Bengaluru is copying Mumbai. Language purity is becoming a code for economic frustration

The Print

2 days ago

His detractors include Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who dismissed his remarks as ignorant, and other state ministers who are calling for a ban on his films. Joining the chorus is the strident Karnataka Rakshana Vedike, an organisation that has been at the forefront of similar language-related debates – they staged a protest outside Bengaluru's Victory Cinema, and threatened theatre owners against screening the movie.
Haasan's assertion that Kannada was ' born out of Tamil ' has triggered the familiar theatre of linguistic outrage. The gist of the widespread condemnation is that Kannada is a separate, but 'sister' language to Tamil, and that there is no hierarchy between the two.
Kamal Haasan was preparing to set the box office ablaze with his latest movie, Thug Life, a mega Mani Ratnam vehicle. But his remarks on Kannada at a Chennai event have had the effect of lighting a match in a room full of petrol.
Meanwhile, Haasan has doubled down, contending that his remarks spring from 'love'. He has refused to apologise until proven wrong. For his troubles, good old censorship will be called upon, once again, to bolster public pride in our roots.
Haasan has become the latest high-profile casualty in a storm that has increasingly been gathering force across Karnataka – where language has become a new fault line for deeper anxieties about jobs, identity, and belonging. But these fissures have always existed in modern India, where our states are divided along linguistic lines. The anti-Hindi imposition movements of Tamil Nadu, for instance, stretch back to the 1930s, but echo well into today in the battles over National Education Policy.
Through the 1960s, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam cemented its political fortunes via genuine resistance against cultural imperialism, in favour of federal principles and economic equity.
Even now, Tamil Nadu remains the only state where Hindi is non-compulsory in schools. And as commentators point out, 'When more than 25 per cent of Hindi speakers remain illiterate even after 78 years of independence, the fervent enthusiasm to impose Hindi on states for whom the language is historically alien and culturally distant is both baffling and potentially counterproductive.'
Versions of these struggles have manifested across India – in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Assam, Bengal, and Jharkhand. In a fit to spurn Punjabi, Haryana once even chose Tamil as its official second language, and it remained on records for 40 years until 2010. At least some of these movements had teeth because they challenged actual power structures. In southern states especially, they were a reaction against the flattening impulse of an overzealous Centre determined to impose Hindi uniformity.
But somewhere between then and now, things have gone sideways. The weapons that once targeted policy makers and power structures have been redirected downward, finding new victims among the most powerless. Today's language warriors corner office and gig workers, harass cab and autorickshaw drivers, and terrorise street vendors. As our cities have become more cosmopolitan, they've also taken a turn for the parochial.
Language purity – wrong & right
In Bengaluru, these tensions have reached a point where both sides are simultaneously wrong and right. There's a fine line that divides pride in your mother tongue from intolerance for any other language – but it is still completely distinguishable. Obviously, it is a crime for an autorickshaw driver to slap a passenger for not speaking Kannada. It is not strictly a crime to say that North Indians come to Bengaluru to 'beg', but it is deeply offensive. It's borderline intimidation – and legally untenable – to say that Bengaluru is 'closed' for North Indians.
At the same time, it is an illustration of typical North Indian entitlement and ignorance to move to another city and demand that the local population speak Hindi. It's disruption of public duty for a nationalised bank officer to refuse to even attempt to speak the language of the state she works in. And it is downright delusional to believe that the city would lose its glamour if North Indians vacated it.
But a staunch defiance of any attempt at assimilation is the hallmark of many Indians. Writing in 1962, the linguist Paul Friedrich observed: 'Starving Indians in the industrial slums of Bombay have knifed each other 'because' one speaks Marathi, the other Gujarati… Various fissures in India's culture may be growing rather than decreasing.'
Friedrich spoke about the connections and the fluidity of state borders and how the neat boundaries never coincided with language. 'Thus, Madras State included not only Tamilians but many people speaking Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, not to mention minority languages. The Bombay Presidency included speakers of at least four major languages.'
This forced differing groups of people to interact, but that didn't always result in a happy coexistence. Friedrich could be writing about today when he said, 'The close juxtaposition of linguistic minorities does not necessarily produce fusion, despite the heat and friction of the urban industrial pot; thousands of caste groups living in diaspora in the big Indian cities have retained their mother tongue, endogamy, and religious practices for hundreds of years, in accordance with the deep-lying values that support social segregation, combined with various types of social interdependence.'
Also read: DMK should wake up. Anti-Hindi politics isn't working on Tamil Nadu voters anymore
Targeting the powerless
Bengaluru is now fine-tuning the template that Maharashtra perfected, where language purity is code for economic frustration. The 2008 Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) attacks on North Indian taxi drivers were systematic campaigns targeting 'outsiders' who supposedly spoiled Maharashtrian culture. Seventeen years on, the same trend continues: A recent viral video showed a cab driver from Uttar Pradesh being thrashed despite speaking Marathi. His attackers scoffed, 'So, you're acting smart in Maharashtra now?' before beating him.
The easiest targets are gig workers and street vendors. An 18-year-old Zomato delivery worker in Mumbai appealed to be treated 'like a human' after facing 'language discrimination'. A few weeks ago, a couple in a Mumbai society refused to pay the pizza delivery executive because he didn't speak Marathi. In turn, the executive had to apologise at the MNS office. Street vendors, already criminalised and harassed by authorities, are also at the receiving end of this linguistic persecution. The informal economy's most vulnerable become convenient scapegoats for attendant concerns about jobs and cultural change.
The bitter irony is that language – even at its most stilted and broken – has always meant connection. Centuries ago, Amir Khusrau wrote 'Ze haal-e-miskin makun taghaaful/Duraa'e nainan banaaye batiyaan (Do not neglect the condition of this wretch! He turns his eyes away and makes excuses)'. The ghazal's unique structure, where the lines alternate between Persian and Hindavi, is a thing of beauty. Khusrau wasn't polluting either language – he was celebrating their capacity to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
There is so much more to protecting a language – like fostering its expression – than the chauvinistic demand that the poorest migrants speak it. This might not occur to today's linguistic fundamentalists, but languages have always grown through mixing, through human cross-fertilisation. Almost all spoken languages were shaped by millennia of beautiful contamination – and they are stronger for their capacity to grow and adapt.
How can a poor street vendor or delivery executive – or even Kamal Haasan – threaten that?
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)