India: A Linguistic Civilization
By G. N. Devy
Aleph Book Company, 200 pages, Rs 599

India’s spectacular linguistic diversity is one of its most defining characteristics as a civilization. The complex trajectory of our languages is intertwined with the evolution of the Indian identity, imagination, and intellectual history. Our languages are a repository of human ideas and experiences across millennia and remain at the core of intense deliberations on what constitutes the ‘idea of India’. Yet to map their evolution is a monumental endeavour—the number of languages to have existed and the ones that continue to be in use are far too many to determine a particular point of origin or reconstruct the story in its entirety.

In this path-breaking book, reputed scholar G. N. Devy lays bare the mysteries and intricacies of India’s linguistic past, present, and future. The evolution of language is set against the larger historical canvas of human progress, and gives due weight to the influences of migration, agriculture, newer patterns of settlement, formation of religious sects, cultural resistance, and centuries of British colonialization on the shaping of our linguistic heritage. The book also engages with language, identity, and political consciousness, and underscores the significance of collective responsibility in preserving endangered languages of indigenous and marginalized communities.

The author studies memory and oral practices as tools of linguistic creativity and as essential components of Indian knowledge and learning systems that have been overshadowed by the written word. And importantly, the book addresses the battle between technological advancement and dialogue and diversity and explores pathways to prevent the loss of both unclassified dialects and minor languages as well as the literary and philosophical traditions of major ones.

Timely and profound, ‘India: A Linguistic Civilization’ is an ambitious study that celebrates the rich tapestry of Indian languages—a fitting rejoinder to majoritarian ideologies that threaten our vibrant multiculturalism.

Devy is currently the Obaid Siddiqi Chair Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, and was previously Director, Adivasi Academy, Tejgadh, and Professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He led the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), a comprehensive documentation of all living Indian languages, forming a fifty-volume PLSI Series.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

ONE NEEDS TO ADDRESS A COMMON MISGIVING that seems to have pervaded the popular sentiment. It relates to the place of the English language. Ever since the English language was introduced in the higher education in India as the main language of knowledge, a slow process flagged off by Lord T. B. Macaulay’s ‘Minutes’ (1835), there have been undercurrents within Indian languages that have viewed English as a challenge (Mayhew, 1926). In the years immediately following Independence, there have been protest movements in the South against Hindi and an active anti-English campaign in the Northern parts of the country. As a result of the exponential growth in the number of English medium schools in the country in recent years, one notices the eruption of bhasha-bachao (save our language) movements in several states, most particularly in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Punjab. It is easy to understand that the anti-English protests and campaigns shape up as the English language has played several key roles in the history of India since the eighteenth century, apart from being just a natural language that came here like many such languages. It has been the language of the people who had colonized India. It has been the language through which a lot of what we call ‘modernity’ is supposed to have reached the Indian shores. It has been the language of the twentieth century imperialism which the political sentiment in India did not favour so much. Besides, English is today the language of a powerful communication technology, and the language associated with the flow of international capital. Being thus so many of the above, and more, it continues to elicit anger from a variety of quarters from time to time.

Yet, it is a language that has brought to Indian languages a very huge range of lexical items adding to their power of expression. It is the language which has continued to enrich the literary and dramatic expression in Indian languages by bringing to them literature from all parts of the world. Besides, it is today probably the most effective link language for the Indian republic and a language which brings employment and business more easily than other languages do. Given this extremely complicated and entrenched place of the English language in India, what is in store for us in the near future? More specifically, what will be the condition of the Indian languages such as Bangla, Telugu, Marathi, and Gujarati and so on? Will English manage to replace all of them completely? Or, will English one day beat a quiet retreat to the lonely island from where it came? It is but natural that these and such other questions should continue to exercise the minds of the nation-loving Indians.

Obviously, there are no easy answers to these questions since human languages are known to have behaved in the most surprising manner in the past. Some very mighty languages are known to have disappeared in the face of some minor challenges; some others have grown taller precisely because they faced threats of extinction. Yet, if one were to try predicting the fortunes of the English language in India, one would have to look at the history of its fortunes in similar situations elsewhere. It is necessary to recall that the English language travelled with the colonial rulers to several other continents. It managed to almost entirely replace the indigenous languages in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. That did not, however, happen in African countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. In India, just as the fortunes of the English language continued to improve, numerous Indian languages too witnessed a remarkable literary and linguistic growth in the same period. Based on this comparative perspective, one can perhaps propose that there had been something in the making of the Indian languages prior to the arrival of English which allowed them to face the encounter in a far more mature way than the languages of the Atlantic and Pacific areas had managed to do. What was this peculiar strength?

If one were to step back in history, one notices that the Indic and the Dravidic languages had previously negotiated the encounter with Arabic and Persian with an equal maturity, themselves surviving in the encounter and linguistically gaining in the process. Given such a history, it is reasonable to assume that the innate multilingualism of the colonized culture(s) will see them through in the current encounter with the English language. As a result of the intimacy between English and the indigenous languages, they are likely to get suffused with English vocabulary. But so long as the grammars are their own, they need not fear a total annihilation at the hands of English.

The fear of decline should arise from another quarter, namely, the neglect of the minor languages, the dialects, and the speech patterns of the indigenous communities, the forest dwellers, the hill communities and the coastal communities. These ‘other’ languages have been like the roots of the main languages in Asia and Africa. In the past, they have provided the main languages semantic resource and expressive power. Those roots have started drying up as the speakers of the ‘other’—the non-recognized, the oral, the economically less privileged—languages are driven to outward migration in search of livelihood. Already the erosion of the supporting indigenous languages has started showing an adverse impact on the main languages of Africa and Asia. The situation would be predictably far worse some thirty years from now. So, if the great language diversity of the world has to be preserved, promoted and carried forward to the future generations, it would be necessary to turn attention to the indigenous and minor languages.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]