GN Devy: 'There is a forest of languages growing around us'

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

We continuously talk about the 'idea of India' and in the book, you have described India as a linguistic civilization. Please tell us how you reached this conclusion?
The geographical expanse of India has kept changing the map of India or imagined India from century to century, age to age and so, if one had to talk of India's geography, that's a near impossible task. If one had to talk of India as a single ethnic group or just a few ethnic groups, that is a near impossible task. So, how can one talk of India?
There are numerous philosophies, Buddhist, Jain, Sufi, Vedic, Upanishadic. There is philosophy which believes in God, philosophy which does not believe in the existence of God. So, how does one manage? Therefore, I thought it would be good to look at certain cultural habits and speak in terms of those habits. The most striking cultural habit that India displays historically across ages, whether there are native rulers, whether there are foreign rulers, whether India is passing through drought or famine or a phase of prosperity, is the acceptance of languages; and not just bilingualism but plurilingualism. If you compare Indians with people from other nations, you find that normally -- there may be very few exceptions -- an Indian feels pretty comfortable in the presence of many languages. People in many other continents get somewhat startled when they hear a language other than their own language being spoken in public spaces.
This ability to absorb many languages is historically a continuous habit. Also, in effect, producing a philosophy where Indians become easily amenable to the idea of thinking of many gods, many religions, many prayers or they are also amenable to putting up with many kinds of food habits. They do not feel terribly upset if they don't have the food that they eat at home or outside when they travel.
This diversity defining the Indian body space and the Indian mind space emerges out of India's multilingualism. If one had to describe the Indian civilization, it is advisable to not talk of certain spots such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro or Dandi or Wardha or Delhi or Hyderabad. It is much better to talk of a lasting mental habit and so language and its diversity becomes a useful means of describing Indian people, their history, their minds, their beliefs, the way they relate to the outside world, to nature, to God, to others in society and to themselves.
Lastly, it is amazing to see how easily Indians do code switching, code mixing. If you are in a Hindi area, in a single sentence you find people mixing some English words, some Persian words and some Urdu words. 'Khana to bahut interesting tha' becomes a Hindi sentence.
Can social media and AI become tools for the preservation and sustenance of languages?
When paper became available in India, we saw was an efflorescence of the bhashas, languages like Gujarati, Marathi, Bangla, Odia, Kashmiri. There was a tremendous growth in literary output. Then came computer and television and we thought that TV is such great entertainment, people will forget reading literature altogether. But actually, if you look at the statistics in publishing, we notice that a much larger bulk of books started getting produced precisely at the time television arrived here. When AI comes in, Indians will cope with that too. Linguistically, I mean all these are technological revolutions. The Indian response to technological or social changes resulting from technological shifts has always been a linguistic response. Linguistic productivity has been a way of dealing with technological shifts brought into society because of technological changes.
As far as AI is concerned, it is a challenge to the functioning of the human brain. There are studies carried out in England and other European countries, which indicate that the part of the brain called the Broca's lobe, which helps the human mind analyse the world through language is becoming sluggish, lethargic, it is fatigued and therefore humans are reluctant to use language, they are reluctant to read books, writing is going out of fashion and even speaking.
But a similar study has not been carried out so far in the Indian context and I imagine that if such a study were to be carried out then we would find that language as we have known in the past is getting slowly diminished or wiped out. But I am optimistic that our multilingual language capacity will help us in going through this phase of technological change more efficiently than what happens to monolingual people.
About a decade ago you said that India is becoming a graveyard of languages. Has the situation changed in any way?
It has worsened. I said so because in the census of India there is normally a list of mother tongues. In 1961 the list mentioned 1652 mother tongues. In the 2011 census that list has come down to 1389. That means 250 mother tongues are absent from the census. There were no people reporting those mother tongues to the census authorities and that means their languages have gone. If we continue the way we behave in the coming 50 odd years, we will lose more such languages. Therefore, I said that I feel surrounded by a graveyard of languages.
But having said that, I do not mean that India has literally become monolingual. I do not say that India is either captured entirely by the English language or by the Hindi language because while working in the field I noticed that languages which previously did not have writings in them have started developing their own scripts. Languages which did not produce written literature are now producing in addition to their oral traditions. To explain it further, in the past in Europe, Latin was the dominant language and those who spoke it considered all other languages as vernaculars, the languages of slaves. That is the literal meaning, verna means domestic slave. Vernaculars are the languages spoken by the people wrongly considered as slaves.
In the course of history, Latin disappeared but the 'vernaculars' became strong. Some of them became languages such as Spanish, French, German, Italian. So, in our situation, the dominant languages will diminish but the languages on the periphery will increase their transactions, their social space.
Just take the example of Hindi. Bhojpuri was not even considered a language in the past. People used to laugh at the mention of Bhojpuri, but today, it is the world's fastest growing language. In the last census, more than 5 crore people have claimed Bhojpuri as their mother tongue with pride. Not with embarrassment or shame but with pride.
So, while many small languages are dying or rather made to die because of the policies we have, there are many more other languages which are non-scheduled languages, non-classical languages, they are growing quite rapidly. So, there is a forest of languages growing around us and on the horizon, there is also a graveyard of languages surrounding us. It's a paradoxical situation.
Translations have become quite famous in the Indian literary scene. How do you see this trend as a means of promoting interconnectedness between people coming from different linguistic groups?
You see, a major literary text in the Marathi language literary tradition is Jnaneshwari of Jnandev. That was a translation of the Gita. In every Indian language, barring Tamil and Sanskrit, the earliest major texts were translations.
In some cases, they are translations of the Mahabharata, Ramayana or Gita or some other earlier texts. In fact, even with the Mahabharata, the Adiparva has a story about the origin of the Mahabharata and it has a person telling many young students a story and the students ask him to repeat it. And he says, look, I know only one third of it. Mahamvitti, Shukovitti, Sanjayavitti: Shuka knows another part, Sanjay knows yet another part. All three used to speak different languages. One was from the forest, a tribal, we can call him. Another was from what was considered at that time as half-caste or low caste, and third was from a proper Sanskrit speaking background. All of these got translated into Sanskrit to form the corpus that we call the Mahabharata. So, translation has been at the inception of literature in all languages in India.
We do not feel rattled when we hear another language and our consciousness can easily migrate from one language to another without feeling any discomfort. I always maintain that the Indian consciousness is a translating consciousness, not a monolingual consciousness.
The only Nobel Prize in literature that India has ever received was for a translation, Gitanjali. So, translation has been a part of our being.
It is not just in language, it is in philosophies as well. We all believe in metamorphosis. That is, most Indians think that they have one life, they will also have some other lives. Migrating from one life to another, the soul is the same, the body changes. That is a philosophy of translation. So, translation comes very easily to Indians, almost unconsciously and therefore, if translation culture is growing everywhere, I do not feel surprised. It is the most natural thing to have happened to Indian languages and literature.
With globalization and the dominance of English, what role can oral traditions play to keep languages from dying?
We had Sanskrit at one time for many centuries as the paramount language. It went, the Prakruts survived, they grew. Then came Persian; it had the same fate and Indian languages developed.
Now, the question of the English language bringing in new words in Indian languages and rather in large quantities because all our technology words are from English, all our professional words, workspace words are in English, our governance words, law, legal terms, they're in English. So long as our languages do not lose their grammar, their syntactic patterns, no amount of words from other languages can wipe them off. So that is one thing.
Secondly, languages neither grow nor decline because of any schooling system. They grow or decline because of the workplaces, because of the occupations, livelihood possibilities available to people. I mean if a time comes when no occupation, no livelihood exists in any of the Indian languages, then alone will Indian languages go and English come to stay.
But, at the moment, the situation of English is rather precarious because it is very rapidly breaking into different Englishes. The English as spoken in New Zealand is hardly intelligible to British people or those in Ireland. So, the English language will become one of the strata, a stratum in the corpus of Indian languages just as we have words drawn from Sanskrit.
I mean we have thousands and thousands of words in Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, or in the Dravidian languages. So the fear that English will overpower Indian languages may have space in the Indian sentiment because we are relatively fresh out of the colonial period. It's less than a century since the British left us. As time passes, maybe another century, when Indians have forgotten that they were ruled, at that time Indians will happily be using lots and lots of English words side by side with lots and lots of Persian and Arabic words and lots and lots of Sanskrit and Pali words.
The fear is there at the moment but that fear has other contours. That fear has an anxiety of perhaps our failing to govern ourselves competently. The fear is a kind of embarrassment at not being able to produce sufficient quantities of knowledge from within India.
LISTEN MORE: Speaking in many tongues - GN Devy on the Books & Authors podcast
The easiest target is language because language is not owned by anyone. Language does not belong to any policing system and so it is a policeless system and therefore it becomes an easy target. I can give you examples in Maharashtra, out of political reasons, non-Marathi speaking people were targeted. In North Bengal, that is happening now.
After we fought colonialism using the English language, we fought the rule of Persian speaking kings using the Persian language. We fought the varnashram system using the Sanskrit language. So we will be able to digest all these, internalize them, and make them our own Indian language.
Hence English eventually will be known as one of the Indian languages and perhaps an Indian language rather than a European language.
What role can the state play for language revitalization and linguistic research in India?
The histories of languages all over the world show that states neither make a language nor can they finish them off. In modern times, the idea of the nation was associated with a single language, in the case of Germany and Italy. The modern state has invited upon itself unnecessarily the task of being a language sentry, a guardian of language. States have no role, quite honestly, in language growth, making of a language or also finishing it off.
States get satisfaction by doing something because people love languages as they love their mothers. That's why people call language their mother tongue, it is the second mother for any individual. And so, the state gains in the process of showing, displaying, exhibiting care for languages.
People make languages, they use languages, and they discard languages when languages don't suit them. Language is the most democratic of the systems humans have ever invented.
Chittajit Mitra (he/him) is a queer writer, translator and editor from Allahabad. He is co-founder of RAQS, an organization working on gender, sexuality and mental health