As we will see in the
example of Pakistan, India and Indonesia Anthropologists Susan Gal and Judith Irvine
during the 1990’s already stated that Nationalist ideologies have the
capability to construct boundaries of languages from what had previously been
fluid interactions. 1
In the case of S.Asia/India, despite being the language of only a very
small percentage of elite educated in colonial institutions, English was the one language that could claim
some kind of pan-Indian cosmopolitan spread. But in the first decades of
India's independence, English, as the language of the colonizer, was perceived
as a foreign imposition, something which could never nourish the national
genius of Indians and which should be expelled as soon as possible. The riddle
then became what the indigenous language could serve as a national, official
language. While census data on Hindi speakers showed it to be the most widely
spoken language in India, it could never claim more than forty percent of the
population, and even this claim might well have been an artifact of the
practice of census-taking and language nominalization-for the process would
collapse speakers of many different speech-forms (dialects or languages) into
the category of Hindi. 2
In addition to Hindi,
twelve other modern languages with extensive literary traditions and millions
of speakers posed something of a hurdle to any presumptive declaration of Hindi
as a national language in the singular. What the constitution-makers chose as a
compromise formulation was a sort of three-tier management: legally,
"Hindi in the Devanagari script" was enshrined as the "official
language," with a safety-valve provisions for the use of English until
Hindi could be properly "developed" to assume all official and link
functions after a period of fifteen years. But this was a decision reached only
after significant debate, and only by the thinnest of margins according to the
testimony of the chairman of the constitution drafting committee, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar:
It may now not be a breach of a secret if I reveal to the public what happened
in the Congress Party meeting when the Draft Constitution of India was being
considered, on the issue of adopting Hindi as the national language. There was
no article that proved more controversial than Article 115 which deals with the
question. No article produced more opposition. No article, more heat. After a
prolonged discussion when the question was put, the vote was 78 against 78. The
tie could not be resolved. After a long time when the question was put to the
Party meeting the result was 77 against 78 for Hindi. Hindi won its place as a
national language by one vote.
By the time the first
fifteen years of constitutionally-permitted English use were about to expire,
an unexpectedly violent protest against Hindi took place. This resistance was
strongest in Madras state, wherein 1964 and 1965 several young men spectacularly
killed themselves (by self-immolation and drinking poison) in protest against
Hindi and in devotion to Tamil. Such objections were not limited to Tamil
speakers alone; Bengal and Mysore states and the then-autonomous Government of
Kashmir had serious reservations about Hindi assuming the sole status of
official language.3
The argument against
Hindi as the sole official language, should English be de-certified as an
acceptable alternative, was that although the Hindi speakers presented the
question as simply a matter of national expediency, in all cases where Hindi
was closely in competition with another language (Urdu and Punjabi, notably),
the Hindi lobby displayed its rampant chauvinism and attempted to impose itself
as if by right. The Hindi language advocates such as the Arya Samaj, Arya
Sanskriti, Arya Bhasha and Arya Upi alienated Muslims
and Sikhs in the North, their co-religionists in the south-by virtue of the
south's own growing Dravidian pride-could hardly be willing supporters either.
So the official
language compromise with English perdured, conceptualized as perennially
supposed-to-be-superseded-by the more "Indian" Hindi, though the
hindsight of more than fifty years suggests that will never come to pass, not
to mention the fact that Indian literature in English and the dramatic rise in
global prominence of Indian science (conducted and published virtually entirely
in English) has very effectively established the language's national bona
fides. At the same time, early planners' concern that Hindi was not yet
suitably "developed" for modem life has surely been answered; the
language has undergone something of a wholesale transformation since
Independence, having been endowed with a highly
Sanskritic vocabulary for the lexicon of modern life. Rather, this
compromise formulation of the official language is "Hindi in the
Devanagari script" supported by English has, over time, proved to be a
solution that appears to least offend-though notably not the unitary national
language that had originally been imagined.
Aside from the matter
of official language was the dilemma of "linguistic provinces." This
was a question of political administration debated long before independence;
the solution would, in fact, replicate the decision the Indian National Congress
had taken to facilitate its anti-colonial struggle. Under Gandhi's leadership,
the Congress had long championed Hindi-Hindustani as the emblematic all-India
language, in both Devanagari and Persian script forms. But the Congress as well
recognized that in terms of organization and political expediency, it could
better function through a regional-language architecture. After Independence,
the Constituent Assembly appointed the Linguistic Provinces Committee to study
the issue. No easy compromise could be found; to be sure, the committee
recognized that there was considerable demand for the redrawing of provincial
boundaries and that administering education, public life, and legislatures
would be expedited if they could be organized into more homogenous linguistic
units. But they were concerned above all about whether the formation of new
boundaries along linguistic lines would bring new sub nationalisms into
existence, and further what the impact might be in terms of creating new
relations of majority-minority dynamics.4
For example, should a
new Kannada-speaking state be carved out of Madras and Mysore states, a
significant minority of Marathi-speakers would find themselves in a new
subordinate position? Within the south, in what was then-Madras state,
agitations emerged for a separate state of Telugu speakers as well as a
partitioning of Marathi and Kannada speakers. Gujarati speakers in Bombay State
argued for a separate Gujarati-speaking state; Marathi-speakers wanted a
Maharashtra. Punjabi-speakers sought to rescue themselves from minority status
in a Punjab that had suddenly become primarily Hindi speaking as a result of
Partition and the exodus of millions of Punjabi-speaking Muslims to Pakistan.
The question of linguistic provinces became a serious matter of public debate,
with the biggest names in Indian political life issuing reports either
recommending a linguistic province's reorganization (Ambedkar, for example) or
against, it, for example, Patel, Sitaramayya, and Nehru. 5
The argument against
however raised the specter of imminent Balkanization, invoking the recent
trauma of Partition and the necessity for the Indian Union to foster great
unity rather than further divisions, exemplified by this sentence from the
Patel, Sitaramayya, and Nehru report: "The context demands, above
everything, the consolidation of India and her freedom...the promotion of unity
in India It demands further stem discouragement of communalism, provincialism,
and all other separatist and disruptive tendencies.6
Despite this, a
massive reorganization of state boundaries did indeed take place, in shifts,
absolutely along linguistic lines, and through a process of combining princely
states and carving up the huge British-organized "presidencies."
First, the 1953 Andhra State Act carved a Telugu-speaking state of Andhra out
of Madras. Chandemagore was folded into West Bengal
in 1954. Then the 1956 states reorganization produced the "new"
states of Andhra Pradesh (by adding more territory to Andhra), Kerala, Madhya
Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu; it also redesigned the borders of Himachal Pradesh,
West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, and the various Union territories. The 1959
Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh Transfer of Territories Act reapportioned land to
each; the 1960 Bombay Reorganization Act created Gujarat and Maharashtra; the
1962 Nagaland Act created Nagaland; the 1966 Punjab Reorganization Act forged a
new Hindi-speaking Haryana and created majority Punjabi-speaking Punjab. The
1968 Andhra Pradesh and Mysore Transfer of Territory act created
Kannada-speaking Karnataka, and finally, the 1971 North-eastern States
Reorganization Act threw up Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur, and Arunachal
Pradesh. The 1990 language conflict in Bangalore for example, has involved
anti-Tamil demonstrations, and protests against attempts in 1994 to broadcast
Urdu-language news on local (state-operated) television Bangalore, resulting in
protests.7
Nearly fifty years
after the reorganization of the major state of 1956, most contemporary
observers judge the administrative organization to have been a policy success,
for language conflict is now relatively rare (again, Assam the salient
exception) and language riots practically non-existent.so Did the creation of
more homogenous administrative territories produce new sub nationalisms? From
the perspective of the center, the answer appears to be broadly no. Yet if we
ask this same question from another vantage point, that of speakers of a
minority language within the linguistically demarcated states, we do find that
the majoritarian language hegemony Patel, Sitaramaya,
and Nehru worried about has come to pass. Two points should be noted in this
regard. First, for minority language speakers within states-using Dua's example
of Dakkani speakers in Mysore-the required language
repertoire can be as high as five languages (Dakkani,
high Urdu, Kannada, Hindi, English). This is a dramatic load compared to a
Hindi belter's ability to get by studying only Hindi and English.8
Yet this appears not
to be a significant source of conflict, and in any event, high levels of
multilingualism have long characterized the South Asian region. But the second
point, perhaps more apposite, lies in the way that new relationships of
linguistic categories have indeed created new minorities and new majorities
with unequal relations of power. After the reorganization of the major state in
1956, individual states in India passed their own state-level laws to promote
and develop various official languages of the state. The composite Hindustani
effort would end, to be replaced by separate Hindi and Urdu broadcasts.
Regional nodes of AIR (renamed Akashvani, or ''voice
from the sky" in official Hindi), would create programming in regional
languages, following the pattern of the linguistic provinces. Doordarshan, India's state television, follows a similar
structure: national programs are created in Hindi and English, relayed
throughout the country, with additional programs created at the state level in
the various regional languages. India's unique literary heritage was considered
so critical for national development that a government resolution in 1954
created the Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy
of Letters). It began operation in 1956. The Sahitya Akademi
exists entirely to serve as a sort of national bureau of literary recognition,
with programs to translate work from one Indian language into another, as well
as into English, not to mention the annual bestowing of awards for literary
merit in each of the languages recognized in the Constitution. This is a
self-conscious effort to establish a national sensibility of unity-in-diversity
through literature. Of course, the project is not without its conceptual
dilemmas. As Sheldon Pollock argues, a paradox inheres in the fact that this Akademi had to be created in order to forge awareness of
the national literature it assumes to already exist.9
Jyotirindra Das Gupta in turn
notes, the "Hindi literati" played a significant role in the
creation of modem standard Hindi-picking up from where the Hindi language
movement left off in the late 19th century, coining an extensive array of new terms for modern life from Sanskrit, and promoting
a brand new form of the language that aimed to create a veneer of a different
kind of linguistic genealogy, i.e., the modem inheritor of the great Sanskrit
tradition.10
The post Independence efforts to make a national language in
the singular fell on the sword of its own diversity, producing a multilingual
national policy that effectively mirrors the sort of multilingual existence
deep-rooted in the region. In this sense practices with much longer precedents
rode roughshod over the bureaucratic imagined idea of a national language. The
ideological "content" carried by the national language project and
its proponents, namely organizations seeking to fuse the national language and
thereby the nation with an Aryan overlay, was the most important feature of the
conflict with India's southern states, particularly Tamil Nadu. The Dravidian
anti-Brahmin populism which characterized the state's politics of the 50s and
60s could hardly have welcomed the introduction of a language explicitly
presented as some high-water mark of Aryan cultural achievement. This
demonstrates how the social-ideological context trumped the program for forging
national linguistic unanimity. Secondly, the case of India shows how and why
literature and its histories matter. Long senses of literary traditions
inscribe the history of regions with cultural exemplars, a narrative biography
of a language's past. These ideas are difficult to undo. But because of its
size, the decision to administer a federal system with states drawn along lines
of language communities, and considerable efforts to incorporate the work of
the many language associations as effective arms of language policy, perhaps
India cannot offer the most appropriate comparison for the language policy
decisions taken by Pakistan. The Pakistani nation-state sought to present Urdu
as the natural and exclusive emblem of the Muslim nation of the Indian
subcontinent, investing the idea of the language with a peculiar religious
sacredness, this claim would pragmatically dissociate the literary traditions
central to Pakistan's regional languages from the realm of faith. Partition
ushered in the era of the nation-form along with its essentialist presumptions
of large-scale uniformity, including in the realm of language. This pursuit, in
India as well as in Pakistan, drew upon teleological narratives of the past and
of a religious community that had their roots in a nineteenth-century language
controversy in northern India. Specifically, the presumption that Urdu was the
obvious national language of the region's Muslims was the outcome of two
intertwined phenomena: the geographical base of the Muslim League's primary
support, and the pre-history of what became known as the "Hindi-Urdu
controversy." Up until 1946 the primary support for the Muslim League's
Pakistan demand was located in the North-West Provinces, termed the
"Muslim minority" provinces. This was the very same territory of the contentious
Hindi-Urdu controversy that took place in the second half of the nineteenth
century. This meant that a salient political issue for Muslims in the region
was the "protection" of Urdu, even though Muslims in the vast expanse
of British India and the various princely states obviously spoke a wide variety
of other languages; but with the political core centered on the North-West
Provinces, ideas about who and what constituted Islamic India collapsed the
cultural imagination onto the great historical and cultural traditions of that
particular land to the exclusion of everywhere else. Indeed, the historical
record here underscores the contention of linguistic controversy, which paved
the way for a growing consensus that linked language and religion into the
slogans "Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan" in opposition to "Urdu-Muslim
Pakistan“." The social and literary histories of Hindi, Urdu, and their schismogenesis are now becoming voluminous.11
Given the factual
conundrum that neither Hindi nor Urdu, at least in the forms they would assume
by the twentieth century, had any particular role in sacred religious texts,
their opposition appears all the more perplexing in retrospect. In effect,
these two languages would become the bearers of religion first, then nation by
proxy. In fact, what is called Urdu today could-at any point from perhaps the
late sixteenth through nineteenth centuries-have been called, variously, Hindu,
Hindi, Dihlavī , Gujari, Dakhini or Dakkhani (دکنی), Rekhtah, "Moors" (a British coinage), Hindoostanic, Hindoostanee, and
so on...
The former usage of
"Moors" apparently was synonymous with "the black
language," at least for officers of the Royal army.12
The name
"Urdu" is itself a short form of "Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mu'alla,"
or "Language of the Exalted (Military) Camp" -attesting to the belief
that the language's origins lie in the interaction of Turkish and
Persian-speaking military troops with indigenous Indian soldiers in the Mughal
employ. This is the standard narrative of Urdu's birth, though even that is
under revision.
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
argued that the name ''Urdu'' did not come into existence until the end of the
eighteenth century, the very tail end of the historical period which supposedly
produced the language. And that the belief that the name "Urdu"
referenced the military camp is incorrect, and that it refers to Shahjahanabad instead, and that the actual birth of Urdu as
a literary language stemmed from the production of works by Sufis in the Deccan
and in Gujarat.13
And like our above
case study suggested, As the nineteenth century continued, advocacy for Hindi
in the Nagari script continued to gain force, and the demands became political.
Hindi advocates petitioned the colonial authorities for the equal privilege to
use Nagari-script Hindi in the courts, and as well for the right to a
Hindi-language primary education. Pamphleteering for Hindi's right to
participate in the official spheres of public life allied the language with the
masses-the Hindu masses-and forged a discourse at once about religion and the
spread democracy, through language. Urdu was figured as a foreign imposition,
an alien script with alien words that came from alien invaders. As Hindi became
a more potent sociopolitical force, Urdu speakers felt themselves under attack.
Urdu then became a language in need of "defending," a language
represented by its partisan proponents as a core aspect of Muslim life itself.
The Hindi-Urdu Controversy in north India, in conjunction with movements for
religious reformation within Hinduism and Islam slightly predating and
continuing during the same period, participated in community schismogenesis, a process which at its endpoints, would
result in the complete association of Urdu with Islam and Hindi with Hinduism.
And while it is generally recognized to have been an important concern for
residents of the North-West Provinces, it rose to a similar level of primacy in
the territories which would eventually form Pakistan. In fact, by the time of
Pakistan's birth, the elision of Urdu-Muslim-Pakistan was complete, and yet
highly controversial. There was a disjuncture between the territorial
imagination of the Urdu Muslim synecdoche and the actual practical situation of
the territory that was Muslim-majority and which would become Pakistan.
In sharp contrast,
Indonesia's national language planners explicitly crafted Bahasa Indonesia as a
unique modem instrument of expression, one without a deep past, literally
"constructed" (Pembangunan) as one might build a gleaming skyscraper
to signal an ascendant national modernization. One was a religion, the other a
science.
Indonesia.
The similarities
between Pakistan and Indonesia are so striking that one wonders why the two
rarely received sustained attention in a comparative fashion. Born within two
years of each other-the two countries share a number of common features. Prior
to 1971, both countries were nearly the same size in population trends:
Pakistan had 75 million people in 1951, compared to Indonesia's 84 million in
the same year.14
Since 1971 and
Pakistan's truncation, Indonesia is much more populous, home to the largest
Muslim population in the world, and Pakistan is now the second; recent
population figures are 206 million for Indonesia (2000 census) and 150 million
for Pakistan (estimate based on 1998 census). Both countries are overwhelmingly
Muslim, approximately 97% for Pakistan and 88% for Indonesia.
Both have been ruled
by authoritarian regimes for the better part of their independent existence,
and have long had highly centralized polities. The military has and continues
to play a disproportionate role in politics, industry, and society in both countries.
Up until the mid-1970s, both countries had similar human development indicators
in terms of literacy and per capita income. Indonesia's economic miracle began
to take off with the discovery of oil in the early 1970s but really took flight
in the 1980s. Indeed it was not until 1986 that President Suharto would make
primary education universal in the country and by now a vast gulf of literacy
and education separates Indonesia from Pakistan. Both countries are home to
bewildering ethnolinguistic diversity, yet within that diverse mosaic, both
have a dominant ethnic group comprising approximately half of the population:
Punjab's 56% of Pakistan, and the Javanese 48% of Indonesia. For example,
illiteracy in Indonesia decreased from 39% (1971) to 10% (1999).
Both chose national
languages which were the first languages of only a tiny percentage of the
population: at independence, native Bahasa -Indonesia speakers comprised only
4.9% of Indonesia's population; native Urdu speakers comprised no more than
three percent of Pakistan (East and West wings; 7% of the West wing alone) at
the same moment. Most importantly for my argument here, Indonesia sought to use
Bahasa Indonesia to create a cohesive Indonesian identity, envisioned as
secular whereas Pakistan sought to use Urdu to forge a cohesive identity
envisioned as Islamic. Indonesia's efforts to propagate its national language
have by all accounts achieved successes that make Pakistan's troubled
experience with Urdu all the more striking, given the two countries' broad
similarities.
Bahasa Indonesia is
the state-developed form of a lingua franca, Malay, which had developed across
the sea trade routes in Southeast Asia. Malay is widely used in southeast Asia,
for in another national version (Bahasa Melayu) it is
the national language of Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore (where it is
one of the four national languages), and it is in use though without official
patronage in two southern provinces of Thailand. Malay is a member of the
Austronesian language family, as are many of the other major Indonesian
languages, such as Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Batak. The region was deeply
influenced by contact with Hinduism and Buddhism, reflected in the fact that up
until the fifteenth century, Malay was written with a Sanskrit-derived script.
Malay developed in a context in which Tamil, Arabic, Javanese, Chinese,
Bengali, and Gujarati all interacted. Islam as we have seen elsewhere, came
relatively late to the region, via traders in the fourteenth century, but its
influence was quickly felt on the written language: between the fourteenth and
nineteenth centuries, an Arabic-derived script called "Jawi"
superseded the Sanskritic script.
With colonization by the
Dutch (Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia) as well as the British (British
Malaya, now Malaysia and Singapore), in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
a roman alphabet ("Romi") as well as the first dictionaries were
developed for this lingua franca, a preoccupation in particular of Dutch
philologist-colonizers. The roman script is now the official script in use
today for Malay Indonesian. As a lingua franca, Malay was used by traders and
those who encountered them in the region. Its minimalist grammatical features
(in its lingua franca form) bear witness to this: for example, verbs are not
conjugated for tense, there is no gender nor plural forms of nouns (plurals are
indicated by reduplication), word order is variable, and there are no honorific
forms. This sets Malay apart from Javanese, which has very
highly structured hierarchy embedded in the language itself.15
In Javanese, it is not
simply that one adds honorific titles or particles to words; rather, there are
distinct modes of speaking that depend on the speaker's place in relation to
the addressee. While Malay was a commercial language that spread-again, in a
lingua franca form-due to merchant travels, we should also note that Old Malay
was the language of the state of the Sriwijaya empire, centered in southern
Sumatra. The much more populous island of Java, however, was the site of the
region's literary giant, Javanese. It was an important language of the Majapahit kingdoms, and it includes extensive poetic
traditions, performing arts, and written epics. Javanese managed to survive and
indeed flourish from the impact of Sanskrit and Pali influence (early Hindu and
Buddhist periods) as well as the sacred language of Arabic when Islam gradually
became the dominant religion of the archipelago from the fourteenth century
onwards. The famed Javanese epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, are of course drawn
from the eponymous Indian Sanskrit literary works, the performance of which
comprises the primary form of popular theater in several distinct
puppet-theater forms in Java. Given the rich cultural heritage of Javanese, it
is perhaps surprising that this lingua franca, Malay, would become the national
language. But it was a purposeful choice, one made by those challenging
colonial authority. Nearly all narratives-oral or written-of Indonesia's
independence struggle and the development of Bahasa Indonesia as the national
language invoke the Sumpah Pemuda, or Youth Pledge,
as a moment that crystallized the fusion of the anti-colonial nationalist
movement with a vision of civic national belonging and a singular language.
Firstly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia declare that we belong to one fatherland,
Indonesia Secondly: We the sons and daughters of Indonesia declare that we
belong to one nation, the Indonesian nation. Thirdly: We the sons and daughters
of Indonesia uphold as the language of unity the Indonesian language.16
This Youth Pledge,
taken by a group of nationalists at the second Youth Congress on October 28,
1928, forms the commemorative basis for the Indonesian nation and is celebrated
annually. This Congress-in the same way that Ekushe
functions for Bangladesh-marks the beginning of the historical narrative of the
Indonesian nation that culminates with its independence. Its significance is
widely accepted, and the story of the Second Youth Congress is told and re-told
today as the national point of origin. The Youth Congress chose a language for
this national exercise that they knew had only shallow, but far more
geographically widespread, roots in the region. It was the language of no one
for all intents and purposes-but the young nationalists felt (with great foresight)
that it offered the best opportunity to unify a disparate region into one with
a larger sense of cohesion. The Indonesian nation and its national language
were literally willed into being.17
Of course, two
moments in the pre-Independence history had lain some of the groundwork for
Indonesian to emerge with the possibility of becoming a national language.
First, the Dutch had patronized Malay and their work in developing dictionaries
and basic readers resulted in the systematization of bazaar Malay, or brabble Maleisch, into "school Malay," which then became
the language of educated Indonesian elite. See Hoffman, "A Foreign
Investment: Indies Malay to 1901." Professor Anton Moeliono,
the former head of Indonesia's Pusat Bahasa (Language Center) and the
intellectual inheritor of Alisjahbana's role in terms
of stewardship of the national language, believes that modern Indonesian grew
out of school Malay, not from bazaar Malay.18
It was, however, only
used by those fortunate enough to attend the limited number of colonial schools
(the number of Indonesians educated in Dutch was fewer still). Balai Pustaka,
the colonial publishing house, offered short literary works in this emergent
school Malay, while also publishing in Javanese and Sundanese. The nationalist
intellectuals, however, sought something different than a school-gibberish and
began to create new reading materials in Indonesian that would "satisfy
the demands for more nationalistic literature. Sutan Takdir
Alisjahbana was the towering figure among these
nationalists. His prolific writings-in English as well as in
Indonesian-exemplify the spirit of modernist enthusiasm for the great project
of new language-making as nation-making. High modernist ideals of systemization
led to spelling reforms, the development of new vocabularies for new fields,
and the emergence of literary magazines written in this new language. A mere
glance at the titles of some of his many English-language writings readily
illustrates his focus on the nexus of language, nation, and becoming modern. In
Indonesian, Alisjahbana would go on to found a new
literary magazine in 1933, Pujangga Baru ("New
Poet"), as well as take part in the writings which became known as the
"cultural polemics," or Polemik Kebudayaan. Secondly, the three years of the Japanese
occupation of Indonesia (1942-45), according to nearly every historian of
language in this period, eliminated what had been the prestige relationship of
Dutch to the archipelago by eliminating its use entirely.
One should
acknowledge however that in the case of all the independence movements
mentioned above (movements that imagined nations that had never before
existed), we're able to convert the masses who did not actually read. This
suggests that national consciousness can indeed coalesce through oral
communication, public addresses, and other forms of non-print communication
that can take place in multiple, even mixed, language forms.
To this one can add
that because language contact and geographical displacement imply various kinds
of social change, it is inferred that the contact between "Indus"
language and the Munda/Para-Munda languages was somewhat intense, implying a fairly
high degree of socioeconomic integration. The same was true later, of the
contact between OIA (presumably both the inner and outer varieties) and the
local languages, which presumably included both "Indus" and
Para-Munda. In both cases, if
"Indus" and Para-Munda were languages of the Indus Valley culture
(respectively a local language and an interregional lingua franca), then it
would not be surprising if such contact occurred; nor would it be surprising if
early speakers of Indo-Persian interacted with the local people in similar
ways, given the need of pastoralists for agricultural produce. Interactions
between Dravidian and Indo-Persian speakers appear to be somewhat later, and
perhaps occurred first in a place called "Sindh" also spelled Sind, which
is furthermore the name of a province of southeastern Pakistan. It is bordered
by the provinces of Balochistān on the west and
north, Punjab on the northeast.
In fact Dravidian
languages were present probably by 1000 BCE if not earlier. And Dravidian place
name suffixes are found in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Sindh, and Dravidian may
have played a role in the southern cities of the
Indus Valley culture in Sindh and Gujarat. Outer Indo-Persian languages
probably appeared in this area by the mid-second millennium BCE or earlier.
Following are early
languages in contact with each other in various parts of the subcontinent:
The Prakrits provide some suggestions of regional dialect
variation but there is no knowledge of the relationship between the literary
tradition that has been handed, and the actual usage of the majority of
Indo-Persian speakers. Evidence suggests that regional variation was probably
greater, even from the earliest times, than one can infer from any analysis of
the traditional texts. The Nuristani or Kafiri
languages, a separate branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, may have found
their way to their current locations a few centuries earlier. Korku, a North
Munda language listed above, is spoken in Nimar District of Madhya Pradesh. And
Speakers of outer Indo-European may also have
entered the Kosala/Avadh area from the Narmada across the Vindhya complex, via
the valleys of the Son and other rivers.
But for all its ups
and downs Persian is still spoken beyond the borders of Iran (as Dari, (درى). Dari is the variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan,
where it is one of the two official languages, along with Pashto, and is used
as a lingua franca among the different language communities. Dari is also used
as the medium of instruction in Afghan schools, and beyond that in Tajikistan
(as Tajik), famed for its poetry.
The attractions of
the Buddha's teachings caused the spread
of Sanskrit in its path northward, round
the Himalayas to Tibet, China, Korea and Japan (for all we know, Buddha
lived in the fifth century BC, in the lower valley of the Ganges,
speaking a Prakrit known as Magadhi). The faith he founded spread all over
India and Sri Lanka, as well as into Burma, its scriptures largely written in a
closely related Prakrit, Pali, but also, more and more over time, in classical
Sanskrit. Besides the spread to South-East Asia, the most influential path that
Buddhism took was to Kashmir, and back to the homeland of Sanskrit itself in
Panjab and Swat.
1. See "The
Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct
Difference." Social Research 62, no. 1, 1995. For an example of this
phenomenon in Africa see Patrick Harries, "Discovering Languages: the
historical origins of standard Tsonga in southern Africa," in Language and
Social History: studies in South African sociolinguistics., ed. Ranjend Mesthie (Cape Town: David
Philip, 1995.
2. See Arjun
Appadurai, "Number in the Colonial Imagination," in Orientalism and
the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Carol A Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
3. For details see
Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue.
4. See Government of
India Constituent Assembly of India, "Report of the Linguistic Provinces
Commission," New Delhi, 1948, p.1.
5.Ambedkar, Thoughts
on linguistic States, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. B. Pattabhi
Sitaramayya. and Jawaharlal Nehru, Report of the Linguistic Provinces Committee
appointed by the Jaipur Congress, Dec. 1948; New Delhi: Indian National
Congress, 1953.
6. Patel,
Sitaramayya, and Nehru, Report of the Linguistic Provinces Committee, 4.
7. See Asghar All
Engineer, "Bangalore Violence: Linguistic or Communal?," Economic and
Political Weekly, October 29, 1994, Janaki Nair, "Kannada and Politics of
State Protection," Economic and Political Weekly, October 29, 1994.
8. For details see
Hans Raj Dua, Language Use, Attitudes and Identity Among linguistic Minorities,
ed. D.P. Pattanayak, vol. 8, CIIL Sociolinguistics
Series (Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages, CIIL, 1986.
9. Pollock.
"Literary Cultures in History,"
10. See
"Official Language: Policy and Implementation" and ''Language
Associations: Organizational Pattern" in Das Gupta. Language Conflict and
National Development, 159-224.
11 .On Hindi before
the nation, see especially Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu
Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra
and Nineteenth-century Banaras (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997),
Christopher R. King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in
Nineteenth-Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994), Stuart
McGregor, "The Progress of Hindi, Part 1: The Development of a
Transregional Idiom," in Literary Cultures in History, ed. Sheldon Pollock
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003), Pandey,
The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, 201-32, Alok Rai,
"Making a Difference: Hindi, 1880-1930," Annual of Urdu Studies 10
(1995), Amrit Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984). On Urdu before the nation, see Brass,
Language, Religion and Politics in North India, 119-81, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi,
Early Urdu Literary Culture and History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001),
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, "A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture. Part 1:
Naming and Placing a Literary Culture," in Literary Cultures in History,
ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley, London, New York: University of California
Press, 2003), Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in
South Asian Islam Since 1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 102-38.
Francis Robinson. Separatism among Indian Muslims: the politics of the United
Provinces'Muslims, 1860-1923. vol. 16, Cambridge South Asian Series (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1974), 33-132. On Hindi after the nation. see
especially Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (New Delhi: Orient Longman. 2000).
Harish Trivedi, "The Progress of Hindi, Part 2: Hindi and the
Nation," in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia,
ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley, Los Angeles. London: University of California
Press, 2(03). On Urdu after the nation, see Ahmad, "Some Reflections on
Urdu.", Aijaz Ahmed. "In the Mirror of Urdu: Recompositions
of Nation and Community, 1947-65;' in Lineages of the Present: Political Essays
(Delhi: Tulika Press. 1993 [1996]), Philip Oldenburg, "'A Place
Insufficiently Imagined': Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of
1971," Journal of Asian Studies 44. no. 4 (1985), Tariq Rahman, "The
Urdu-English Controversy in Pakistan," Modern Asian Studies 31, no. I
(1997).
12. See Henry Yule
and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words
and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographic, and
Discursive, Reprint ed. (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1996 [1886]),
584.
13. Faruqi, Early
Urdu Literary Culture, and History, 60.62.
14. Central Statistical
Office Government of Pakistan, 25 Years of Pakistan in Statistics, Karachi:
Government of Pakistan, 1972, 4.
15. For details see
among other Joseph Errington, Structure and style in Javanese: a semiotic view
of linguistic etiquette, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
16. Quoted in The
Development and Use of A National Language, Yogyakarta, Oadjah
Marla University Press, 1980, 15.
17. See Benedict
Anderson, "Language, Fantasy, Revolution," in Making Indonesia:
Essays on Modern Indonesia, ed. Daniel S. Lev and Ruth McVey, Southeast Asia
Program, Cornell University, 1996.
18. Also see Moeliono, Language Development and Cultivation: Alternative
Approaches in Language Planning, 97-8 n.4.
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