#HindiImposition: A Missed Chance for Linguistic Rights

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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?

Slumdog, colonial legacy, etc.

The other day I was chatting with a friend about Slumdog Millionaire. He said it was one more of those unbelievably un-ending attempts to sell India's poverty. (Really! If only India's poor knew how valuable they were. They must know, of course.)

Anyway, from Slumdog we went on to talk about contemporary literature and how I felt we lacked one, one which is truly representative (though I don't see how one text can ever be representative of India). He disagreed and said we did have contemporary literature, only it needed to be translated into English (from Bengali, he meant. My friend is a Bong.)

Then, I clarified that I was talking about stuff written by Indians in English. To which, he said, “But why should we write in English? What's the need?”

It seems so clichéd to talk about all this, but here's my bit for what it's worth:

Anyone who loves to write will not mull over which language to write in. We write in the language that comes naturally to us, the language in which we think.

Now, this should logically be the mother tongue, right? Mostly, it is. But because many Indian children are educated in English right from the first day of school, they may use English + mother tongue equally well.

I think in English a lot: this could be because of my profession, my education, or just my inclination. But, as long as I know and love my mother tongue equally well, I don't see why I have to shy away from the fact that I would prefer to write in English.

English wields a lot of political power over Indian languages, it's true. But, after more than 3 centuries after colonial rule, cant we get over the hangover and see it as a language, and not as something we grudgingly use because we were forced to use it 300 years ago? I mean, learning or speaking English shouldn't automatically mean you despise or refuse to learn any other language, be it Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, etc. If you choose to do so, [that is, look down on your mother tongue or Indian languages], that is your choice.

I do not like to look down or hate a language. I, for one, absolutely love to learn new languages, and love to discover the whole new worlds, new cultures, sub-texts buried deep in the womb of each language.

It is sad that most kids today cant read or speak a complete sentence in their mother tongue without faltering. And parents are hardly bothered with that. I had once read somewhere that the less you use a language, the more you lose in terms of the knowledge that comes with the language, like the different people who speak it, their occupations, knowledge about their bio-diversity...

For instance, there could be herbs or spices that grow only in a particular place and only people who live there know about it. They have a name for it in their language, possibly a whole culture built around that local uniqueness. But it remains outside your awareness and if the language perishes, all such knowledge, will, too. (My grandma can look at a herb and say what remedial powers it has. This language will die with her -- Of course, we'll always have our KAPLs and Daburs, but at the household level it will be lost. – Neither my mother nor I have bothered to learn this from her. Of course, this is not really about language politics. It's more of post-colonial India's suspension between the knowledgeable past and the liberating present. Aah, there we go again... making India's colonial past a reference point.)

Well, to sum it up: I don't see a contradiction or a dichotomy in myself if I say I love my mother tongue and English, and choose to write in English. I sometimes write in Kannada, too, for my own consumption. I frankly don't think it is worthy of putting it out in public. If I could give enough time to it, I think I could write as well in Kannada as in English, but, time... that is the one thing I don't have.

Sir.

Linc said, “Considering your capacity to cry rivers and oceans, you didn’t cry much.” And I thought, yes. Linc, who is usually much stronger than me, was breaking down every now and then, and frequently had a lost look in his eyes. How was it possible that I wasn’t reacting similarly? What stopped my tears?

It is his voice in my ears. I hear it all the time. To me, he is ever-present: in each book I read, each comma, each apostrophe that I will ever use, each sentence that I write, and re-write, for I hear his voice in my head, “Be human, be clear.” Somehow, his absence is not as strong as his presence was.

I was changed from the first day I met Jyoti Sanyal at journalism school seven years ago. He overawed me by his passion for lucid writing and also his sweep of knowledge, but I never remember being terrorized by him, as so many others do. I saw through his sound and fury quickly for the compassionate man he really was. (I realized his anger was not directed at individuals, but at the obsolete way of writing that has entrenched itself in India. He set up Clear English India in Kolkata, where I still work, to fight the evils of legalese, officialese, circumlocution and the like that plague Indian writing.)

He was fired from that school by a maniac, but Linc and I kept visiting him every week at his place in Fraser Town. It was there over cups of coffee he made that I learnt my editing. I pasted newspaper clippings on to a sheet of paper and edited on the hard copy. He corrected them with his red-ink pen. I think I still have them somewhere, must look for them. With each visit, my horizons of knowledge expanded and my love for him grew.

Sometime during those meetings, our relationship graduated from teacher-pupil to father-daughter. What fun and joy-filled moments those were! Those raunchy jokes he cracked, the anecdotes he shared, those conversations rich in information…, everything is cherished. Going back home after each visit, I remember thinking that each conversation could be the subject of a book.

My writing bloomed under his watchful eyes. About a year after I met him, he told me he saw a maturity in my writing. I felt like I’d won the Pulitzer prize. Those people who have ever been complimented by him know the weight and sincerity of those compliments. Then, one day, he told me I was among his smartest students. I simply laughed it off. That was too huge a compliment for me to handle. But he kept looking into my eyes, and said, “Yes Viju, you are.”

Just a year ago when I did a series of stories on street children for an NGO, he asked me to send it to P Sainath and get it published as a book. These are landmark moments in my life.

When he gave these compliments, I had shaken my head incredulously. But now I know I have to believe in myself and cannot look for reinforcements. He believed in me, so shall I.

He lived a simple life, and though he was associated with a business in his last years, was never really money-minded. What he loved to do was to teach and make more people convert to plain language and practise it. I hope I shall be able to further his work here at Clear English India.

You don’t meet too many great people in one lifetime, and get to know them closely and then work for them. I can’t believe my luck sometimes.

I remember you, Sir, for everything you gave me.
Continue to be the voice in my head,
and hold my hand as I write each word.
Sit here beside me as you would,
with answers to all the questions I asked.
You would say these words are unnecessary,
and would have deleted them right away from this post,
But Sir, thank you.

Plainly speaking