Languages and the State

One of the most significant features of Indian civilisation is its immense linguistic variety. Given that languages show marked variations in their phonological behaviour from one geographical region to another, it is but natural that a vast geographical expanse such as India should give rise to a large variety of dialects. But not all large countries have such a variety as India has. This is so mainly because of India’s peculiar history of assimilation of different cultures during the course of the last three millennia. The result is that, with its wealth of more than 20 written languages and over 700 other languages, India is today a unique ‘linguistic area’.

For any nation state in the world, it becomes necessary to regulate the growth and development of languages in order to keep the country together and at the same time, to do justice to the nature and identity of its linguistic heritage. This problem had been a part of the deliberations that contributed to the drafting of India’s Constitution, which provides the foundation for various policies for cultural development in independent India. During the pre-independence era, debates arose concerning which language should be designated as the national language, which one should serve as the language of administration, and how many languages could accommodate literary programmes. 

As a result, the makers of our Constitution decided to include a special schedule of languages. Hindi, included in the schedule, was expected to be elevated to the status of the national language. But provisions were also made for English to perform that function for a limited period of ten years. Thirteen other languages were included as the languages of administration. The reason for not including other languages was that it would be impractical to run the business of the government and the judiciary in each and every language. 

Subsequently, through Constitutional Amendments, three more languages were added to the Eighth Schedule. The other statutory bodies, which had to deal with languages and literature, more or less followed the principles laid down in the Constitution; but they added to this list a few more as and when the need was felt. Thus, the Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust have been publishing books in 22 languages.

The 2011 Census of India data related to languages was released by the census office in 2018. With all its tables and charts, it looks perfectly harmless. But, scratch the surface and you find that it is worth scrutinising. It tells us that in 2011, our countrymen stated a total of 19,569 ‘raw returns’ (read non-doctored claims). Out of these, close to 17,000 were outright rejected, and another 1,474 were dumped because not enough scholarly corroboration for them exists. Only 1,369, roughly 6% of the total claims, were admitted as ‘classified mother tongues’. 

Rather than placing them as languages, they were grouped under 121 headings. These 121 were declared as languages of India. One may ask, but how does this matter? It matters because the data for Hindi has been bolstered — shown at more than 52 crore — by adding to its core figure of speakers, the speakers of nearly fifty other languages. These include Bhojpuri, claimed by over five crore, many languages in Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Bihar, claimed by close to a total six crore. 

At the same time, 17 of the 22 Scheduled Languages are reported by the census as showing a downward trend in their rate of growth in comparison to the growth in the previous decade. The architecture of the presentation of the language census data has, at its foundation, the principle of exclusion. And the exclusion is imposed on the languages that people of India have claimed in the census exercise as being their languages. It goes without saying that our actions are inflicting severe harm upon the invaluable diversity of our languages. To use a term from medical sciences, this act amounts to imposing an involuntary aphasia on citizens. In this instance, the numbers on whom it is imposed run into crores. And that is no small matter.

(G N Devy is chairperson, The People’s Linguistic Survey of India)