The Great Language Debate: Politics of Metropolitan Versus Vernacular India

Abstract

The use of a regional language as the language of administration in a state, and as the medium of instruction in schools, is by now an established policy. It has been followed, although not uniformly, in almost all the slates of the Indian union. In 1991, Mulayam Singh Yadav, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, chose to reaffirm this policy. And that precipitated a fierce attack from the powerful English-language press in India. My interest in this event is not confined to commenting on the role that the English press played in countering the implementation of an established policy in an Indian state. Using that as a vantage point, I shall focus on the wider debate that this event generated, after 44 years of independence, on the future of the English language in India. More than articulating the issues involved in the policy as such, the debate brought to surface the changed relationships among social groups in politics, and the divergence of perspectives between the contending groups—the proponents and opponents of English—on language policy as a means of nation building. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to situate the language debate in the politics of social change and to show how the clue to the language issue may lie in viewing democratization, rather than the continuing political hegemony of an elite class, as the means of nation building for India.

The term vernacular is used in two senses: linguistic and cultural. In the former sense, vernacular refers to all non-English Indian languages as a diffused countervailing reality confronting the pre-eminence of English in India. As such, these languages comprise the constitutionally recognized Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and so on, which in common parlance are referred to as the ‘regional’ languages. In this context, Hindi is also referred to as a vernacular, although it is competing with English at the national level and is aspiring to become recognized as the lingua franca of India. Other Indian languages and the so-called dialects which have not yet acquired legal-constitutional recognition (such as Konkani, Dogri, Tulu, etc.) also comprise the vernacular languages.

The term vernacular when used in the larger cultural context refers to a cultural identity in politics, of people and social-political elites who are identified us such for their non-use of English in the national political discourse. The use of non-English Indian languages by the ‘vernaculars’ (people, elites, etc.) may be due to conscious preference or the inability to use English as their first language. In the pan-Indian discourse, the non-use of English is uniformly associated with lack of sophistication, parochialism and cultural underdevelopment. And, therefore, all articulation and activity in Indian languages is seen as devoid of a genuine national perspective and modernist content. This has given rise to a countercultural identity in politics, of people and elites not using English as the first language; they are variously described as regional, provincial, mofussil, indigenous or vernacular.