Tongue twisters

Parties pushing for language conflicts should remember how quickly things can get worse

Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. In the truly troublesome cases, repetition risks worse, it risks disaster. As far as ‘language wars’ are concerned, these have inflicted very painful wounds on India over the decades. The zest with which different political parties are replaying such conflicts suggests they don’t mind the risk of more fractiousness. They also think it won’t get out of hand. This complacency is built on missing crucial details. Hindi vs south India, is the common framing of the faceoff. But there’s plenty of discord between different south Indian languages that’s being fanned with equal gusto.

This weekend, at a book fair hosted by Karnataka’s legislature, there were protests against the sale of Tamil books. This has become the predictable kind of battlecry these days. It was the line that speaker UT Khader took that was unexpected. He said one needs to appreciate other languages, to improve one’s horizon and live in a globalised world. This is so commonsensical. Social media warriors, by contrast, inflame every conversation. From their far and safe screens they, like the politicians, prod extremist, zero-sum positions. As public buses travelling between Karnataka and Maharashtra get caught in jingoist Kannada-Maratha crossfire, neither the safety of the staff nor the needs of the passengers is a priority for the ‘language warriors’.

India has a history of linguistic animosities that, fanned into fire, conveniently grab oxygen from other disputes. For example, in Assam, the Nellie massacre of 1983, which took over 2000 lives, is one of several occasions when anti-Bengali grievances have spiralled into deadly violence. In US’s Silicon Valley, to walk into a coffee shop is to hear a world of languages, but this doesn’t lead to aggressions in education, work, politics. So when Trump signs an executive order elevating English over all other languages, it doesn’t carry the same menace as changing the status quo here threatens. Think about the many times migrants of different linguistic groups have been forced to flee Bengaluru, whether to bordering Tamil Nadu or far Assam.

What all the war-makers wilfully ignore is that there is an organicity to the way different languages find their equilibrium in our country. Hindi cinema has spread Hindi beyond anything its stoutest sarkari proselytisers have achieved. Bengal’s ridiculous experiment with ending primary school English or Mulayam’s angrezi hatao call or BJP’s frequent thunders against ‘colonial language’ – nothing changed or will reduce popular demand for learning English. Let Indians decide how they want to deal with their country’s linguistic diversity. Don’t decide for them.

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