E. Annamalai
Throughout its history, the Indian subcontinent has been a place for many languages that are historically unrelated, but have interacted in geographical space.The political relationships among them did not remain constant, but the shaping of their interrelationships through policies formulated and implemented by rulers is a phenomenon of the modern period beginning with colonial rule. The recent history of the politics of language has been marked by changes in language policy, but with some continuity across the colonial and postcolonial periods as well as within each period. The factors that motivate policy changes are multiple, encompassing both the goals of government and perceptions of people concerning their interests, which include economic opportunities, social advancement, and cultural security. Language policies concern both the choice of languages that will be used in public domains, most importantly in government and education, by the state, and in private domains such as kin networks, recreational activities, and cultural practices, including religious practices by the people. A third domain, which overlaps the public and the private, is the market. This chapter is about language policy and language behavior in public domains, covering the historical period of colonial formation and its consolidation, as well as the transition to independence and social transformation in the new nation.The constant amidst change is the maintenance of some social, economic, and political relationships among languages. But changes in language policies are continually redefining these relationships. The continuously contested relationship of English with other languages, concerning its role in political control and socioeconomic transformation through the phases of its emergence, containment, and reemergence in the Indian political scene, provides a vantage point to survey also the relationship among all the languages of the country.
The politics of language policy open a window to an understanding of the nature of the Indian nation and its differences from neighboring countries, whose national integrity was broken or is threatened on the issue of language dominance. Pakistan split into two and Sri Lanka has endured violent conflict over the division of the country, arising in both cases from issues of language dominance. Guha1 characterizes India in relation to its linguistic diversity, among other aspects of diversity, as an “unnatural nation.”The way language conflicts, arising from the contested relationship among languages in India—which is a country of linguistic minorities in which even an amalgamated community of Hindi speakers make up less than half the population2—have been resolved through policy decisions has been an important factor in sustaining the integrity of this unnatural nation. It is unnatural from the classical European criterion of “one nation, one culture, one language,” but is natural with respect to the traditional, historical existence of India as a country. India’s linguistic diversity has not blocked its aspirations towards nationhood.
The need of the colonists to equip themselves with knowledge of the country under their rule and the need to generate consent of the ruled for its legitimacy made it necessary for the colonial government to take a direct, political interest in the languages of the sub-continent.3 This political interest manifested itself not only in learning the languages, but also in constructing knowledge about them by classifying them according to their historical relations and categorizing some as languages, others as dialects subordinate to the principal languages. This knowledge was required in order to decide which among them would be used as prescribed languages in government and education.The analytical task involved was identifying and naming languages and defining boundaries among them. The process of boundary making worked to change the perception of languages among the peoples of India from that of a mosaic with fluid relations to that of discrete entities with opaque boundaries. This opened the way as well towards a coupling of languages with other sociocultural entities, including religion. Language categorization by external actors, including colonial administrators, missionaries, and scholars, paved the way for language identification and grouping to be manipulated for political uses, including the exercise of power by the rulers and mobilization for collective action by the ruled. The task of choosing a language for administration, and by extension for education, added a premium to demarcating languages by differentiating names. It created a need for standardizing languages, which culminated in a process of differentiating languages and distancing languages used in formal domains from the languages of everyday speech.
The conflict arising out of the differentiation of khari boli, a widely used speech form for communicating in the bazaar and in the army, into Hindi and Urdu and associating them with two religions, Hinduism and Islam, is a prime example of the political use of language categorization.4 The policies of the colonial government and the actions of individual officers concerning the choice of language for local use in public domains such as courts of law were intended to support one side or the other in the Hindi–Urdu controversy, depending on government’s political exigencies at the time.
Contrariwise, erasure of language boundaries in order to create an overarching language, build a political force around it, and form a political interest group based on language is exemplified by the projection of Hindi as the putative national language of the country. This political process was in turn aided by caste and religious calculations.5
Differentiating languages was essential for curriculum development and textbook production when they came to be controlled and administered centrally in the colonial period. The differentiation began in the language textbooks prepared for training colonial officers in the East India Company’s trading posts in Calcutta and Madras and in the making of a canon of literary texts for language learning. These activities formalized the separation between languages, for example, between Hindi and Urdu; they also involved decisions with regard to literary disputes such as what constituted the earliest Bengali literary text, which could also be claimed to have been actually written in Oriya or Maithili, and so on. The dialect or language chosen as the language of textbooks and classrooms became the legitimate form of that language. Thus, it was the particular variety of a tribal language used by Christian missionaries to translate the Bible that then became the language of the tribe. All these factors enabled the emergence of a political consciousness of language distinct from cultural consciousness.This development of building political consciousness around language became manifest later in the postcolonial period in political agitations for redrawing the administrative boundaries of states to conform to new language boundaries.
A by-product of the political consciousness of language is the concept of mother tongue transplanted from its European origin in the age of reformation. This concept gave a new meaning to the conventional characterization of their speech by ethnic communities as “our speech,” opposing it to “their speech.” This popular distinction denoted different ways of speaking. The concept of mother tongue— matru bhasha or thaay mozhi—is not just a shift of boli (colloquial speech, as in khari boli) to bhasha (formal language, as in Hindi bhasha), but also an introduction of a powerful symbolism to characterize one’s language. It shifted the opposition between any two languages to that of mother tongue versus other tongue. In the regions other than northern India, bhasha has been long in the consciousness of speakers, but it was a cultural consciousness rather than a political one. This is true even in southern India, where languages have a longer literary tradition.6 Mother tongue came to denote the person claiming it as a different being culturally and politically.This symbolism became a convenient political tool to be used for inclusive or exclusive purposes to realize particular political goals. Many of the political debates as well as political conflicts in the colonial and postcolonial periods were framed around this way of conceptualizing one’s language.
Language, characterized as mother tongue, with marked boundaries, became another group characteristic to define and categorize people along with others like caste, religion and ethnicity and to create new political formations. Beginning in 1917, with the formation of the Andhra Provincial Congress Committee to represent the Telugu region, the regional units of the Congress party were organized according to linguistic region.7 This was done when the administrative units of the colonial government or the principalities were not coterminous with linguistic regions.
Language may provide an overarching group identity, although it may not supersede other characteristics for group formation such as religion when it serves some political purpose, as in the cases of Urdu (for Muslims) and Punjabi (for Sikhs).Alternatively, language unity may be undermined by caste differences, as in the case of Maithili.8 The political potency of language as a marker of group identity multiplies when it is coupled with another characteristic like religion. Such a coupling, however, has not been witnessed in many states, notably Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where linguistic identity covers more than one religion and where castes do not align with different languages. Decennial variation in mother tongue figures recorded in censuses does not fluctuate significantly in such states, in contrast to others where political identifications based on religion, for example, have led millions of people to adopt a different name for their language or even to deny their own language identity. At the same time, mother tongue as a sign of social identity can be politically negotiable. For example, the political behavior of people with regard to their declared mother tongue may not match their actual linguistic behavior with regard to its use at home or their choice with regard to medium of instruction.
Colonial intervention in language identification and choice heightened the political consciousness of language in ways briefly described already. It also changed the nature of cultural, social, political, and economic relations among languages in the multilingual Indian constellation. The ascendancy of the English language, which started with the official policy of the colonial government, formulated in 1835, to support English as the language of education, reworked the relationship among languages. English replaced the classical languages, Sanskrit and Arabic, as the source and means of acquiring knowledge. With it, the nature of knowledge also changed to conform to what the colonial administrators and educationists called useful knowledge, which was meant to be the knowledge of European thought, science, and morals. English also relegated the vernaculars in education to a secondary role as carriers, through translation, of this useful knowledge to the masses, while these vernaculars continued to be repositories of their past literature for local consumption.Vernaculars were also a conduit for Christian theology to reach the masses through the activities of Christian priests and pastors from Europe inside and outside missionary schools.
The government schools, although notionally open to everyone, in fact provided education through the medium of English mostly to students from upper castes. The main contributor to this was the government’s education policy, based on what was known as the filtration theory, to provide English education to a few, who, in turn, would transfer (filter down) European knowledge to the masses through the vernaculars. The evolution of this policy was shaped by the huge anticipated expenses in providing universal English education, shortage of teachers to provide this education, fear of social unrest from the frustration of a large number of English-educated youth not finding gainful positions in the government, and the idea that the class of people with leisure and a tradition of learning are best equipped for intellectual pursuits.9 One result of this policy was that students from lower castes were largely excluded from English education. They were attracted by the missionaries to their schools with the hope of proselytizing them. This fostered the public idea that English education, where English is the medium, is for those in the upper echelons of the society and vernacular education, where English is only a subject, is for those at lower echelons. English thus played, through differential access, a crucial role in the reproduction of social inequality through education.This turned into a political problem in the colonial period, which was more acute in western and southern India, engendering demands from the excluded lower castes for access to English, expressed through petitions, protests and formation of political parties.This issue of differential access to English education remains a political problem in postcolonial India.
English education took early roots in the presidency provinces of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal, which were under the direct control of the colonial government.The traditional elites living in the presidencies, by virtue of their ritual high status and land ownership granted to them for their ritual services to the ruling classes, transformed themselves into new elites through their access to the new temporal power, status, and wealth that English education gave them.The elite status traditionally sanctioned by knowledge of Sanskrit was augmented by a new sanction, namely, knowledge of English. Castes that were not ritually at the top, but provided administrative service to the pre-colonial governments, also adapted themselves to the needs of the colonial government.The middle level castes that owned lands and traditional industrial production, such as textiles, were behind in English education and the tillers and the low service castes were largely left out of it.The aspirations for upward mobility that were curtailed as a consequence of the regionally and socially differentiated access to English education, and hence to new economic opportunities, led to political action by the excluded people in the colonial period. But the issues were far from resolved and were carried over to the governments formed after independence. Political conflicts in independent India, arising out of regional differences in material progress created by the colonial economy, were fought in the name of language; much of it was framed in terms of “for or against English.” The social differences in material progress have been echoed in the politics of affirmative action, in demands for reservation of seats in education and jobs for scheduled and backward castes in independent India. Language, however, figures in this conflict of social equalization only secondarily, and only recently in relation to the teaching of English.10
It has been claimed that acquisition of English by the new middle class helped communication across linguistic regions within this class, and thereby organization of the opposition to colonial rule and the fostering of nationalism.11 However, English did not fill the need to communicate with the masses and mobilize them for political action against the British. It was the regional languages that were used for these purposes by political leaders in the respective regions—although not so much use was made of the minority languages in these regions. Every national movement for independence uses symbols by which people identify themselves to represent the nation and its elevation from the status of a colony. Under Gandhi’s leadership, khadi (homespun cloth) was one such symbol.With regard to language, Gandhi sought to elevate Hindustani (which he saw as an amalgam of Hindi and Urdu) to such a national symbol.12 However, this choice itself became a subject of political debate, particularly concerning its relationship to the Hindi and Urdu languages. Many in the independence movement identified Hindi as the national language and promoted learning of Hindi as an expression of nationalism. This was not, however, embraced by all communities defined by religion or language. Ambivalence among the people concerning the desirability of having one language to symbolize the nation13 and to develop citizen allegiance to that language, was reflected in the policy debates in the constituent assembly14 and in the later political agitations concerning the choice of the official language of the government of the new nation.
Two questions relating to language that the nation faced on the eve of its independence concerned the language of government and of education. The first is a question of administration and the second of development.A third question is dependent on these two. It concerns communication among people across the country to facilitate participation in the government both in its administrative tasks and developmental programs as well as to nurture a sense of sharing a language common to all. With regard to the search for answers to all three questions, policies were made, contested, and modified. Practice on the ground with regard to actual use of languages was guided by the policies at some levels and in some ways and was at variance with policies at other levels and in other ways. There is thus tangible divergence between policy and practice in the 60 years after independence. The story of the politics that has produced and continued this divergence is essentially the story of the politics of language in India.
One policy, however, where there is no divergence, is that of maintaining the multilingual and multicultural fabric of India. The kind of nationalism built on one language and one culture has not been accepted by the majority of people. The political parties that promote this ideology of a nation have not been able to make it a legitimate policy and the people who subscribe to it at an ideational level practice multilingualism in real life.While there is no divergence from this policy of defining the nation as multilingual in practice, there has been a difference in the nature of multilingualism as practiced in postcolonial India. The difference is in the public roles assigned to languages and, consequently, in the differential access of promoters of languages to the resources and patronage of the state. This influences the composition of the linguistic repertoire of people. This composition ultimately stems from the larger political and economic interests of the people. Education plays a major role in bringing in this difference in the linguistic repertoire. The shift in multilingualism since Independence is towards adding non-local languages, like English and Hindi, to the repertoire of speakers. The premium on such non-local languages is their literate variety taught in schools. This shift cuts across communities, with the result that the new multilingualism becomes less community-based and more class-based. Local variations in multilingualism that reflect local conditions and needs get subordinated to the national pattern.
Taking up first the third question mentioned earlier (communication among people across the country), there is no officially mandated or constitutionally recognized national language of India. There is, however, a set of languages listed in the constitution, which are called scheduled languages, as they are placed in a schedule (numbered eighth) annexed to the constitution.The specified purposes of the list were to shape and monitor the development of Hindi as a pan-Indian language, drawing from the resources of the languages in the list, and to constitute an official language commission, whose members would be drawn from the communities of languages in the list, to review the acceptance and performance of Hindi as the official language of the union. The list, at the time of writing the constitution, had 14 languages, representing different historical, linguistic and cultural traditions in the regions of India. The purpose of listing languages in the constitution changed, in the political perception of it at the ground level, soon after its adoption in 1950.The list was perceived at the popular level to be granting political recognition and entitlement to some languages over others, thereby placing those languages in a privileged position to receive a greater share of the patronage and resources of the state for their development and to acquire a political status superior to that of other languages. At the bureaucratic level, the list was viewed as providing a “natural” criterion for federal decisions concerning which languages, other than the two federal official languages, would be added to meet the language demands on the federal government.These demands concerned the languages that would be available for candidates for civil service examinations, those that could be taught as a third language in schools under the policy dubbed as three language formula, the languages that would be eligible to receive grants from the federal government earmarked for the development of modern Indian languages, and so forth.15 Such uses of the list as a criterion for inclusion and exclusion of languages to benefit from major government decisions strengthened people’s perceptions of the list as a mechanism for status elevation and material rewards for these languages. The languages included in the list are popularly believed—without any constitutional sanction for such belief—to be the national languages. Political demands to include new languages in the eighth schedule gradually increased in number and intensity. The first agitation for inclusion was in 1967 on behalf of Sindhi, which did not have a contiguous region of its own; the last four, added in 2004, are Dogri, Maithili, Santhali and Bodo, of which the second one is subsumed under Hindi as one of its 48 “mother tongues” or “dialects”16 and denied an independent language status in the census, and the last two of which are tribal languages.The total number of languages in the list now stands at 22. The criterion for inclusion in the list is now political pressure by means permitted in a democratic polity, including bartering political support in elections, bargaining in coalition politics, and street demonstrations.
The other part of the third question concerns lingua franca. It is generally coterminous with the official language of a country, but not always. There are two languages of wider communication across linguistic regions in India, viz., English and Hindi, which run parallel along class lines. English is preferred by the educated middle and upper class in interactions among themselves. Hindi is used by the working classes for communication among themselves in situations such as labor migration to another linguistic region, travel to pilgrim centers, and with the middle and upper classes from different language backgrounds. English is the preferred language for air travelers to speak with stewardesses, whereas Hindi is the necessary one for train travelers to speak with vendors.The lingua franca Hindi is different from the official language Hindi in words and grammatical structures, but is closer to Hindustani in both respects. The English used by rural college graduates who travel to other regions or meet with people from other regions is likewise different from official English; it is also different from the pidgin variety of English used by people, who may be high school graduates or dropouts, for example, tourist and pilgrim guides, whose clients do not know any Hindi.
Hindi as a lingua franca is fostered and transmitted through popular cultural media, particularly feature films, rather than by any federal government effort, which is limited to supporting teaching of Hindi as a second language in the voluntary sector.The government’s Hindi teaching programs serve the purposes mainly of increasing acceptance of, access to, and use of the official language, Hindi. The federal government’s actions in displaying Hindi on signboards in areas of public use such as train stations, milestones on national highways, post offices, and national banks serve the dual function of using the official languages of the Union in federal facilities and of using a common language all over the county for people on the move across regions.These actions have been resisted on the political ground that the regional languages must have a status on par with Hindi in the regions or on the grounds that English and the regional language will suffice for the intended purpose, as in Tamil Nadu, where Hindi in name boards was erased by political parties subscribing to Dravidian ideology. The final political solution was to have sign boards in three languages in federal establishments, viz., English, regional language, and Hindi in that order. There have been erasure campaigns in some states, like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, to remove English or demote it to a secondary place in commercial sign boards in bazaars. These are by and large fringe movements politically. The alphabet characters (and numbers) used in the registration plates of motorized vehicles are roman (and international), not in devanagari characters (and numbers). Some state governments allow the use of the script of the state official language for the characters (and numbers), but the enthusiasts who go for this option are a small minority. In the public transport systems run by state governments, destination signs on buses are posted in their official language only, and in English also in buses running to other states. It is clear that the contestation for status as a lingua franca is between Hindi and the regional language in the public sector in states, while English remains the unquestioned common language of choice. It is also clear that the question of lingua franca becomes salient politically when the issue is symbolic, as in sign boards, but it ceases to be so when it concerns actual practice, as in travels or recreation of people.
Acceptance and use of Hindi has increased since independence in the private domain of entertainment, specifically films and television. The language used in films is actually Hindustani, not the official language, Hindi. Hindi films and television programs, which are mostly clips from films, are watched in all linguistic regions. Music stores carry discs of Hindi light music in all regions, but newspaper and magazine stands carry minimal Hindi materials.The pop music programs in popular religious and other festivals in street corners have a component of Hindi songs along with the songs of the regional language and of the larger minority languages in the state. This is, however, more of an urban phenomenon. Learning basic Hindi in schools eliminates any inhibition in learning it as a language, but the real understanding of the language comes from hearing it spoken in the entertainment media. Such acceptance of Hindi, however, does not extend to getting information from the media or reading literature. It is more common for the educated non-Hindi speakers to read English fiction or watch English news in addition to those in the regional language. Among the second languages, Hindi is favored in oral pop culture and English in literate culture.
The first question mentioned earlier concerning the language of government in its three wings of administration, judiciary, and legislature is the most contentious one politically. This was one of the hotly debated questions in the constituent assembly17 and required political compromises for a solution. With regard to the central government, the first part of the question concerned the choice of language. For ideological and sentimental reasons, it could not be English, which represented the colonial government and not the masses of the new nation.The real contest was between Hindustani, visualized by Gandhi as a language of the common people and as a bridge between the people of two religions, Hinduism and Islam, in northern India, and Hindi, visualized as the largest regional language and as a bridge to the ancient past symbolized by Sanskrit. These two languages, or two varieties of a language, differ more ideologically than grammatically. They were fostered in the anti-colonial movement with different political ideologies and goals and had developed different political bases. Political mobilization for Hindi involved the political incorporation of many geographically contiguous, but historically different, mother tongues into a language called Hindi and presumed the willingness of the people to surrender their distinct linguistic identities. Political mobilization for Hindustani envisioned an India united through a composite culture, by which was meant a culture incorporating ways of life in two religions, Hinduism and Islam. Hindi in devanagari script finally won the vote in the Congress Party and then in the constituent assembly.
The other part of the first question about the official language of the Indian Union concerned the timing for the replacement of the old official language, English, by the new official language, Hindi. After acrimonious debate concerning the time of the switch, it was decided that it would take place in 15 years after the constitution was adopted, which would have been the year 1965.18 Until that period, Hindi and English would be the two official languages of the Union. The distribution of domains of use in the three branches of the government between the two languages and the levels in each domain were spelled out with the proviso that the use of Hindi will progressively expand to the domains and levels assigned to English.19 Hindi, during this period of transition, was to equip itself with technical terms and translations that would make it functional in running the business of government.
The third part of the same question was how to make Hindi acceptable to all the regions of the country. To reframe this question, it became one of concern about how to elevate Hindi from a language of a region, however large, to a language of the national government. Hindi had a disadvantage compared to the languages of many regions in lacking a long literary tradition and previous use in royal courts.This disadvantage had to be made up to fortify its numerical strength.The solution hit upon, as mentioned earlier, was the creation of a list of languages of major regions and literary traditions from which Hindi was to draw nourishment. This solution took on a different purpose as those languages became competitors20 to Hindi for official benefits from the federal government, which culminated in the amended Official Language of the Union Act, 1967 of organization of the party itself by linguistic units and previous party resolutions in favor of that principle for reorganizing the internal boundaries of the country as well.21
Regarding the official languages of the states, which were successors to the British presidencies and native states, the constitution provided that the then existing state legislatures could choose a language spoken in the state or Hindi. Most states chose the majority language of their state.There were a few exceptions. For example, Jammu and Kashmir chose the language associated with the majority religion, Urdu; Nagaland, when separated from Assam to become a new state (much later, in 1963), chose a language ordinarily not considered a native language, namely, English. Himachal Pradesh, where Hindi is not the majority language, nevertheless chose Hindi when it became a state later on, in 1971.The reasons for the different choices of official language in the states related to their different political orientations as well as their language demography. Hindi or English were chosen as official languages in non-Hindi-speaking states that did not have an alternative majority language. The choice between the two was motivated by a political perception about the state’s relationship with the central government or the nation defined in terms of relative political autonomy and economic advantage from the central government.
Elevation of the political status of regional languages to official languages goes along with the claim that speakers of the language in question are predominant in one political territory under one government. Status elevation and territorial consolidation feed each other. This aspect of language-territory identification led to a major shift in the political organization of the states in the union, erasing the earlier one that reflected the colonial history of annexation of territories and divisions of them for administrative convenience. The first state carved out of the former Madras presidency and the Nizam’s state of Hyderabad on the basis of this language-territory identification was Andhra Pradesh.The language was Telugu.The creation of Andhra Pradesh was conceded in 1956 after a violent agitation following the death of a regional congress leader and a disciple of Gandhi in 1952, who had gone on a fast unto death to achieve this demand.22 The government of independent India put on hold the formation of linguistic states in the aftermath of partition of the country on the basis of religion in spite of the Congress Party’s principle.After the creation of Andhra Pradesh, many other linguistic states followed, usually after agitations, often violent, based on the principle of “one state, one language” (not one language, one state in the case of Hindi, which was the official language of many states with Hindi as the majority language, and Bengali with two states (West Bengal and Tripura) in which it was the majority language).23 With the formation of Haryana, carved out of Punjab in 1966, language was combined with religion in drawing the boundaries between the two states. In the case of the formation of new states carved out of Assam, language became secondary to ethnicity in defining those states.Thus, the principle of establishing states based on linguistic majority expanded in course of time to include establishment of new states based on the identity of religion or ethnicity of minorities with distinct languages of their own. However, the new ethnically defined states, such as Nagaland, either do not have a majority language at all or, as in the case of Meghalaya (created in 1972), have a bare language majority.
Linguistic states ended up becoming subnations identified with a language, which became the politically dominant language of the state. Those linguistic groups that contested the establishment of Hindi as the only dominant language in the union sought to promote the majority language of their states as the dominant language within them. In spite of this principle of single-language dominance, every linguistic state in fact is multilingual, containing minority languages of different demographic strengths. Depending on their political strength, some minority languages have been given the status of a second official language of the state, as, for example, Urdu in Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, Bodo in Assam, or Kok Borok in Tripura.They are not called associate official languages, as in the case of English in the union, and often their status as second official language is restricted to particular districts in the state and to particular domains of government.
The process of creating linguistic states also created boundary problems. Political campaigns were launched, some of which turned violent, to claim adjacent areas or to claim a preeminent cosmopolitan city in the region as the capital of the new state. The campaigns were for consolidation of language groups with a majority in one state, but having a minority status in neighboring states, thus leading to demands to alter the borders between states in order not to leave the majority language speakers of the new states as minorities in neighboring states. Nevertheless, such consolidation also has not solved the problems of a majority language community when majority language speakers in one state migrate to another state in search of work and become a linguistic minority there. They lobby the government of their “home state” from which they migrated for educational opportunities in their state of residence, especially in professional education for their children, and make other demands such as for waiver of residency conditions for allotment of house sites by municipal corporations. At the same time, in some states, such as Karnataka, an opposite form of political pressure has arisen to make the claim that only the “sons of the soil,” that is, those who have resided in the state for generations, were entitled to full rights and privileges in the linguistic states. In other words, there are contradictory claims by those demanding rights in a state based on residency in it rather than language to ward off new linguistic communities that migrated into it in recent times from having rights to privileges in the state, and those demanding rights to privileges based on their natal affiliation to the dominant language community in the state they migrated from rather than residency. A mother tongue speaker of Kannada living in Maharashtra, to give an example, can claim a seat under the distributive control of the government in a professional college in Karnataka, but not a speaker of Hindi from Rajasthan who migrated to Karnataka in his generation and is living there.
The emergence of linguistic states with dominant languages effectively eliminated Hindi as an option for official language in those states.This option, provided in the constitution, was not even debated in any public forum in non-Hindi states. The debate was only about the timeframe for the transition from English as the official language to the dominant language(s). Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the number of states in which Hindi was declared the official language increased when some newly created states with no majority language chose Hindi, or when a Hindi majority state was bifurcated, as in the cases of Uttaranchal, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand. Hindi is now (in 2008) the official language of nine states, as well as of the capital territory of Delhi. Out of the 28 states of India, English was chosen by only one state, Nagaland, although it continues to be used—along with the official language of the state—for some intrastate and all interstate official purposes in many states. In some tribal states in northeastern India, such as Arunachal Pradesh, whose legislature has not yet passed a bill establishing an official language, English remains the de facto official language.
During the constitutionally mandated 15 years allowed for the switchover to Hindi, official use of Hindi in the central government gradually increased, despite political protests from southern and eastern states, particularly Tamil Nadu, whenever an increase in use was perceived to involve imposition of Hindi.Tamil Nadu (formerly part of the former Madras province), has had a long history of opposition since the colonial period towards giving Hindi any special status; such opposition has for long been an important part of the platform of the various political parties that have been associated with the Dravidian movement.24 The first political agitation against Hindi occurred in 1938 against the decision of the Congress government of Madras presidency to make Hindi a compulsory subject in high schools. C. Rajagopalachari, the chief minister, implemented the national policy of his party. Congress had come to power winning the first election in 1937 after the dual government run together by the British and some Indian political leaders (called dyarchy) ended with the Government of India Act of 1935. The Justice Party, which was in the government during dyarchy, had political reasons to strike against the new government. The 1938 anti-Hindi agitation (the first in Tamil Nadu) ended in loss of two lives from hardships in imprisonment and withdrawal of the order of compulsory Hindi by the government.
Opposition to Hindi was part of a political strategy to safeguard the interests of southern India against the feared dominant position of the numerically larger Hindi-speakers in northern India, on the one hand, and of the upper caste, southern Brahmans, who occupied leadership positions in the Congress party and were expected to fortify their advantage in mastery of English with the learning of Hindi as well, on the other. Organized political action against Hindi in the form of conferences, demonstrations, and agitations continued intermittently for the next three decades from the first agitation in 1938 whenever the provincial government reintroduced Hindi in the school curriculum or the central government issued an order for its employees to learn Hindi or to write sign boards in Hindi in its departments in the province or to give more time to Hindi programs in state-controlled television, and such other actions perceived as involving imposition of Hindi on unwilling Tamils.25 Anti-Hindi agitations peaked in 1963 when an Official Language Act was being framed to carry out the constitutional provision to make Hindi the sole official language of the Union effective in 1965. The agitation continued through 1965 to 1967 when the Official Language Act was amended (see below). This drawn-out, widespread, student-led anti-Hindi agitation propelled the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) (an offshoot political party of the Dravidian Movement) to come to political power in 1967 in Madras. The new DMK government removed teaching of Hindi in school altogether, establishing a policy of two-language instruction in schools against the national policy of three-language instruction known as three language formula, which had been designed to accommodate a combination of the official language of the linguistic state and the two official languages of the country, one of which happens to be an international language.
The amended Official Language Act of 1967 includes the assurance given by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru in Parliament in 1963, in response to the sustained anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu, while piloting the Official Language Act of 1963, that English may continue to be an official language as long as the non-Hindi population of the country wants it. With this act, a reversal in official language policy was set in motion, namely, continuation of English, which made the policy of official language bilingual, not monolingual either with Hindi or with English.This act also wrested the final decision about Hindi becoming the only official language of the country from the Hindi-speaking majority and entrusted it to the collective of non-Hindi-speaking minorities.26
By this time, opposition to Hindi had found its place in the mainstream of politics in Tamil Nadu in the sense that no regional political party or unit of a national party in the state, including congress, could speak openly in support of Hindi.27 Another development was the political realization that the battle of regional languages (the majority languages of the linguistic states) to contain the supremacy of Hindi has better chances of winning by having English as the contestant against Hindi rather than the regional languages themselves.28 This realization was shared by many states in the southern, eastern, and northeastern parts of India besides Tamil Nadu.29 It became possible because of the changed political equations, including the rise of regional political parties in many states and the changed attitudes towards English from being a language of political oppression to a language of progress, from a language of economic deprivation of the rural masses to a language of centrally planned development for all, from a divisive language of the administration to a unifying language of the constitution, from a language of political inequality to a language of ethnic neutrality. The new Official Language Act also made the central government responsible for the development of regional languages in the states as languages of the nation, not just of their regions alone. The earlier policy position that the central government was responsible only for supporting development of its official language, Hindi, the country’s classical language, Sanskrit, and the “stateless” languages, Urdu, and later Sindhi, changed with the allocation of money in the federal budget and the creation of institutions for the development of regional languages. Thus, the Official Language Act of 1967 was politically significant in two respects. First, along with the new meaning of the eighth schedule of the constitution (see earlier), the national status of the regional languages was enhanced. Second, the national role of English was restored in administration and made to be a crucial vehicle for economic development of the country.
The place of the official languages of states having been asserted in the national political arena, a further issue within the states concerned the claims for recognition from minority language groups.Their demands were for equal access to employment opportunities in the public sector and educational opportunities in government institutions, as well as assurances that native speakers of the majority language would not have any special advantage by virtue of their language. They sought to achieve these goals by limiting the dominance of the majority language through opposition to compulsory teaching of it in schools and to the requirement that knowledge of the state language be required prior to selection for government employment. Further, they sought to provide a place for English in education as medium of instruction on the basis of the constitutional provision (art. 30) that grants rights to minorities to establish and administer their own educational institutions. These institutions may choose not to teach the majority language and instead choose any other language, provided they do not receive any financial aid from the state government. They admit students from the majority language community also, subject to stipulations decreed by the Supreme Court, thus reducing the stake of the majority language to be the language learnt by everyone having school education. Students speaking the majority language could take this route to learn another language, Sanskrit or French, for example.This offers the possibility for students to finish school education without becoming literate in the official language of the state.The minority educational institutions more often follow the legal route, basing their claims on constitutional grounds, than the political route to preserve their rights to manage their educational institutions on their own terms.30 Nevertheless, the success of the migrated or border linguistic minorities in a state (such as the Kannada-speaking community in Maharashtra) and the autochthonous minorities of a state (such as Tulu- or Urdu-speaking communities in Karnataka), depends on their political strength and leverage in the state. As at the level of the relations between the nation and the states, English plays the role of keeping the powerful in check at the level of relations between the majority and minorities within states.
According to the constitution, the states have a responsibility with regard to the use of minority languages in government schools, including tribal languages, and in primary education under certain conditions, particularly concerning the numerical strength of students speaking those languages. Implementation of this provision, which does not fall under fundamental rights of citizens granted in the constitution (arts 350A, 350B), but is under the obligations of the states, has been cursory and fragmentary. The apathy and indifference of states in the implementation of this provision are described in the Report of the Linguistic Minorities Commission, which is submitted to parliament every year. But it does not lead to any governmental action when the linguistic minorities are politically weak. The political and bureaucratic reasoning for inaction is that promotion of minority languages in education, particularly the tribal languages in non-tribal states, will hinder the political process of integrating minorities with the mainstream. This is a reasoning rejected by these same politicians and bureaucrats when it concerns regional languages and national integration. That leaves the cause of minority languages in education to be taken up by the nonpolitical voluntary sector.This sector runs teaching centers for children left out or dropped out of school education, which often focus on children of tribal language communities and other poor linguistic minority children. These centers supplement mainstream education by running classes after school, or they provide alternative education that includes the teaching of tribal and other poor minority languages and using them as medium of instruction in the initial years before they are switched to mainstream education.
The second question mentioned earlier, the question of language in education, is closely tied to the first question, the question of language in government, because the purpose of education policy was seen as building skills and knowledge for the development of the country. Skills include language skills. When national development takes precedence over personal development in education policy, the choice of language is made by the state. India developed a political consensus in 1961,31 following deliberations with the chief mini-sters of states, that every child completing ten years of school must learn three languages: the regional language, English, and Hindi in the non-Hindi-speaking states, but another modern Indian language, preferably a south Indian language, for students in Hindi-speaking states. This policy sought to achieve three goals: the acquisition of skills to enable participation in the economics and politics of the nation, a perception of an integrated nation through language learning, and equal distribution of “language load” for students in all regions. Failure to include a place for the mother tongue in the formula (constitutionally mandated for teaching in primary schools, as mentioned above) and the classical language (Sanskrit and others) in the policy has led in practice either to adding a language or, more commonly, to substituting the minority mother tongue or a classical language in place of one of the three languages, often the regional language.32 When it comes to implementation of this policy of language choice in education, insofar as the Hindi states are concerned, there is no instrumental motivation for students to learn a third, modern Indian language. The preferred choice in the Hindi states has been Sanskrit.Tamil Nadu follows a two-language policy, as mentioned above. It is clear that the national policy in regard to language education may not articulate well with state policies and with parental preferences in practice. Thus there is variation in language choice across the country in actual practice. Variation, it must be noted, is in the first language (which is by and large the official language of the state) and in the third language (which is mostly the primary official language of the Union, viz., Hindi); it is almost nonexistent in the second language, viz., English throughout the country.
The greatest challenge to language policy concerns medium of instruction. As with regard to the language of government, the policy enshrined in the constitution with regard to education provides for Hindi or any Indian language of the state legislature’s choice. The policy decision of the states was to provide for the official language of the state to be the medium of education as well. No state other than the states where Hindi is the official language chose Hindi as medium of instruction.There is thus consistency in the language policy in government and in education in the states and near uniformity in exercising the choice of language provided in the constitution.33
There is, however, one crucial difference in the language policy for government as opposed to education with regard to replacement of English.There is no timeline for switchover for the language of education as there was for switchover in official language.This, along with other factors mentioned earlier, including the change in perception about English, has contributed to the widest divergence between policy and practice and between policies in relation to education. Absence of a time line results in differential implementation of the policy in higher and lower levels of education. This, in turn, mars the cohesion in policy leading to lack of unity between policy and practice. It is possible, for example, to attribute the reluctance in using the national and provincial official languages at higher levels of administration in part to their non-use at higher levels of education, which supply bureaucrats who work at higher levels of government. It is possible also to explain partially the parental preference for the medium of English in school education by the failure to switch from English medium in higher education.
All governmental commissions on education hedge the time line for switching to indigenous languages with words like “as early as practicable”34 when it comes to changing the medium of instruction in higher education. The National Policy on Education promulgated in 1976 says that “urgent steps should be taken” without specifying a time. The reasons for hesitancy are two: the speed with which English emerged after independence as the language of academic disciplines, particularly in science and technology, and the time needed for Indian languages to equip themselves with terms and translations for the new task.35 The switchover time has remained the catch-up time with English, which does not close up. It is a fallacy that form precedes use; the belief that words and materials must be ready before the language can be used takes precedence over the fact that the use of a language in new domains creates words and materials. Another language ideology that informs policy is language purism, according to which the new state-controlled uses of the language must not borrow forms from another language, Persian in the case of Hindi, Sanskrit in the case of Tamil.This results in delay in use in the class room induced by the ideological debate, incomprehensibility of the new register of the language for students, and control over the materials going into the hands of language specialists rather than subject specialists. With the new knowledge-based, globally integrated economy that puts a premium on English, the policy of switchover of language medium in higher education will remain merely politically symbolic, not substantive. The symbolic offering of an option to have an Indian-language medium of education draws to these courses mainly students who are poor, scholastically and economically, which further corrodes the credibility of policies for Indian language change.
During dyarchy (1919–35), Indian political parties shared power in the colonial governments in the presidencies and had the education portfolio under their charge.At their initiative, Indian languages were introduced as an alternative medium of instruction in government schools from 1921. By 1937, when the political arrangement with provincial autonomy was in force and the Congress party formed the government in Madras presidency, 51 percent of secondary schools offered an Indian language as a medium of instruction.36 The switchover of the medium at the school level became nearly universal after Independence. Indian language medium schools at present comprise 90 percent of all schools in India.37 The switchover from English to an Indian language as the medium of instruction, however, has been partially reversed in the last few decades.The prestige and power of English as the medium of education at higher levels has percolated down to lower levels of education. The government’s policy concerning school education remains that the official language of the state must also be the medium of instruction in the schools.This policy is implemented in government schools and those that receive financial aid from the government.38 The government’s policy of disallowing use of its funds in English medium schools is a reversal of the colonial government’s education policy from 1835.The popular demand, however, is to have English as the medium for various reasons, including the desire for success in higher education in English medium and in the world of work where English dominates, as well as the desire of first-generation learners to catch up with others, who have had the benefit of English through education over two or more generations.The gap coincides with the divide between forward and backward castes and between working and middle classes.This takes the medium of education issue from pedagogy to politics. It becomes a matter of seeking government funds for English medium education, thus bringing about a reverse switch-over from existing Indian language medium education. This demand amounts to a return to the colonial policy. This also amounts to reversal of the stated policy of extending the Indian-language medium available in schools to universities to one of extending the English medium from universities to schools.
Governments have changed their policies concerning the teaching of English as a subject by pushing downwards the starting year to the primary stage from the post-primary stage and in some states to the first year of education. They accommodate the popular demand with regard to medium not by changing the policy, but by allowing manoeuverability in the policy through such means as providing parallel streams of medium in aided schools, or parallel structures of education such as matriculation schools in Tamil Nadu. The new structure added to the existing structures of the State Board of Education and the Central Board of Education, which implement government policy in education in Tamil Nadu, is the board of matriculation schools; the latter are in the private sector and have freedom in implementing the policy, although they are under the administrative (not financial) control of the state with regard to accreditation. In the name of increasing access to education, private schools are encouraged, which are not governed by the policy of the government with regard to medium of education, and some of which are accredited by bodies outside the country.These schools charge a heavy fee from students, thereby restricting access to those who can afford it. Schools run by minorities are another source for providing education through English medium, as mentioned already.
It is an intriguing political question why democratically elected governments do not change their policy to meet the popular demand for English-medium education.There is, of course, the pedagogical reason of the advantage of teaching children though the language of their childhood experience. But there is also the politics of symbols. Using the language of the state as the medium of education is an acknowledgement of its prestige and an expression of its power.This policy gets legitimacy for the government from cultural elites like littérateurs and language teachers and from the general public as the custodian of their language. But in their personal lives they, as well as the political leaders themselves, who make the policy, make their choices on substantive grounds, notably economic opportunities. Hence the dichotomy between policy and practice is not perceived by the people as contradictory.
The politics of preserving or promoting the economic and political interests of various groups was played out in the name of language soon after independence until it changed to one of promoting the interests of various designated castes in the second half of the period. But the English language continues to play a role in the pursuit of political interests, as it does in economic pursuits. Socially and economically advanced groups try to hold on to their advantages by holding on to English while the disadvantaged groups try to advance socially and economically by acquiring knowledge of English. The latter suspect that there is a conspiracy by the elites in control of government to keep them from mastering English through the government’s language policy in education. English is believed to be a liberating force for them and a means of empowerment,39 which is not different from their perception of English in colonial times. The politically active among them want their voice heard across the nation and beyond it and to have a common language to communicate with other dalits (economically and socially deprived lower castes) in other states in the country to create a national political platform to fight oppression, just as the elites used English for interregional communication in their fight against British oppression40 They believe that they have a right to English, which was denied them by the colonial policy and that they should get it from the government, since the fee for attending a private English medium school is beyond their reach. Clearly, in postcolonial times, the politics of language in India has taken a new trajectory with roles reworked for English.
The narrative of the politics of language in India suggests the following conclusions. The minority languages without political clout are orphaned. Regional languages have gained political dominance and retained their supremacy in the literate culture of the states. Hindi retains an edge in the competition for jobs nationally, for social networking in the national capital, and has gained acceptance as the language of entertainment and urban pop culture as well as a sign of desi (native) identity for the mobile youth in the globalized market. English, in contrast, has enhanced its status as the language of economic power, elite status and intellectual pursuits.
1 Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), “Prologue,” pp. 1–15.
2 This is true of religion also. Although Hinduism is the majority religion, it is a heterogeneous religion with no organized structure of control and designated authority. It does not have a common language; Sanskrit is not a language of religious practice or identity for all Hindus.
3 Bernard S. Cohn,“The Command of Language and The Language of Command,” in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).
4 Christopher R. King, One Language,Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994) is a narrative of this differentiation. Distancing of formal Hindi from its popular base is described in Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001).
5 Paul R. Brass, Language Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: University Press, 1974); reprint edn (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005).
6 Tamil may be an exception, but the relationship between Tamil and Sanskrit and the perception of Tamil as both a cultural icon and a political icon is complex in its relation to “Aryan” North India. See S. V. Shanmugam (in Tamil), Mozhi vaLarcciyum mozhi uNarvum: canka kaalam (Language Development and Language Awareness: Sangam Period) (Madras: Manivasagar Patippakam, 1989), p. 219.
7 Gandhi initially opposed this idea, but soon gave it his approval. See M. S. Thirumalai, “Early Gandhi and the Language Policy of the Indian National Congress,” in the online journal, Language in India, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2005), www.languageinindia.com. The Congress Party, persuaded by Gandhi, adopted Hindustani as the language of its official deliberations, including proceedings of its conferences. Use of Hindustani had been increasing in party conference speeches from the time of Gandhi’s association with the party despite resistance to it from some leaders from the south. But, by 1947, Gandhi had become an advocate of linguistic reorganization of the states of India, although he had a lurking suspicion that the regional languages may assert themselves, thereby threatening the unity of India that had been forged with Hindustani; see Ramachandra Guha, pp. 189–90.
8 Brass, pp. 78–90.
9 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), ch. vi, “The Failure of English,” pp. 142–65. See also E. Annamalai, “Medium of Power: The Question of English in Education,” in James W. Tollefson and Amy B. M.Tsui (eds), Medium of Instruction Policies:Which Agenda? Whose Agenda? (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), pp. 171–94.
10 The debate is about teaching English effectively to subaltern students from social groups who had missed out education. The demands vary from teaching English to them from class one to using English as the medium of instruction. One encounters a conspiracy theory also, according to which the educationists, who come from upper castes, teach a standard variety of English they speak, denying any role to subaltern English in order to make these students fail in English.
11 For example, Bruce McCully, English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).
12 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Thoughts on National Language (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1956); also Jawaharlal Nehru, The Question of Language (Allahabad: Congress Political and Economic Studies, 1937).
13 This question continued to be debated even after the constitution did not choose to designate any language as the national language; see, for example,V. K. R.V. Rao, Many Languages, One Nation:The Problem of Integration (Bombay: Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Research and Library, 1978).
14 For the intensity and diversity of beliefs about language and nationhood, see Kuldip Nayar, “Bilingualism,” in Between the Lines (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1969), pp. 30–69. Nayar is a journalist who worked as the press information officer of the Government of India.
15 B. Mallikarjun,“The Eighth Schedule Languages: Critical Appraisal,” in R. S. Gupta et al. (eds), Language and the State: Perspectives on the Eighth Schedule (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1995), pp. 61–83.
16 The census reports what the citizens tell the enumerators is their mother tongue, which is a token of social identity rather than a distinct language; neither is it a dialect in a linguistic sense.The reports group these mother tongues (raw data) into languages (processed data) on the basis of linguistic and political considerations. Mother tongues reported by less than 10,000 speakers are not counted. Hindi has the largest number of mother tongues grouped under it. The number will be more than 48, if these numerically smaller mother tongues are also included.The anomaly with Maithili is that it is not given a language status in the census but is on par with the country’s major languages in the constitution. It is also recognized (along with Dogri) as a literary language by Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) for awards for best literary works.
17 See, for example, extracts from the Constituent Assembly Debates (1949) compiled by M. S. Thirumalai and B. Mallikarjun,“The Evolution of Language Policy in the Constituent Assembly of India,” in Language in India, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2006).
18 This scheme of things, however, was modified with the Official Language Act of 1963 issued in response to agitations against Hindi becoming the sole official language from 1965. This Act provided for the continued use of English beyond 1965 in domains in which it was in use with the stipulation that all acts, government orders and such other documents made originally in English must be accompanied with their Hindi translation.
19 See “The Constitution of India: Provisions Relating to Language,” compiled by M. S. Thirumalai, in Language in India, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2002).
20 At the level of political symbolism, the demand by the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu is to make all the scheduled languages the official languages of the Union.This demand, irrespective of its impracticality by the number of languages to be used and of the fact that the list is open-ended, was still alive in 2008, as can be seen in a speech of the chief minister of Tamil Nadu ruled by DMK on the seventieth anniversary of the first anti-Hindi agitation: “Other regional languages should also be made official languages at the Centre” (The Hindu online (Tamil Nadu section), 27 January, 2008). Note the implication of “other” in the sentence cited suggesting that Hindi is also a regional language that was elevated to be the official language of the central government, which elevation other regional languages also deserve. The idea is to have all regional languages including Hindi as the symbolic official languages of the country and English the working official language.
21 For the text of the act, see The Official Language Act, 1963 (as amended, 1967) in Language in India, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2002).
22 For detailed history, see History of Andhra Movement (2 vols) by Committee for History of Andhra Movement (Hyderabad: Goverment of Andhra Pradesh, 1985). After the Congress Party’s electoral debacle in the Telugu region of the Madras state on the question of having a separate Telugu-speaking state, the central government constituted the Commission on Linguistics Reorganization of States (New Delhi: Government of India, 1955), which evolved criteria and recommendations for the formation of linguistic states. The linguistic basis of the formation of states yielded later to demands based on religion, ethnicity, and unequal economic development within a state. The demand for a separate state of Telangana, which is Telugu-speaking, to be carved out of Andhra Pradesh on the basis of economic underdevelopment is likely to be met by the compulsions of electoral politics.
23 B. R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1955).
24 It should be pointed out that Hindi was first introduced as an optional subject in 1926 during the period of dyarchy and, a few years later, was made a compulsory language in high schools in Madras presidency not by the government of the Congress Party, but by the government in which the Justice Party, the progenitor of the Dravidian movement, shared power and was in charge of the education portfolio. See Eugene F. Irschick, Ta m i l Revivalism in the 1930s (Madras: Cre-A Publishers, 1986), pp. 213–14.
25 For an analysis of anti-Hindi agitation from a point of view of dialectical materialism, see Mohan Kumaramangalam’s India’s Language Crisis (Madras: New Century Book House, 1965); and from a cultural–political point of view, see Mohan Ram’s Hindi vs. India: The Meaning of DMK (New Delhi: Rachna Prakashan, 1968).
26 This assurance of Nehru was a long way from Gandhi’s characterization, in 1931, of the Tamil Nadu Congress delegation’s failure to use Hindi in the party conference as an act of tyranny by a minority; cited in Irschick, p. 212. For Nehru’s pragmatic views and influential role in formulating and implementing official language policy, see Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Policy of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
27 After he left the Congress, C. Rajagoplachari changed his earlier position in favor of Hindi and became an advocate of English against Hindi; see his The Question of English (Madras: Bharatan, 1962).
28 This political strategy is considered to be relevant even now in 2008. The current chief minister of Tamil Nadu said, in the speech cited in note 19, that “English will remain as our shield” against Hindi.
29 The choice of English as a political symbol by the northeastern states is based on a different reasoning, namely, that it gives their tribal communities a non-Hindu (and, for some, non-Indian) identity.
30 E. Annamalai,“Language Choice in Education: Conflict Resolution in Indian Courts,” Language Science, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1998), pp. 29–43.
31 This was originally proposed by the Central Advisory Board of Education in 1957. It was incorporated in the National Policy on Education in 1968 and has been repeated in every new formulation of education policy since then.
32 S. Aggarwal, Three Language Formula: An Educational Problem (New Delhi: Gian, 1991).
33 As there are departments of the central government in the states, there are schools run by the central government in the states. These central schools have Hindi (along with English) as medium of instruction.
34 A phrase used by the University Education Commission, chaired by S. Radhakrishnan, in 1977.
35 For arguments for and against switchover see A. B. Shah (ed.), The Great Debate (Bombay: Lalvani, 1968).
36 S. Nurullah and J. P. Naik, A History of Education in India (during the British Period), 2nd edn (Bombay: Macmillan, 1951), p. 650.
37 National Council for Educational Research and Training, Sixth All India Educational Survey: Main Report (New Delhi, 1999).
38 One section of a class in such aided schools may have English medium instruction, whose teachers’ salary will be paid by the school management from its sources, not from grants given by the government.
39 S. Anand, “Sanskrit, English and Dalits,” EPW, Vol. 34, No, 30 (24 July, 1999), pp. 2,053–56.
40 After Independence, the use of English by these elites increased in literary production promoted globally in the name of postcolonial literature. Dalits are beginning to participate in this literary culture after half a century of Independence. They have conflicting pulls between the desire to have their voice heard globally and locally, between participation through English in the national and international literary culture, and in the historically longer literary culture of the regional language they are born into. Meena Kandasamy, a Tamil-speaking dalit poet in English, says in an interview (The Hindu online, 6 January, 2008, magazine section), “Dalits need English for social empowerment, but English has become more or less another caste. In India, after caste and class, the next important thing is whether you are English-speaking, (but) unlike caste it is something you can change (into) by yourself. (But) I think you have to be very conscious of your background, of where your roots lie.” She goes on to say: “Some activist–academics like Kancha Ilaiah tell us to bury our Indian language in favor of English; but somehow I am very scared of that.”