Tied to a nation state
The notion of nationhood has captivated many, though most are fuzzy about what it stands for. Is a nation what the British are protecting as they stumble into Brexit? Or what European countries have sought to defend in the cultural clash with refugees, or that which Americans seek to make great again?
In India, where the idea of country and citizenship is being kneaded afresh, the nation is being defined by a bunch of negatives. Not weak, not too diverse, not too tolerant and not too intolerant either — perhaps a more accurate rendering of the ongoing debate would be that India is not, or cannot be, what it once was. According to the most recent proclamation by the home minister, a nation needs a unifying language. (He has since clarified that he never meant to impose Hindi, merely establish it as a lingua franca.)
A story from the Middle Ages about the Marranos (Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity) shows how language, although contentious, may be a misguided way to define national identity. In 1492, under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, Jews were expelled from the country and those that remained were converted to Christianity. Many of the converted Jews fled. Some to Portugal where they were ostracised and tortured during the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536. Many then moved to Turkey. Wherever they went, the Marranos retained their character (Spanish), their language (Castilian) and they wrote using Latin characters or Hebrew script. Much like the refugees today, they did not see their linguistic and religious practices in conflict with their national identities.
To believe that one language unifies all would mean that many languages divide the people. However, to cast language in this role seems antithetical to its original intent. In India, in the sacred texts, language was not a divisive force. In the Rig Veda the goddess Vac is revealed through speech, which is also what her name means. The word is divine, as it is in other religions.
Vac is truth and it is her knowledge that makes one a Brahman. She is perceived as a bounteous deity, responsible for creative forces and rejuvenation and in later literature, identified with the goddess of wisdom, Saraswati. Just as many gods had but one form, many languages had the same god.
The existence of many languages was no barrier for the spread of myth and epic literature or belief systems. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have several versions in many languages; some add a special twist or bring in a local colour to make it more palatable to the immediate audience. For instance, in the Mahabharata, a story about Draupadi’s secret love for Karna is told with subtle variations in Bengali and Marathi.
Draupadi, one afternoon during the exile years, was stricken by hunger. Unable to resist, she plucked a fruit off a forbidden tree. The tree belonged to a local sage whose only meal was the single fruit that the tree bore every day. Draupadi’s indiscretion could have been fatal because the sage was known for his short temper. However, Krishna arrived at the opportune moment and said if the Pandavas were to reveal their most closely guarded secret, the fruit would rise up and latch back to the tree. However, if any one lied, the fruit would fall back to the ground. When it was Draupadi’s turn, she hemmed and hawed and after a few failed attempts, confessed that she often wondered what it would have been like if Karna had been one of the Pandavas. In the Marathi version, the tree is a jambhul (a kind of plum tree) and in Bengal it is a mango tree.
These small variations carry a wealth of knowledge within them. As linguist and author Ganesh Devy has said on many occasions, language comes with a memory chip and stores an entire universe within itself. Devy led the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI, 2010) that counted 780 Indian languages and 68 scripts still in use in the country.
The Indian subcontinent, Devy said at a lecture at the Asiatic Society in Mumbai recently, is particularly blessed with a “translating consciousness”. Thinking, speaking and writing in multiple languages have been seen as normal literary behaviour for far longer than in any other region, making us he hypothesised, the unique carriers of something like a translating gene.
A country is enriched by the diversity of thought and opinion that many languages generate. Tragically though, the debates have framed the idea of a nation in binaries. And nationhood that was once imagined as an invisible knot that locked in diverse cultural, religious and social beliefs, has become a set of inviolable red lines.
To believe that one language unifies all would mean that many languages divide the people. However, to cast language in this role seems antithetical to its original intent