Minding our languages

The Tamil Nadu Government has demanded that in addition to English, Tamil should be used to conduct proceedings in the high court. The acceptance of this demand by the Union law minister, as reported in this paper on Sunday April 20, illustrates once again that the Indian state has proved more than sagacious when it comes to accommodating linguistic demands. This lesson in political prudence has, however, not come naturally to the state. It has been learnt literally through trial by fire, for in the 1950s and 1960s the new nation was in danger of being torn apart on the twin issues of linguistic states and that of the national language.

Throughout the freedom struggle, the Congress leadership had been committed to the idea that language should form the basis of constituent states in a post-Independence federal India. In 1927, the Congress adopted a resolution suggesting that ‘that the time had come for the redistribution of provinces on a linguistic basis’. The resolution was significant because the colonial power had constituted administrative units in complete disregard of language ties. For example, the Madras presidency stretched from Cape Comorin and touched the Jagannath Temple in Puri. It extended to the Bay of Bengal in the east, and to the Arabian Sea along the Malabar Coast. The Presidency encircled Mysore State, and impinged on the princely states of Cochin and Travancore on the coast of Coromandel. Not surprisingly in 1931, 60.3 per cent of the population in the Presidency was to speak a language other than Tamil: Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam, and Kannada. In the same year, 57.2 per cent of the population of Bombay Presidency spoke a language other than Marathi, such as Gujarati, Sindhi and Kannada.

In 1928, the Motilal Nehru Report reiterated that the principle of linguistic states was desirable since language ‘corresponds with a special variety of culture, of traditions and literature. In a linguistic area all these factors will help in the general progress of the province’. But when the time came for the realisation of these commitments, the leadership of the newly constituted republic was to palpably hesitate and prevaricate. Given the political context of the time, this vacillation was understandable. Linguistic states might just have opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box in a country that had been already divided in the name of religion, consolidate narrow, chauvinistic loyalties, and threaten the unity and the political integrity of the country. On November 27 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru stated in the Constituent Assembly that though there were pressing issues facing the government, language was not one of them. And the Linguistic Provinces Commission or the Dar Commission stated that the time “for embarking upon the enterprise of redrawing the map of the whole of Southern India, including the Deccan, Bombay, and the Central Provinces” had not come.

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