Last year, a hashtag
trended on Twitter India: #HindiImposition. It was the online
manifestation of a protest in Bengaluru over Hindi being one of the
languages on the display boards of the city’s metro rail service.
The protesters were Kannada-speaking people of the city. They felt
that Hindi signs were not required in Karnataka.
If Hindi must be used
in Kannada-speaking land, then the converse must also come true, they
argued. That is, Kannada signboards be used in Hindi heartland,
especially Delhi, the capital of the country. And as that seemed
highly improbable, Hindi felt like an imposition over Kannada
speakers, the protesters argued.
To someone not aware of
the many fiery linguistic -- and thereby identity -- clashes that
Hindi has stirred up in the past, this whole debate may make no
sense. Indians by and large may deem the protests parochial or
justified, depending on which part of the country one hails from.
To me, it seems that we
may have missed an opportunity to press for a recognition of
linguistic rights all over the country, starting from Bengaluru. If
Hindi felt like an imposition -- and it may well have -- why not send
a message out for linguistic diversity by including the top languages
of Bengaluru?
And, no, Kannada is not
the only language spoken in Bengaluru. This page here from a
city-based translation and localization company cites at least three
other languages that have more than a double-digit population in the
city. An older article from The Hindu mentions pretty much the same
proportion of other language speakers.
So, why can’t we have
the metro displays in the four languages of the city: Kannada, Tamil,
Telugu, and Urdu, plus English as a catch-all language? Why can’t
we take decisions related to language on an inclusive rather than an
exclusive basis? That is, why should the people of Maharasthra rule
out all languages apart from Marathi? Can’t every city in the state
adopt a simple enough benchmark like recognising all those languages
that are, say, spoken by more than 10% of the population and then
have all public communication disseminated through them? Governments
that have a much larger budget and certainly the central government
must publish all information in all the 22 official languages of the
country online.
India is a melting pot
of languages. There is no one region, state, or city that speaks just
one language. There may be smaller villages that perhaps speak just
one or two languages, but the linguistic diversity deepens and widens
a whole lot when you move to bigger towns and cities.
Why then must we insist
on creating these non-existent linguistic monoliths? In doing so, we
reduce the fight for linguistic rights to a much narrower and
parochial squabble bordering on xenophobia. Linguistic rights need to
be secured not just for us in our state, but for everyone everywhere.
Only then, this call for language equality will be taken seriously by
publishers of mass communication, whether it be government or private
companies.
Of course,
acknowledging people who speak other languages and their right to
access public services in those languages requires that we understand
democracy. Demanding that everyone speak the language of the land is
a simplistic solution and one that frequently divides people along
the lines of us and them. Which one of us wouldn’t be grateful to
download bus routes in our language in any Indian city that we go to?
We need to show more
maturity and inclusivity in our demand for linguistic rights. It’s
not enough that we ask for shopboards to be in the local language.
The demand needs to be for comprehensive language access for each
citizen of India, regardless of where they are from and where they
live. For, if one can have linguistic rights only in one’s state,
they aren’t really rights, are they?
