The story feels ominous against the backdrop of Bangladesh now. But it still breathed a chilling anxiety when I heard it a few years ago,. “I took a taxi at Dhaka airport on my first visit to Bangladesh,” said the veteran Bengali writer on stage at the Kolkata Book Fair, “It was past midnight and the driver was silent as he drove for what felt like forever. I had no idea where he was going, and I started to feel scared. Speeding through the dark, he just grunted inaudibly in response to my anxious questions.” Then he stopped at a petrol pump and everything changed.
“I was staring at the signs in the petrol pump and suddenly realised everything was in Bangla…even the units, the measure of the petrol and the taka, which would never be in Bangla in Kolkata. And just like that, I felt safe. Nothing bad could happen to me in a place where everything, including the work of business happened in the Bangla alphabet.”
The happy ending of the story left my memory, but affection of the petrol pump never did. It hit me again during another literary festival experience, this time in Dibrugarh earlier this year. As I got down from the car that picked us up at the airport, the sign announcing the hotel’s name called out to me. “Sarovar Portico”. Written in Assamese, it brought up a strange home – everything but the “Ra” was identical to how we would write it in Bangla. It was as if the image was mine…but not quite.
This was my first visit to Assam – though I had seen written Assamese many times, including books in the language. I can’t describe how I felt at that moment. There was a sense of promise, possibility…and a shame. This was a language so close to mine, particularly when written…and yet it was not mine. I had failed to make it my own. She was a close relative, but between us lay a gulf that I had failed to bridge.
If an Indian must learn three languages, including two from India, what should be the second Indian language if the first one is the language of their personal heritage? The answer came to me like with the sense of shame and identity that written Assamese brought to me. It should be a language adjacent to one’s own.
If English is our ticket to the world and our own language the artery to our roots, a second language, that of an immediate neighbour, is the loveliest bridge between community and nation. The approach to forge national unity through a single language in India can never succeed the way it has worked in monolingual nations. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot go beyond our own linguist limits – or live forever in the binary opposition of the local and the national. A fertile path to forge greater unities in India is the expansion of the local into the regional in ways that hold the nation like an interconnected garland. Not through a single overarching thread but a number of overlapping ones.
You know how the character of tea changes as you move through the different parts of India? Not abruptly but gradually – from dark to light to the milky and the frothy and spicy. Perhaps from childhood memories of the fare of chaiwallahs in different stations as the train moved through them? When looked closely, the waves of change between languages, their sounds and scripts mirrors the gradient of slow-shifting tea between regions. How about sipping from our neighbour’s khullad/bhad? They taste may be comfortingly familiar, yet with an indefinable twang of difference. The right tension between shock and familiarity is what makes life interesting and shapes enduring education.
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The three-language formula, which has resurfaced as a bitter conflict between the centre and Tamil Nadu over the enactment of the National Education Policy 2020, is almost as old as independent India.
The University Education Commission of 1948-49, chaired by S. Radhakrishnan, was the first to propose the three-language formula for primary and secondary education. The Kothari Commission of 1966 endorsed the formula and incorporated it into the National Education Policy of 1968. Their suggestion that northern states adopt a second Indian language preferably from the south was well-meaning, but impractically ambitious given the linguistic insularity of the Hindi belt and their geographical and cultural distance from the south. The Hindi-speaking states got around the three-language formula by offering Sanskrit in schools, which has been ineffective for a number of reasons – ranging from the fact that it involves learning no new alphabet to the fact that Sanskrit is scarcely a living presence in modern India beyond prayer and ritual.
The aspiration to unite a country like India through a single language is a colonially inherited ambition. Chinua Achebe reminded us that the British did not try to impose English in sub-Saharan Africa; they rather sought to spread the Bible in indigenous African languages. But what they also did was to impose the idea of the nation on the multifarious tribes in the region. The idea of nationhood brought with it the need of a language that could connect the various tribes. This is where English triumphed over Igbo, Yoruba, Gikuyu, Shona, Swahili and every other local language to bring together Nigeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) as nations – as well in linguistic contact with each other. It was nationhood that created the need for English. Self-contained tribal societies had no need for a Western language. But it is in the nature of modernity and globalisation to merge smaller units to form larger ones. The cultural, administrative, and political glue that creates larger units are often imperial in nature. This makes colonial modernity an irrevocable choice even in postcolonial nations as returning to the past is, in most instances, no longer an option.
India is different from the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Dynasties long and larger had created kingdoms and empires that spread across vast realities even though they were different from the modern nation that emerged in 1947. And yet it cannot be denied that modern nationhood in India owes much of its reality to the idea of the nation-state that emerged in Europe following the French Revolution. For the most part, modern nationhood has worked well in this country, notwithstanding some bloodied and dissenting spaces that are inevitable inheritances of decolonised nations.
When it comes to language, unification hasn’t quite worked. The formation of Bangladesh is the loudest testimony of this failure in the subcontinent. Within India, the attempt to unite our independent nationhood with a single indigenous language has met with continued resistance – most notably from the south that now overshadows the Hindi-speaking north in economic and professional success but is fighting its own battle over delimitation in the parliament.
English has united the national bourgeoise, including the population for whom English is the natural language. But that was the work of a colonial administration and its postcolonial legacy. The attempt to find an indigenous language that can do the same is but an replication of that administrative dream. Such imitations are fine when they work in the decolonized nation, but when they don’t, they indicate a cultural vitality that colonialism had failed to subjugate. The failure of the single national language in India marks such a vitality. It is cause for celebration and a matter of pride. But neither does this imply that we are fated to remain in our respective linguistic silos. We can move beyond this binary if we think in a different way altogether.
The ruling party’s vision of Hindi as the national language that connects all of India through all spheres of life mirrors the colonial fantasy of a unified administration – just the way its version of Hindutva, with its restrictions and exclusions, reproduce Hinduism as it was shaped by the Victorian Protestantism of the British Empire. It does not surprise, as this party wants the domination of language to mirror that of religion: Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan. The imagination of singular and monolithic forms of unity often indicates the overarching nature of colonial modernity as opposed to pre-colonial pluralities. But in the dystopian futurity of fundamentalist imagination, they symbolise the purity of an ideal past.
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The National Education Policy 2020, preserves the recommendation of the three-language formula, specifying that two of the languages should be modern Indian languages. Strictly speaking, Sanskrit, a convenient medium for the imagination of a Brahminical India and merely used as a placeholder to allow the hegemony of Hindi to continue uninterrupted in the Hindi-speaking states, cannot qualify as a “modern Indian language”. Hence can’t be named the second option anywhere. The space for the second Indian language, as I see it, becomes the perfect space for my neighbour’s language.
A second Indian language – neither my own, nor the singular one of a hegemonic nation. Neither the vision of an insular localism nor a monolithic nationalism. But the language of my neighbour, the language I already know some of, in snatches of my days and dreams. I know its sound or I know its form, perhaps a bit of both, even if I don’t follow it when native speakers pour their lives in it. Or it takes me so long to read that I would never dare to read anything long or complex in it. But still a language that is part of my consciousness, sometimes in ways that shakes me up. it is a language that carries the shadow of my own, or a fragment of its soul, sometimes a bit of both, and a language whose speakers I meet every now and then in the course of my life, whose songs and jokes and proverbs resonate with me like the chatter of a distant family member.
I sense this is already more true in the southern states – Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka – than elsewhere in India. People in these states have greater working knowledge of the languages of their neighbouring states than states in the Hindi belt. Like other parts of the country, trade, marriage, and other personal and professional reasons have shaped migration between the southern borders, but here, mutual linguistic contact is higher than what we see between neighbouring states in most other parts of India. While speakers of Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada can generally also communicate with each other in Hindi, Tamil speakers tend not to, as Hindi is not taught in schools in Tamil Nadu to the extent it is taught in the other southern states. But similarities in script and sound between some of these languages, as well as social and professional connections have enabled a degree of mutual knowledge that speakers of the dominant north Indian language, Hindi, rarely show of languages from states that border their own.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
But what if schools in Uttar Pradesh chose Rajasthani as their second Indian language? Schools in Delhi chose Haryanvi or Punjabi? Schools in Himachal Pradesh made space for Kashmiri or Punjabi? Maharashtrians and Gujarati people may already have some knowledge of each other’s culture due to business or immigration, and so it may be easier to make each other’s language the second Indian language in their respective states and free each other of the hegemony of Hindi. Indeed, Hindi hegemony, as many have argued, has overcast the local lives of many languages in the Hindi belt as well, and languages like Bhojpuri and Maithili would be organic choices for the second Indian language in parts of the Hindi-belt where these languages have local lives. In Uttar Pradesh, Urdu would open magic doors of art, beauty and thought, but sadly, that reality feels remote in our current political climate of intolerance.
The second modern Indian language in the NEP recommendation deserves to be chosen with an eye on its local vibrancy. For the Hindi-speaking states, neither Tamil nor Sanskrit are sustainable choices, for very different reasons of course. When a language has a local life, a life in the neighbourhood, or just across the border, it brings with it the reality of a lived, proximate culture that expands one’s immediate horizons without stretching it in the direction of a national utopia. India may not be perfectly connectable through a single language, but it can be a tapestry of languages that can claim close kinship with each other. We can escape the binary of the local and the national through a web of mutually connected regionalisms. And it is impossible to ignore the practical matter that both willing teachers and students in neighbouring languages might be easier to find than a distant language of national hegemony.
Promise, possibility, and shame. The strange melange of feelings that greet us on our encounter with our neighbour’s language. But why shame? I realise that speakers of Bengali, the second most popular language in the subcontinent and the marker of a different kind of hegemony, have been particularly bad in learning our neighbour’s language. I’ve certainly met many more Assamese or Odia people who have some knowledge of Bengali than Bengalis who have comparable knowledge of these two neighbouring states. To hear these languages spoken, and with Assamese, to see it written, sends that teasing twang of recognition through the senses of the most insular Bengali. How difficult would it be, with such seeds of recognition, to create a garden of interconnected plants?
The NEP’s three language formula can be an inspiration to revive these sleeping nerves of kinship that straddle state borders drawn on the basis of language. To transform promise and possibility into kindred realities, to wipe out the shame. We need other ways to imagine our nation than replicating the administrative fantasy of colonial unification. We are diverse, and yet our diversities lie in close proximity of each other. Learning our neighbour’s language may be the most crucial step to threading our diversities together.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony.
