in this milieu, though no longer due to its status as a relic of

British colonialism but rather because it suggests a more ubiquitous economic and

cultural domination by a vaguely defined “west.” This domination has led,

paradoxically, to an official cementing of its status as insider, captured in the new

symbol for the Indian Rupee (“ ”), which combines the Hindi notation for “r” (र)

with the English “R,” as well as the recommendations of the National Knowledge

Commission. The effect of such changes on the conceptualization of national identity

and regional identity in India, and on the understanding of recent Indian history itself

is yet to be seen.

369 Habib Beary, "Bollywood Ban in Language Fight," BBC (bbc.co.uk),

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4046275.stm.

197

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