India’s Language Story So Far And Where It Is Headed

On April 7, While presiding over a meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that people from other states should start talking to each other in Hindi. Shah said that Hindi should be learned as the second language after a mother tongue in various parts of the country. Stating that Hindi should be the “language of India”, Shah said it should be accepted as an alternative to the English language. He also announced that there were plans to make Hindi a compulsory language in the North-East.

No sooner had the Home Minister uttered these words than the dissenting opinions started to make their way through the puddle of controversy. A.R. Rahman reacted and said, “Tamil is the connecting language”. Congress leader Shashi Tharoor made a pedantic observation and said, “Uniformity is not unity. Attempts to impose uniformity will undermine India’s unity”. Even the BJP’s Tamil Nadu chief CK Annamalai said, “Tamil Nadu BJP won't allow Hindi imposition in the state and the party will be proud if Tamil will become a link language across our country." 

CPI(M) leader Balakrishnan staged a protest in Chennai and discredited the words of Annamalai while speaking exclusively to Republic TV. Balakrishnan said “State Party president keeps changing, and so their words don't hold any importance considering Centre's decision. Amit Shah is a National leader and Union Minister and so his words are final."

DMK leader & Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin expressed his displeasure over the Home Minister’s comments and said "Amit Shah's suggestion is an idea to wreck the unity of the country.  A single language (for the entire country) will not help ensure unity.”

Senior BJP leaders like Himanta Biswa Sarma and CT Ravi took a cautious line while toeing that of the Union Home Minister and not crossing the one in their native states. While Sarma said “Amit Shah has not said that one must give up learning Assamese to learn Hindi,” Karnataka BJP leader CT Ravi said, “What's wrong with that? He didn't say anything against regional languages.”

Such expression of polar sentiments on the language debate in India is not being seen for the first time needless to say. Our great country has struggled with the factor of reckoning with and administering one common language. We just can’t seem to agree on that one medium of communication that will act as the solvent in which all of us would happily dissolve ourselves in harmony, putrefying that pugnacious osmotic layer of linguistic separation. But can there really ever be any solution to this language debate? We must go through a bit of India’s linguistic history first to try and understand it as a problem in modern India.

India’s rich linguistic history

The Eight Schedule of the Indian Constitution recognises 22 languages. The original Eighth Schedule had only 14 languages while the rest 8 were added in the course of our great republic’s progress through the decades, the last one being in 2003 by which Santhali, Bodo, Dogri, and Maithili were added. But the Constitution’s recognition of 22 languages cannot capture the richness of linguistic heritage which India has possessed since ancient times. It is a wee bit important to look at this history, in brief, to understand how the garbled noise of the human voice, through chiselling away the layers of uncouth, rough, and boorish guttural vocalisations, came through to be the embellished, fine, and specific intonations developing and settling into the current system of syntax which makes languages the only logical intelligible tool, allowing us to record and pass on ideas to successive generations, preserving, altering, adding and amplifying the scope and magnitude of human knowledge.

Sanskrit: Ancient language, modern virtues?

Languages are dynamic. They evolve correspondingly, metamorphose rather, along with the progress of any society. Most crucially languages reflect the fundamental thought processes of society. For example, when Panini wrote Ashtadhyayi, the classical text delineating the rules of Sanskrit grammar in the 5th Century (400s) BCE in the Indian subcontinent during the waning phase of the later Vedic Age, classical Latin was already on its way to infecting the rest of the Italian peninsula has moved beyond the ancient city of Rome and the Tiber river basin. But to make a very schematic comparison of the two languages, Sanskrit had extremely precise rules of grammar, denoting specific articles, and inflections in nouns and verbs dependent on the case, the numerical quantity, assigned gender, of the object, and subject in a sentence and the tense in which it existed, Latin did away with the concept of definite articles altogether. This is just one aspect of the difference between two contemporaneous ancient languages but reflects a very radical aspect of divergence.

While Sanskrit had evolved through over a millennium of Vedic recitations, apocryphal legends and tales of heroes, gods, and demons, and intense commentaries on human emotions, and the very meaning of life and its nature of being, the Latin language had gone through two centuries of evolution from around 700 BCE to not even using articles in a sentence. 

This statement, though misses the erudition of philology and deep cultural knowledge of the Western language, can't but help a layman appreciate the richness of thought possessed in ancient Sanskrit. Every rule of syntactic denotation could precisely indicate a piece of information in utmost brevity. Take an example of the rule of plurals in modern-day English. While one suffix of an ‘s’ is all it takes to convey the plurality of being, it leaves the exact number of units in ambiguity to the mercy of further clarification. But in Sanskrit, the inflection of a noun, a verb, or a simple definite article is dedicated to explaining the exact nature and context, and contents of a sentence. This means a simple ‘the’ in Sanskrit will explain whether the object described is/ are one, two, or more, masculine or feminine, and the case in which it represents. Perhaps this reason of precision with which Sanskrit grammar sought to capture and convey thoughts is why it has often been touted as being analogous to a modern-day computer programming language.

This minute scale of grammar rules to construct language in ancient India helped in descending through layers of complicated thought in specificity. This concept of articulating thoughts in the most infinitesimally possible way along with our practices of meditation and deep contemplation perhaps helped transcend all forms of human consciousness into the final realisation of being one with the universe. Realising that intuitive knowledge of how every vibrating atom in our body, which cannot be felt at the physical level in neurological terms, is infact a part of the continuum of the matrix of the earth, its natural elements, which finally go on dissipating into the vast emptiness of space, but still remain fundamentally the same, which we’re all part of… Aham Brahmasmi. 

While other cultures were scared of the world around them and believed in personified ‘Gods’ and deities, the language of our ancestors understood ‘God’ as this inexplicable force of nature, which we were all part of, as a unified entity of creation. Perhaps it is our language that allowed our society that luxury of spiritual realisation of what it means to be human, which Westerners with all their technological heft, military might, and material prosperity, still come to our great country to seek. 

Sanskrit was the court language in most Mahajanapadas who ruled a major portion of the North Indian plain in the 5th century BCE(400s), but the modern languages as we know today were far from having taken shape. 

In South India, Dravidian Languages Begin To Flourish 

While in the northern plains, the vernacular Prakrit languages and the court language of Sanskrit were flourishing, the southern part of the Indian subcontinent was flooded with the use of Dravidian languages. Tamil is said to be the oldest of the four modern-day Dravidian languages, the others being Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu. The earliest known Tamil literary work is the Tolkappiyam which is a monograph of Tamil grammar and is thought to have been compiled between the 0- 300 C.E, in the second Sangam of great poets and sages.

The Sangams were fabled gatherings of sages, authors, and poets, which according to legend, went on for thousands of years in the ancient city of Madurai in Tamil Nadu. No literature from the first Sangam survives today, but it is said that the great sage Agasthya, who is also said to be the first Aryan, to cross the Vindhya mountains, to travel into the deep south, presided over that first assembly of bards. This is a remarkable event to consider lest it is lost in the popular discourse of our country’s linguistic history, because it marks the unity of Indian languages, in sharp contrast to how divided we stand today on that issue. 

Agasthya is one of the most revered sages in the Indian subcontinent and is one of the prime Saptarshis who is credited to have composed various chapters of the Rig Veda in Sanskrit. The connection between Sanskrit and Tamil is evident in the Rig Veda which has Tamil loanwords like Mayura meaning peacock and Kana meaning one-eyed. 

The other languages of southern India arose from an interaction between these two linguistic poles. It is thought that Malayalam arose from a dialect of western Tamil until it turned into a different language altogether. The first literary work in Malayalam dates from 1100-1200 CE which makes it the youngest southern Indian language. 

Going north from Kerala, we find the Kannada language which is mostly spoken in modern-day Karnataka. Kannada has been the language of powerful southern Hindu empires from the Gangas, the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas, and most prominently, the Vijayanagara empire, one of the last bastions of Hindu rule in the Indian subcontinent in the south. The Vijayanagara empire lasted from the early 1300s to the late 1500s CE, well into the time the Mughals had come and established themselves in the subcontinent. The Vijayanagara rulers were great patrons of the Kannada language and of arts and music. Kannada is said to have an unbroken literary history of over a thousand years since at least the 400s, from well before and after the Vijayanagara empire arose and fell.

If we move east from Karnataka, we reach Telangana and Andhra Pradesh where the Telugu language is spoken. In modern-day India, Telugu is the most spoken Dravidian language-- with over 8 Crore speakers. In 2014, when Telangana was formed, Telugu became the first Dravidian language to be spoken predominantly in two Indian states. Telugu has an ancient history too, with its earliest recorded inscription dating back to the late 500s CE. Both Telugu and Kannada, have had immense interactions with the Prakrit dialects and were heavily influenced by their syntax and grammar rules. 

This Brownian mixture of languages all miscible in the crucible of the Indian subcontinent, continued for over a millennia before the speakers became aphasic to each other’s tongues as enough time passed, separated by empires, but unified by trade and cultural exchanges.

Sanskrit became less and less commonly spoken and the Prakrit languages developed into dialects turning into languages like Bengali, Gujarati, and Oriya. The advent of the Islamic invasions in India brought Persian as a court language, especially during the Mughals. During the rule of the Mughals, the languages of northern India changed in terms of their daily parlance and became even more divergent from the ones spoken in southern India. The Hindustani style of speaking Persian influenced by the native Sanskritic and Prakritic elements became Urdu which is a further split of personality so to say, started to become the Hindi we know today. As if this confusion of languages was not enough, the British since 1757, started to go about their agenda of colonising us with their sense of Anglo superiority, wanting to ‘educate’ us, bringing in Thomas Babington Macaulay, the person who would be responsible for the post Independence generation to have read more of Wren and Martin, Shakespeare, Coleridge, and a Machiavelli, rather than the Ashtadhyayi, Tulsidas, Thiruvalluvar, and a Kautilya. And this is where we must slap ourselves out of the stupor of this historical reverie and come back to the modern era of India and her constant coquetting with languages to find that one perfect one.

The language conundrum since Independence

Before India became independent the sole language in use for all official and administrative purposes was English. In 1947, when India gained Independence, the issue of language was one of the most hotly contested in the Constituent Assembly debates. 

President Rajendra Prasad had said, “There is no other item in the whole Constitution, which will be required to be implemented from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute.” The importance of the issue was unmissable. While many of our founding fathers had called for Sanskrit and Hindi to be used as our republic’s lingua franca, there was major dissent from the people who did not speak Hindi as a native tongue. 

Shyama Prasad Mukherjee the founder of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, never believed in the view that there will be a day when Indians will speak one language. He laid out a condition if Hindi was to become the common language. “If you want that Hindi is to really occupy an All-India position and not merely replace English for certain official purposes, you make Hindi worthy of that position and allow it to absorb by natural process words and idioms not only from Sanskrit but also from other sister languages of India”. Mookherjee also said that non- Hindi speakers could have accepted Hindi had it not been ‘aggressive’ to ‘enforce’ Hindi. 

Pulloli Thomas Chacko, who also became the first LoP of the state of Kerala made a very important observation. He said for India to survive in the times of modern civilizations, the language of India, has to evolve, and not be artificially created, and moreover “should have a lore of scientific literature”. 

Jawaharlal Nehru cautioned against the imposition of Hindi but was wary of English too. He said, “that while English is a great language (that) …has done us a lot of good,…no nation can become great on the basis of a foreign language”. 

After all the discord, Hindi was adopted as the official language of the Indian Union. 

Part XVII of our Constitution is specifically dedicated to the issue of the official language of our republic. Under it, Article 343 says that it shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script which shall be our official language, accompanied by English which shall cease to operate after 15 years. However, the same article also allows for a continuation of English to be used after this 15-year period passes. This has happened of course as English is still used in our official parlance, for all our juridical, legislative, and administrative purposes.

The Linguistic Reorganisation of India’s states

Language has played a very major role in the organisation of the states of our great country. The 1948 Linguistic Provinces Commission, also known as the Dhar Commission in its conclusion observed “The formation of provinces exclusively on or even mainly linguistic considerations is not in the larger interests of the Indian nation and should not be taken in hand”. 

However, the 1953 States Reorganisation Commission(SRC) rightly observed that “The States cannot be so reorganised as to conform to economic regions. Nor can the principle of economic self-sufficiency within an administrative unit be regarded as a clear criterion.” One cannot argue with the wisdom of this Commission. Economic zones if created would only lead to a widening of disparity and further help in dividing a nascent Indian republic, which the world for their glee and entertainment, wanted Balkanised. So the Commission recommended restructuring the states based on language but not before giving a sound rationale for the same. The Commission said, “We have observed earlier, we are not inclined to concede any demand on the sole ground of language.” but in the end recommended a major rejig in state lines based on language.

Throughout the report, the Commission observed different peculiarities for different parts of India, but their basic gist was that a linguistic reorganisation must be for the ease of homogenous administration and the easy intercourse of daily life and administrative functions amongst and for the people of a state. We must understand this recommendation of the 1953 SRC as the basis for the States Reorganisation Act of 1956. Creating linguistic-based states like Kerala, the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, while assimilating parts of Maharashtra, and Karnataka, are all centered around India’s experiment with preserving cultural identities as the edifice of a society and its thereby construction of economic prosperity. Noted left-leaning historian Ram Chandra Guha has agreed with this notion of reorganisation. He held that such reorganisation has safeguarded India’s unity after Independence.

The language conflict in modern India

However, the fault lines in India’s language saga did not close even then. The north-south divide and anti-Hindi sentiment, especially in Tamil Nadu continued. C.N. Annadurai, the DMK stalwart, protested the 1963 Official Languages Act’s temporary provision for a fifteen-year lapse period of English, demanding an indefinite continuation of it as India’s official language. The situation descended spiraling out of control when a three-language formula of Hindi- English- Tamil has introduced in the then Madras State Legislative Assembly by the Congress CM M. Bhaktavatsalam after Nehru’s death in 1964. 

Vehement opposition from the legislators and agitation from the student intelligentsia led to self-immolation and riots which spread across the state from Madurai, killing over an estimated 60 people. The situation only stabilised when the then PM Lal Bahadur Shastri made a national radio broadcast assuring the Tamils that English would be continued to be used in inter-state, and Centre-state communications and in Civil Services Examinations. In 1967, the Indira Gandhi government amended the 1963 Official Languages Act and allowed for the continuation of English as the lingua franca of the Indian Union but the Congress never returned to power in Tamil Nadu after Bhaktavalsalam. The DMK, C.N. Annadurai’s party, propelled to power for the first time in 1967 on the language issue, got a thumping mandate even in the 2021 elections.

The issue is not just a north-south divide, just that the gradient of linguistic difference is the steepest between them. Most northeastern states see a degree of Hindi usage, while states like Telangana have seen some usage of Urdu especially in the Hyderabad region, while most speakers of northern India, understand sparse Hindi, and the language is used in a fairly staple way. However, even in states like West Bengal, Hindi saw a pushback wherein in 2018, an agitation led to IISER Kolkata withdrawing a notification that had made knowing Hindi a compulsory qualification to apply for teaching posts. 

The 2011 language census uncovered that only 12 out of India’s then 35 states chose Hindi as their first language. Even though Hindi is spoken by about 43% of India’s population, only 26% or just over 1/4th of Indians speak the language as their mother tongue. In 2019, when the draft National Education Policy(NEP) was released with the three-language formula, the debate gained steam again, as Raj Thackeray’s MNS went all out to assert how Hindi was not their mother tongue while impending language wars were warned by Tamil Nadu political parties. The 2020 NEP which was approved by the Union Cabinet called for the medium of instruction to be the mother tongue of a student ‘whenever possible’ till the VIIIth standard. Though the idea has been hailed by Pedagogists as one which is long due, trends suggest an opposite and somewhat fractured non-uniform sentiment. According to a Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) report of 2019-20, despite Hindi remaining the biggest medium of instruction in India, accounting for around 42% of the share, the preference for the English medium is on the rise. Studies indicate J&K has nearly 100% enrollment in English, trailed by Telangana which has a nearly 75% enrollment. Another 2020 NSO study found that over 50% of pre-primary schoolchildren who spoke one of 13 regional languages at home, including Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Punjabi, were enrolled in English medium schools. 

So could we ever achieve linguistic parity in our beloved motherland?

Will we ever be able to reconcile the many factors of variations plaguing this vision of using native mother tongues to learn in primary and secondary school? Will we be able to reconcile all that with a common language that is acceptable to all? That is of course an answer which history will record and tell. However, what we can do is learn from the tales of other societies. Beyond religion and ethnicity, language is often seen as the second most factor innate to forming an identity. To give a few examples, let us look at Bangladesh and Pakistan. They broke away from us on the pretext of religion, only to fragment further when the tall, fair Punjabis of West Pakistan derided the shorter-darker Bengalis of the East calling their language effeminate and their ways of life no better than vermin. The unforgiving Sri Lankan civil war raged on for over a decade when the Jaffna Tamils were denied the same linguistic rights which the majority Sinhalese enjoyed. Or how about the tensions in Belgium in which there is constant speculation of when the French-speaking southern Wallonia region will split from the Flemish north while Brussels would be where the centre of the strife would lay. And lest we forget Quebec in Canada, which wants its own country sometimes for being a Francophone region, separate from the English speakers. And last but not the least, the entire Catalonia movement of wanting to secede from the Kingdom of Spain. It would also be amiss to not mention the Russia- Ukraine war which started on 24th February, which President Putin claimed was a military operation to salvage the Russian speakers in Ukraine. Language is the perfect tinder to spark a war. And rouse and rile sentiments.

Tower of Babel undone by the Indian Republic

Our great land has been looted by the English who divided it on the basis of religion. We have lost major geopolitical leverage in losing the modern-day territories of Pakistan and Bangladesh, yet we remain together. The progress of our country must not be extricated from the contingency of a language factor that will propel us to the heights that the Indic languages did in the ancient and medieval times. The Madurai clashes of 1965 between college students and Congress workers which led to the language riots in Tamil Nadu is a blemish on the legacy of the great sage Agasthya’s visit and participation in the first great Sangam session in that ancient city.

Though there is no solution to this language debate, often, epiphanies are arrived at by looking at aphoristic tales. And which better one than the Book of Genesis in the old Hebrew Bible which tells the tale of the Tower of Babel. After God destroyed the world with the Great Flood, a united human race converged on the land of Shinar, the southern part of Mesopotamia. The entire human race inhabiting the plains of Shinar would speak in just one common language, and vocabulary. Upon settling, they started to build a metropolis, in which they conceived of the Tower of Babel. This tower was to reach the heights of the heavens which would take mankind literally to great heights and place them at a pedestal no lower than heaven itself. But when God saw this, he remarked, “If as one people all sharing a common language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be beyond them.” But this could never be acceptable to a Supreme being. So he chose to smite the humans and said, “Come, let’s go down and confuse their language so they won’t be able to understand each other.” And so god split the one tongue of men into many after which they ran amok fighting each other descending into anarchy and violence over misunderstandings petty and grand because of the language divide, as the tower lay unfinished with god reigning supreme.

It is simple. India, through all its pillaging and still sustaining, has been given a gift that is the opposite of the tale of Babel. Our gods have conspired to give us that one unifying language through the horrors of colonialism, which is equidistant from all our native languages so that a feeling of indigenous imposition can never come about. We must preserve our ancient literature and way of thought and use this one language in the most mechanical manner possible, to surpass the heights of the abodes of our colonisers’ gods and the rest of the world.