The literary critic and language activist takes a radically different approach to India’s history from it’s current leadership
The history of India, a nation whose present geographical expanse, it’s worth remembering, is of recent vintage, can be told in innumerable ways: from the stories of its wars and rulers, to a study of its material culture, to the views of its ordinary citizens, to an analysis of specific events and sociopolitical movements. One cannot ignore too the constant, revisionist tampering with that history in order to make the past better align with the present. But while this is the preferred discourse for India’s current national leadership, literary critic and language activist G. N. Devy takes a radically different approach.
In his latest book, he constructs the country’s history by examining how language ‘impacted India’s epistemic architecture’. This is a challenging task, not least because scholars don’t know what languages existed in the pre-Vedic and or pre-Indus Valley Civilisation era (though there’s no doubt that there were hundreds). Moreover, the exact number and nature of languages that are spoken in India is still something of a mystery, one that’s only exacerbated by the fact that the last complete linguistic survey was undertaken between 1894 and 1928, decades before India’s independence.
Devy headed the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (2010–13), which sought to provide an independent overview of living languages. It ended up reporting 780, with the caveat that it may have missed some 70 others. Thus, one can assume then that there are about 850 living languages in the country, or about 12 percent of the estimated 7,000 languages of the world. Repeatedly emphasising that the preservation of the nation’s languages is a founding principal, enshrined in the Indian Constitution, Devy explains how the lack of exactitude in official language data is strategic, driven by political agenda. The obfuscation of census data (languages with less than 10,000 speakers are simply clumped into ‘others’) and unscientific, arbitrary bureaucratic decisions (surveys do not cover tribal areas) are designed to create a hierarchy of languages – for example, placing those with scripts above those without – where none should exist. Under the head- ing ‘Hindi’ in the language data of the 2011 Census (the last General Census conducted in India), ‘there are nearly fifty other languages’, Devy writes. These include languages like Bhojpuri, spoken by more than 50 million people (mainly in the Bhojpur-Purvanchal region), and others (numbering several hundred thousand speakers), some of which are mutually unintelligible with Hindi. The final inflated number, 520 million, is used to cast Hindi as the national language and to impose it across the country while creating policies that are detrimental to the development of other tongues.
In a section on memory and oral traditions, Devy reminds the reader that in the country’s literary past, ‘most of the linguistic creativity has been in the oral tradition’, and that the artificial privileging of written over the oral was the result of British colonialism. And yet it went on to influence how postindependence India’s state boundaries were drawn up, and continues to drive education policies today. Consequently, he argues that ‘decolonisation of Indian aesthetics and Indian linguistics, without an obscurantist turning back entirely to the past, is the larger task at hand for the contemporary Indian intellectual’.
Indeed, the book packs in multiple trains of thought: from those proposed by European thinkers on memory and knowledge, later used by colonisers to disregard Indian traditions of memory, to fascinating case studies of languages used by nomadic communities and tribes, to imagining the shape of language in our digital future. Devy’s is certainly an unusual and interesting approach to history writing, but this cramming of thoughts, and the assumption in several places that the reader is already knowledgeable about India’s complicated sociolinguistic histories, can be a deterrent to the general reader. One cannot help but wonder how much more easily accessible the book would have been if topics were presented at a slower pace, and engaged with in a little more depth.
India: A Linguistic Civilization by G. N. Devy. Aleph Book Company, Rs 599 (hardcover)
