Lingua Franca: Its Irrelevance In An Indian Context

4^th July 2017

St. Louis, MO

I am personally opposed to the efforts of Hindi chauvinists who are out to impose the Hindi language on non-Hindi speaking states. This is partly because I am averse to the idea of imposition of anything. Hindi is, without doubt, the most widely spoken language in India, however it is restricted to northern & central India and is therefore as incomprehensible to many south Indians, as Kannada or Tamil could be to the rest. In the south, each of the four major states has its own language and these languages are dissimilar to each other, and even more to Hindi. The north-east Indians too are opposed to the movement to make Hindi a compulsory language & have been vocal about it.

A peak into the past: Historically in India, the plan to have one common language, specifically the Hindi language, across all the states has come up time and again, but has never worked. Now, I feel that it must not work in the future too and I shall present my arguments why. Europe is a land of several distinct languages and cultures, with each country having its own language. In the process leading up to present day Europe, Europeans have fought among themselves and have polarized based on language, religious beliefs and having common enemies. The historian Ramachandra Guha articulates this well in his speech titled ‘Why India is the most interesting country in the world’. Pakistan attempted to impose Urdu on the Bengali speaking East Pakistan, which was one of the causes that lead to the war in 1971 and consequently the creation of Bangladesh. The Sri Lankan civil war that raged for decades between the Tamils in the north and the Lankan Government, which has been one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in history, started, among other reasons, with the imposition of Sinhala as the only national language there. Thinking on these lines, India is like several European nations operating as one. History teaches us that imposing a single language have only lead to fissures between people who did not share a common tongue.

Gandhi’s views on a national language: Gandhi is frequently quoted, and often misquoted; and, his name has been invoked in this debate too, because he had once said that Hindi must be made a common language of communication in India. I quote from an article in the DNA “Like the way Britishers speak in English and use the same in practice, in the same way, I pray to all of you to provide Hindi the dignity of a national language. By making it as the national language we should fulfil our duty”. However, another quote explains why Gandhi wished to have Hindi as a national language “My humble, but a firm opinion is that unless we do not provide Hindi the national language status and other regional languages their adequate importance, till then all talks of a 'swarajya' are meaningless.” Of course, he had said this with the aim of unifying various groups across the country during the struggle for freedom. It would have been a great idea to have a common language then, but that idea is today out of time and out of place. After all, we did win our independence without having a common language. These suggest why we do not need a lingua franca now. In that same DNA article, there is another quote by Gandhi in which he subtly equates the statuses of national and regional languages- “The national language should be used during court meetings. If it is not done, the people will not understand the political processes properly. The national and regional languages should be definitely promoted in courts.” Gandhi, of course, was a man of constant evolution.

The people who quote Gandhi must not forget the fact that Gandhi himself knew & spoke several languages. He wrote his journals- Indian Opinion, Young India and later Harijan- in English, Hindi, his native Gujarati, and had one translated into others. He had even made serious efforts to learn Tamil, so that he could communicate with large groups of Tamils who lived in South Africa & who were his staunch supporters during his efforts to rescind the notorious Asiatic Act there. One of his trusted lieutenants in South Africa was a Tamil named Thambi Naidoo. So, Gandhi was not parochial, and how one could tie Gandhi to arguments of regional parochialism is beyond me.

Language, functional or emotional? Indians from all parts have coexisted and lived in different parts, even if they spoke a different language not native to that place. When needed, we have learnt each other’s languages too. In my personal experience, I have had friends who amazed me by speaking good Kannada, despite it not being their mother tongue. Several, including me, have been trained in Hindi and can read, write and speak the language. But, my stand is that, learning a language must be a choice and not an order. To me it is like wearing clothes or eating food of one’s choice. It is not a stand against any language, but against the imposition of it. It is incumbent on us to not just protect and preserve our language, but to simultaneously allow other languages to flourish. The feeling of threat to one’s regional language is unfounded, as long as one feels secure about speaking, writing and reading one’s own tongue, even while one communicates in various other languages. If a Hindi chauvinist feels that Hindi is threatened, then imagine how threatened a Kannadiga or a Keralite or an Assamese might be for his/ her language, which have fewer speakers, fewer authors and fewer dramas/cinemas coming out than Hindi. I strongly agree and believe that language has a dual role of being ‘functional’ and ‘emotional’. Emotional when we use our native tongue & functional when we use another language to only communicate. So, while some may criticize an auto rickshaw driver in Bangalore for speaking in Hindi with his customers, I have been fine with it because he simultaneously plays the latest Kannada soundtracks on his stereo and yells hello to a fellow auto driver in Kannada, his native tongue. He simply uses another language as a means to make business, as should anyone else who chooses to. Imposition is therefore unnecessary.

Possible approach to a solution: Schedule 8 of the Indian Constitution recognizes twenty-two official regional languages in India, excluding English. So, what language should we use on boards, buses, metro trains, milestones, post offices? We can have huge boards with all twenty-two on them, across all the states. That is the fairest solution, but clearly not the most viable. So, it is best to have the regional language of that State on them because it is understood by the majority living in that state. But, we must oblige and accommodate people from other states who speak other languages and this begs a different solution. Thus, we have to include one more language that is either the second most widely spoken after the state’s language, or agree to have a common language English, whose numbers and letters are understood and are acceptable to many across all states of India. The main goal must be to accommodate all linguistic groups to go about their business anywhere in India. My larger point however is that, solutions can be innovated, and thus there is no reason to give diktats to learn one common language. It is now safe to agree that having Hindi script on milestones in Tamil Nadu is as preposterous as having milestones with Telugu script in Punjab or Tamil in West Bengal. But, if the chauvinists insist their demands, then they must be prepared for a resounding ‘No’ from the non-Hindi speaking states.

We as Indians must take pride in our multi-lingual culture. The scholarship of Indian thinkers and authors has found more audience and has had more impact when they have used multiple languages in their writings.  Ram Guha’s essay titled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Bilingual Intellectual’ in the Economic and Political Weekly discusses this. Here are a few excerpts that I had found most interesting from that essay-

About Tagore he writes- “Tagore understood that while love and humiliation at the personal or familial level were best expressed in the mother tongue, impersonal questions of reason and justice had sometimes to be communicated in a language read by more people and over a greater geopolitical space than Bengali.”

On Hindi’s legendary author Premchand- “Perhaps the most striking instance of this bilingualism concerns the crafting of Premchand’s Godan. This work, published in 1936, is considered the very archetype of the modern Hindi novel, yet the author first outlined the plot in English!”

An interesting one was this- “Rajaji’s contemporary V. D. Savarkar also wrote books in English, as well as plays and polemical tracts in Marathi.”

I quoted these specific lines to also defend my position on the use of English. But that is another matter. How can we justify that learning a common language would do us any good, when one of the first songs that kids all over India learn in schools is a composition in Bengali- our national anthem?

To sum up: I want to conclude this essay with a personal observation. These days, in the evenings, I’ve been watching the 80s Indian TV show ‘Malgudi Days’ on YouTube. I had never seen it before. The series is beautifully shot in quaint Indian towns and it takes you back in time. It reminds me of simpler times, of home, of family bonds, of friends and it also makes me think of the human mind & emotions. However, there is another element to this show that makes it apt to be mentioned here. This TV show is based on novels & short stories written in the English language by a south Indian author R.K. Narayan, whose mother tongue was Tamil, but he was fluent in Kannada having studied and lived in Mysore. The cartoons and caricatures for the book and the show are done by the author’s equally famous brother R.K. Laxman. The director of the show is the late Shankar Nag, a genius filmmaker and a flamboyant Kannada movie star. The cast includes many actors, Kannada and Marathi theatre artists, including Shankar’s brother and another famous Kannada actor Ananth Nag and, the playwright and Jnanpith awardee Girish Karnad, who is good at Konkani, Kannada & Hindi. The pleasant music scores are rendered by L. Vaidynathan, a Tamil. But, the whole series was shot in Hindi and was aired on Doordarshan, a pan India TV channel. This, to me, is the real India.