GN Devy's book questions common assumptions about India's languages

India: A Linguistic Civilization

Author: GN Devy

Publisher: Aleph Book Company

Pages: 194   

Price: Rs 599

 

This book is not just a masterly exploration of India’s linguistic civilisation. More importantly, it serves as a timely warning against recent attempts at conducting the epistemic study of Indian languages through a narrow prism of singularity. 

 

As persuasively argued by the book’s author, Ganesh Narayandas Devy, plurality and diversity are inalienable attributes of any study of Indian languages. That this warning comes from India’s pre-eminent linguistic scholar is extremely reassuring at a time when cultural debates about the idea of India are increasingly focused on creating a unified vision of one great country, one great language and one great culture, ignoring the rich tapestry of Indian languages that should have ideally challenged such majoritarian impositions threatening the country’s vibrant multiculturalism.

 

Embarking on that ambitious journey of exploring India’s linguistic civilisation, Devy demolishes a few widely-held beliefs about Indian languages. One of them concerns the origins of Sanskrit, which is often idolised as the primary language of India or the Adi Bhasha. The author points to the existence of a proto-Dravidian language variety in different parts of India prior to its coming in contact with Sanskrit. What’s more, he explains how Sanskrit and the early-ancient Dravidian languages forged closer associations with other languages over time. 

 

Devy has also examined afresh the origins of many Indian languages, such as Gujarati, Bangla, Odia, Marathi and Konkani. It was not Sanskrit, but Prakrit that evolved into these languages. Indeed, even as a small number of scholars wrote in Sanskrit in ancient India, most thinkers, saints and poets used the Prakrit-based languages that had emerged a thousand years ago. 

 

But that did not stop India’s political leaders from bestowing on Sanskrit a status that Devy rightly questions. India’s Constitution allocates a special place for Sanskrit in a separate schedule for languages, even though few ordinary Indians had used Sanskrit as a language of everyday life for more than a thousand years. However, Prakrit or Pali, which were used more commonly by ordinary persons, were neglected and have over time been consigned to near oblivion. 

 

Over the years after India’s independence, many other regional languages found place in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, their number growing initially from 14 to 22, even as the demand for including 30 more languages from different regions is gaining traction. But despite such inclusions, several hundred languages spoken by tribals, nomadic communities, North-easterners and coastal people will remain outside the ambit of formal recognition. Devy’s gentle reminder is that any study of India’s linguistic civilisation must acknowledge that it is a country of thousands of languages, and their neglect has only led to their gradual disappearance. 

 

The irony is that India’s political establishment has all along tried to promote the 19th century idea of nationalism while remaining suspicious of the demand for states’ reorganisation on the basis of languages. Remember Jawaharlal Nehru’s opposition to the creation of Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s or of Punjab. And yet, it has had to concede the demands for linguistic state reorganisation. Eventually, the country’s political leadership has had to respect the belief espoused by the Indian Constitution that the country is a “linguistically plural nation”. 

 

Devy brings out eloquently the change in the composition of language speakers in India’s big cities as opposed to the smaller towns. Yet, the language decisions of governments and educational authorities do not reflect that variation and instead impose the same language on the entire state. This has understandably entrenched English as a language with a special status in the country. While the spread of English has its many benefits, the author worries what this growth might mean for the future of many regional languages of India. 

 

English succeeded in almost entirely replacing the indigenous languages in North America, Australia and New Zealand. In contrast, African countries did not see the demise of their own languages. As in those countries, the Indic and Dravidic languages in India could survive their encounter with English just as they had earlier overcome the Arabic and Persian influence on them, Devy argues. There is, however, a concern over what happens to the minor languages, the dialects and the speech patterns of the indigenous communities, forest dwellers, hill communities and the coastal people, which have already seen a rapid decline. 

 

Can the state play a role in reversing this trend? Devy believes that this mission of saving the regional and minor languages would have to be carried out not just with the help of the states, but also by civil society players such as universities, literary and linguistic academies, non-governmental organisations, scholars, researchers and activists. 

 

No discussion on India’s linguistic civilisation can be complete if the role of oral traditions is not duly recognised and its pre-eminent contributions analysed in the social and cultural context. Equally important are questions arising out of the digital future and the role of translation in furthering the cause of a diverse tapestry of India’s linguistic present and strengthening its future prospects. Devy has explored all these issues with clarity in four short chapters in this book. 

 

The book would have enhanced its accessibility for ordinary readers if more care had been paid to its presentation and delineation of arguments in support of the author’s principal thesis. All the four chapters have been written as if they are long essays, without a clear-cut structure to enunciate the various ideas that the author has put forward in this book. As a result, the book reads like a long lecture, where the same ideas have been repeated. The book perhaps needed a better editor, but this shortcoming in no way dilutes the overall richness of the content and its appeal.