It was the remarkable foresight of the makers of the IndianConstitution that they thought of creating a dedicated Schedule of Languages –the 8thSchedule – which initially included 14 languages as the languages ofadministration. This was a radical departure from the European idea ofnationalism based on linguistic uniformity. The list in the Schedule wassubsequently enlarged so as to adjust the intent of the Schedule to thelinguistic realities in the country. As of 2019, the Schedule holds a list of22 languages. These languages, popularly known as the ‘Scheduled Languages’ areAssamiya, Bangla, Boro, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani,Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit,Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
The Constitution empowers individual States to identify anylanguage/s as official language/s even if it is not in the 8thSchedule. Thus,though not in the Schedule, Kokborok (Tripura), Khasi and Garo (Meghalaya) andMizo (Mizoram) enjoy the status of ‘official’ languages of administration.Further, a State has the powers to offer primary school education in anylanguage irrespective of its official status. Under this provision, a number oflanguages of the Adivasi communities have been introduced in primary schools inOrissa, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat where thepopulation speaking those languages is significant. In some States, newlink-languages are conceptualised and promoted in order to keep thelinguistically diverse States together. Rajasthani (Rajasthan), Pahari(Himachal Pradesh) and Nagamese (Nagaland) are instances of such State-promoted’binding’ languages.
During the last hundred years, the print-culture has reacheda number of languages that are not officially recognised or promoted. Though itis not widely known, the number of little magazines, pamphlets andsmall-circulation books produced in the non-scheduled languages is quite large,a phenomenon that led the National Book Trust (NBT) to make tribal languagepublications the central theme for the NBT’s International Book Fair in 2014.All India Radio (AIR) offers slots to nearly 120 languages in its regionalprogrammes.
In addition to the languages mentioned so far, there arenumerous other major languages in India. Some are native such as Kutchhi(Gujarat), Tulu (Karnataka), Bhojpuri (U.P.-Bihar) and Bagadi (Rajasthan),while others have come from other countries and cultures and were accepted inthe course of history as ‘our languages’. The ‘foreign’ languages which arestill in use in different parts of the country include mainly English but alsoin small pockets French, Portuguese, Bhoti, Iranian, Arabic, Persian, Karen andPashto.
During its history of several millennia, the Indiansubcontinent accepted language legacies as distinct as the Avestan of theZoroastrians, the Asutro-Asiatic of the Pacific the Tibeto-Burman of the Eastand Northeast Asia. The Indic (or the Indo-Aryan) languages in the NorthernStates together with the Dravidic languages in the South and the Tibeto-Burmanlanguages in the Northeast, each with a great variety of sub-branches make forthe larger bulk of the Indian languages. Throughout the known history of thesubcontinent, there has been an active exchange and cultural osmosis betweenthe indigenous languages and the migratory languages, producing in the processgreat literature in many of them.
Numerically speaking, India is home to 1 out of every 8 languageson earth. The diversity is impressivenot only in numerical terms. A language is not just a communication system, itis a unique worldview. Thus, though one can translate a given meaning from onelanguage to another, there are always shades of meaning and nuances in anylanguage that simply cannot be translated into other languages. Hence, thegreat diversity of languages in India needs be seen as the diversity ofworld-views, of the unique ways of perceiving the world.
Despite the existing linguistic diversity in India, thelanguage stock in the country has started showing signs of a rapid decline.Several historical factors appear to be responsible for the decline. The printtechnology impacted Indian languages profoundly during the nineteenth century.The languages that were printed acquired importance, the ones that remaineduntouched by it came to be seen more as dialects than as languages. Thereorganisation of Indian States mainly as linguistic States turned the alreadymarginalised and ‘non-printed’ languages into ‘minority’ languages. Thus,Bhili, a major language in itself with over 2 crore speakers, got divided intofour States and became a minority language in all of them — Maharashtra,Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan.
The list of ‘Mother Tongues’ reported by the 1961 Census had1652 names. Beginning with the 1971 census, the government decided to includein the list only the languages having more than 10,000 speakers. The list of1971 had a total of 108 names, with a 109th entry of ‘all others’. The policyof using a cut-off figure further eliminated the already marginalised and minorlanguages. They started becoming increasingly invisible in social practice orpolitical discourse. The relative lack of livelihood possibilities in the areaswhere the minor and marginalised languages are spoken has led to an exodus toareas where major and mainstream languages are spoken. The 2011 census reported19569 ‘raw returns’, which may contain many erroneous claims made by people. Ofthese, after thorough linguistic scrutiny and rationalisation1369 mothertongues were accepted. These were further classified for ‘rational’ groupingand the census radically brought down the number of ‘languages’ to 121. Thus,the language diversity that people have nurtured over millennia and which theConstitution has guaranteed is under attack from the State’s attitude to it.The number of languages that may have disappeared since 1961 is estimated to be250, eliminating in the process nearly a quarter of India’s ‘world views’.
The ‘imposition’ of Hindi insidiously planted in the draftEducation Policy may appear at first sight desirable to any pseudo-nationalist;but it will cause irreversible harm to our language diversity. ‘Nation’ is notonly an emotive idea; it implies ‘people’ and ‘their cultural traditions’.Language is the very basis of community and its tradition. Let us hope that thepresent regime does not further reduce our rapidly shrinking languagediversity, and that language democracy is not destroyed by pseudo-nationalisticmajoritarianism.
(Dr.Ganesh N Devy isa literary critic, cultural activist and Chairman, The People’s LinguisticSurvey of India. He leads the Dakshinayan movement of writers)
(The Billion Press)