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Language, Map, Currency Etc.

By Samir Karmakar

22 January, 2013
Countercurrents.org

On 12 th January 2013 , Lokbhaashaa Sanmelon at Nagpur has given a chance to look back into the issues of endangered languages and linguistic rights in India once again. Preparation of a key note address for this conference come up with several issues. These issues may seem to have no direct relations to the ongoing linguistic movements in India , but their symbolic content has enough to say about the way countrymen are designed as the citizens through the lens of state and nation. This article is an effort to pin down some of those issues as a sequel to my previous two postings in Hard News and in CounterCurrents in the occasion of first approaching one more 21 st February – a day dedicated to the mother tongue.

Despite of being well discussed in academics, problem of mother tongues in India by-and-large remains out of focus due to its failure in occupying a larger space in the world outside of the academics – a world of action and practice. No solution to the language problem in India is foreseen since it is confined within the space provided by the academics which is politically constructed and regulated. As a result, intellectually sound arguments stimulate our thoughts but fail to address the problem in its totality. Consequently, we witness an increase in the number of languages in the death row under the threats of the dominant cultures which are being privileged by the Indian State and Nation. Therefore, many more activities on linguistic rights are welcomed in this continent outside of academics to keep alive different voices.

In academics, language with a plural marker ‘–s' is simply reduced into an absolute singularity in the name of scientific reductionism to make the problem tractable! Let's name this approach as “official approach”. In stead of conceiving the meaning construing capacities of different languages differently, official approach explains languages with respect to a theoretical frame where chances are less to appreciate the otherness of the languages spoken by different groups of people. This frame dissects languages into parts and compares the similar and dissimilar parts within a language and also across the languages to organize them into a body of systemic knowledge. Often the systemic interpretation is exploited in defining the territorial and cultural autonomies – constituting bases for the mega-systems like market and nation.

The theoretical frame and its way of dissection are generally not allowed to be questioned since they are considered as the most vital organs with the help of which governments maintain the general health of the state by institutionalizing some languages out of many. Scientific terms, like ‘rationalization', ‘classification' etc., are used to legitimize official rituals of including and/or excluding the other in a regular interval to take the control over the voices of dissents which come into existence as the accidental by-products of the official policies. In terms of their significance, these processes can only be compared with the religious rituals: In spite of being empty in their content, they seem to be so rigid and so tightly knitted in the framework of nation and state that no easy escape at least in near future can be anticipated. They are being repeatedly used (as can be noticed in the functioning of Office of Registrar General and Census Commissioner while performing the rituals of census in the interval of every ten years) to come up with the up-to-date defensive mechanisms by imposing newer versions of power equations among the equals to subdue a larger diffused mass of inequals. To minimize the threats of disintegration, mega-systems have discovered many tools and techniques to eradicate the chances of its own annihilation: language, map, currency are probably the most important among those tools and techniques.

If we open a linguistic map of India (fig. 1), we will notice how the territory is distributed among those languages which have passed the official tests of rationalization and classification in the name of ‘mainstreaming'. With every ritual in the name of governance, democracy and mainstreaming, it alters the existing make up of the nation and state by populating Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution with the junior members. With every ritual Indian Territory and the associate virtual spaces get redistributed among the equals (though with the footnotes in the Eighth Schedule mentioning who are the junior most!).

Figure 1 : Languages in Eighth Schedule and the claim on territories

As a ritual, official versions of rationality and classification are important in deciding who has the access to the territorial resources and who does not. This has a direct bearing not only on the survival of the languages but also on the survival of the communities and the individuals. Extending this argument a bit then we can say: just like the way, Natural Selection in the Darwinian model of biological evolution determines the appearance and disappearance of the genetic traits, official edition of mainstreaming decides appearance and disappearance of the languages in India.

In contrast to the linguistic map, if we consider the map of scripts (fig. 2), territorial divisions become less cumbersome because the number of scripts used in India is much lesser in comparison to the number of languages enlisted in the Eighth Schedule.

Figure 2 : Territorial distribution of the Indian Scripts

Though official rituals of Registrar General and Census Commissioner redefine the power equations among the languages in every census by adding and deleting few languages, it will hardly dare to disturb the territorial distribution of the scripts. The reason is no-doubt lies with the nexus holding between the script and the market. – After all this nexus costs multi-million dollar business every year through publication houses and Medias of various sorts. Additionally, treaties among the mega-systems – for examples, among the panchayat s, among the states, political parties, multinational companies, courts, and among the democracies – are ritualized (and hence, institutionalized) through the scripts. At the International level, when Roman script is being used for documentation, in national level Devnagari script along with its regional allies are used as the local associates of the global Masters. The distribution of the scripts and their scope in documenting the national tradition in the milieu of the global economy ultimately create a hierarchy through which mega-systems are intervening in the life of the individuals.

Figure 3 : Languages in the symbolic space of currency


As one another tool and technique, we will bring currency notes in our discussion from two distinct phases of Indian Nationalism: one from the pre independent era, and, another from post independent period (fig. 3). The number of linguistic scripts on these two notes will tell us how state perceives the sub-national territorial autonomies in pre and post independent era; what amount of individual freedom in terms of individual access to the territorial and national resources are licensed to whom and how. Concentrating on the note of 1920 will also reveal how colonial masters had perceived the relative significance of the recognized linguistic nationalities in those days. One can easily notice a distinct break between the English numeral 10 and the numerals from the vernaculars. Rulers of the Independent India didn't recognize this colonial break between English and the Vernaculars, but still fail to come out of the colonial hegemony whose reflection can be easily noticed (as once one of my senior colleague explained to me in an Winter School in ISI Kolkata) in the alphabetical ordering of the languages both in currency and in Eighth schedule. In current Indian currency, Indian scripts are sequenced following the order of the Roman alphabets! This instantiates Macaulay's dream, articulated in 1836, containing a colonial intention of creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect”; we are still bearing Macaulay's dream with us as an invisible coronet symbolically represented at the top with the depiction of a much bolder and pronounced English number 10 followed by a enlightened fraternity of Indian scripts. Such instances show how the order of the political and economical alphabets are continuously dividing as well as suppressing us into smaller pieces to strengthen the hold of the global market by weakening state's control over those innumerable nations which live within the Nation. The trend of inventing nations within the Nation can only be compared with the cancer in the body of the state – a cancerous growth which splits the society in an uncontrolled fashion affirming a permanent fragility to Indian State . The immune systems of these innumerable nations within the Nation are determined by their relative holds on the territorial resources which, again, are useful in defining the regional tone of the global capital. As a consequence, India as the linguistic area always remains a fearsome battleground for warring linguistic communities whose shadows can even be seen in the rituals of reorganizing the Indian states again and again even in the post independent period. Under this situation linguistic right in the context of multilingualism needs a deeper look to understand the problems of Education and formation of Nation from a holistic viewpoint.

Acknowledgement: Copyrights of the maps (Fig. 1 &2), Eighth Schedule (Fig. 1), and the pictures of the currencies (Fig. 3) used in this write up are held by their respective authorities. Thanks to Dr. Anil Sadgopal and Nagesh Chaudhuri for provoking me to think along this line of thought.

Samir Karmakar is working in School of Languages and Linguistics in Jadavpur University , Kolkata. He could be reached at [email protected]

 

 

 

 




 

 


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