Forget Hindi Imposition: Language Conflicts Have Only Harmed Sanatana Civilization

Let’s examine two quotes by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi:

At the heart of both quotes clearly resides Gandhi’s noble impulse of amassing as many Indians as possible for the freedom struggle. But as history shows, using language as yet another device to attain the elusive Hindu-Muslim unity spectacularly failed in Gandhi’s career.

But had the call to learn Hindi (or that mule-like appellation “Hindustani”) only been restricted to bolstering the cause of freedom struggle, things could’ve perhaps turned out differently. And post-freedom, people should’ve been free to make such decisions for themselves. But then, language too was added to the list of the innumerable, Nehru-imposed tragedies that set India at a disadvantage after freedom. Consider the following.

This status quo was maintained for a brief interim. After the phenomenal victory of the Congress Party in the 1951 general elections, rumblings began in Madras. The then Chief Minister’s differences with “Lion of Andhra” Tangaturi Prakasam erupted into clashes between Tamil and Telugu speakers which soon manifested itself as a demand for a separate state for Telugu speakers.

Nehru’s government was in a bind: the Congress poll manifesto of 1951 had explicitly stated that “on the matter of states reorganisation, the democratic right of the people to express their opinion would be taken into consideration.” But now since the demand had been made, all that Nehru could muster on the weight of the aforementioned commission’s report was to thunder that he would “not be intimidated by such tactics.”

Enter Potti Sriramulu, the highly revered Telugu leader who took a leaf out of Gandhi’s book of political blackmail and announced a fast-until-death. Nehru was still courage personified, still roaring that he wouldn’t “yield to blackmail.” But Nehru’s bravado evaporated when Potti Sriramulu actually died. The lion that roared was instantly revealed to be a lamb. The Prime Minister caved in. Michael Edwardes describes his death as a

The Commission submitted its report in October 1955. In its wake, widespread rioting and violence followed in Orissa, Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, Ahmedabad and Punjab. Less than a decade after India achieved Independence and was supposedly “united” politically. The first of a long series of language wars among Hindus had begun.

Of course, Tamil Nadu stands as the most extreme example of this linguistic division: recall the slogans of a “separate Tamil Eelam” and such other dangerous nonsense. Thankfully, in my own state of Karnataka, the foundations are still enduring, sturdy. And so, instead of a “separate Kannada state,” all we have are some political actors of this farce. These actors include an ugly  assortment of jobless Kannada “ಓರಾಟಗಾರರು” (warriors without the “w”) drawn from a toxic mix of rowdy political foot soldiers and signboard Kannada organisations, most of which typically indulge in exploiting the sentiment of language for extortions of various hues. These actors also can’t string a sentence of grammatically and phonetically accurate Kannada together — either written or spoken. Therefore “ಹೋರಾಟಗಾರರು” becomes “ಓರಾಟಗಾರರು,” “ಹಾಸನ” becomes “ಆಸನ” and there’s no difference between a nail and rain.

And people who call out this naked hypocrisy are automatically branded as anti-Kannada, their careers are ruined, and God forbid if you’re in public life, you will be physically targeted.

Because it’s the season of politically-correct politeness, it also becomes imperative to be a contrarian if only to reaffirm one’s sanity to oneself. Which means that we need to say it like it is: the aforementioned Kannada champions have borrowed and executed with aplomb the selfsame bully-and-smother tactic of linguistic chauvinism perfected by the Dravidian champions in Tamil Nadu more than six decades ago. The minute and daily-life facets and consequences of how that panned out is chronicled with delicious irony in the writings of the Kannada stalwart writer and scholar, Dr. B.G.L. Swamy. The tragedy facing the Tamil language is that in a bid to “purify” it, the language and literature itself have been misrepresented, not merely misinterpreted.

The situation facing Kannada since at least the last three decades isn’t dissimilar. Classical scholarship in Kannada is pretty much non-existent in almost all universities. Academics with multiple PhDs simply do not know Halegannada or “Old” Kannada, and even in universities where these lessons are prescribed, they are done so with an explicit intent to study them from sociological and anthropological “perspectives.” An honest and informed study of pure grammar, linguistics, poetics, prosody, and literature is dead in taxpayer-funded, government academia.

And these selfsame Kannada warriors and activists and champions and professors strutting about as the Last Prophets of the Language send their kids to the most expensive English schools: ನೋಡೇ ನಿನ್ನ್ ಮಗ ಎಷ್ಟ್ ಚೆನ್ನಾಗ್ ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ಮಾತಾಡ್ತಾನೆ! ನಾವೂ ಹೆಗ್ಯೂಕೇಟೆಡ್ಸು, ಗೊತ್ತಾ?

The consequences are visible everywhere. Watch any random Kannada news channel: the Kannada of the anchor even while reading out from a prewritten script is unintelligible, and the news items that appear in the scroll/ticker commits profanity on Kannada with a nonchalance that’s breathtaking. “Namaskara Bengaluru” is just about the Kannada that the RJs on private “Kannada” FM radio stations speak. The list is endless.

And so when we watch this vast band of politically-motivated mother-tongue philistines posturing as language saviours and their phony anti-Hindi crusades, one is both amused and saddened. Amused at the self-righteous angry confidence that philistinism infuses. Saddened at being the firsthand, everyday witnesses to the cultural and civilisational decay that invariably accompanies linguistic decay.