Nam Jana: What the Language Fight Leaves Out
The taxi was already moving when I began speaking Kannada, and my fluency is limited enough that it showed in every sentence. Had I spoken English or Hindi, the driver would have been reaching for words that were not his, and our conversation would have stayed at the level of the route and the fare. In Kannada, however slowly I managed it, he had room to say what he thought, and he used all of it.
He began with Tamil Nadu, where a new party had taken power this year, and he said that whether it proved competent or incompetent, it was a departure from the norm. Karnataka had no such departure to offer, because two national parties take turns at the state and the ordinary citizen gets no respite whoever sits at the helm. Prices keep rising without a matching rise in incomes. A driver has to find a great deal of money just to keep his business running, and in a better governed state that sum would be small.
Near the end of the ride he referred to me as ‘nam jana’ — one of his people. He and I are separated by language, religion, caste, education and social standing, and my Kannada had not improved over the course of the journey. Yet the phrase did not wait for fluency. Of everything that stood between us, language was the one thing I could do something about, and a halting attempt at it was enough for a man who owed me nothing beyond a safe ride to count me among the common folk.
The other differences stayed exactly where they were, but the language carried his worries and his opinions across to me in the form in which he lives them, and that is what made the phrase possible. I had written earlier about revising my Kannada before trips to Bangalore, and that revision has bought me something no report can, which is the city’s growth and its politics as they look from the driver’s seat.
Nearly two decades ago I wrote about the north-south divide from a southern vantage point, and I wrote it aggrieved. My lived experiences indicated that the north was unwilling to even accede mindspace to the south. Of the migrant groups I have seen, those from the Hindi belt assimilated the least in the south. A Keralite in Chennai or Delhi speaks Tamil or Hindi with his accent. A Marwari in Kolkata or Tamil Nadu speaks a version of Bengali or Tamil that has the legitimacy of a dialect today. Many Hindi-belt migrants kept speaking the language they expected the rest of the country to speak. I believed, with sufficient basis, that one part of the country did not grant another part the right to exist in its imagination. Years outside Tamil Nadu, speaking other people’s languages, put me on the other side of that sentence, because I have since been the one who arrives and the one who learns. The grievance I wrote with was real.
The failure ran in both directions. At my undergraduate institute in Rajasthan, I watched Tamil students spend years there and learn nothing beyond two phrases of Hindi: “kitna hua ji?” and “kafi hai”, and I put it down to incompetence more than to any hostility toward the language. Nobody was refusing Hindi, but nobody was trying it either.
The same argument returns online every few months. The Centre moves to bring Hindi into schooling in some form in the south, and accounts from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka announce the end of their culture. These are influencers and social media warriors, some of them malicious and others playing to populist sentiment because it pays. The grievance underneath has a basis, as mine once did, but their method does not. The man on the road is a different kind of person, mostly not political, and what he believes about politics reaches him through his phone.
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The language fight carries two objections to Hindi that come from opposite directions. The Dravidian camp objects to its Sanskrit lineage, and the south-indian-right-wing objects to the Persian and Arabic vocabulary it shares with Urdu. Hindi descends from Sanskrit through the Prakrits, and the Persian and Arabic layer arrived later through centuries of court and market. Telugu is Dravidian at its core and carries a great deal of Sanskrit vocabulary, as do Kannada and Malayalam, and many of the people who invoke the Dravidian name speak Telugu at home. Tamil has the least Sanskrit influence of the four, though the least is not none, because Sanskrit words appear even in the Sangam literature.
From where I stand, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala make less of this noise. I have lived and travelled in those places, and what I saw is anecdotal but consistent. A person with a basic school education there can usually manage some Hindi, haltingly, and does not treat it as an insult. Both languages carry the Sanskrit layer, so quarrelling with Hindi would mean quarrelling with a part of one’s own vocabulary.
The policy that sets off these fights is more flexible than the fights suggest. Under the National Education Policy the three languages are the choice of states, regions and schools, with at least two native to India, and Hindi is not mandated. A Kerala village on the Karnataka border can make Kannada its third language.
The distrust has a history. The draft of that policy carried a paragraph that would have made Hindi mandatory in non-Hindi states, and the Centre dropped it after protests. The Centre has also withheld school funds from Tamil Nadu over its refusal to adopt the formula. Those are grievances about policy design and money, and the text that was finally issued does not impose a language.
Tamil Nadu had the control, the resources and the political support to protect its own language, since its government alternated between two Dravidian parties for almost six decades, and the language they invoke is the one whose grammar slips in the very posts that defend it.
Film songs reach more people than any grammar book, and they are increasingly written by actors, directors and composers, with errors of tense and sentence construction. In the Tamil film Thunivu, a Tamilian slaps a migrant tea shop worker for no reason, and the scene plays to the gallery.
The migrants pay for the narrative. Last December, a carpenter from Uttar Pradesh was stabbed in Coimbatore after two local men struck up a conversation with him. He answered in Hindi, and an argument broke out, according to news reports. Days later, four teenagers attacked a young man from Odisha with sickles near Tiruttani and posted the video on social media. The police said it was a personal altercation and not an attack on a north Indian, although their own account says it began with a conversation in Hindi. Police accounts are not the last word in cases like these. Bangalore has a sizeable Tamil population, and the logic of the online fight works in both directions.
The language fight is the last card a state government plays when its record on governance runs out.
My driver’s own list of grievances had no place on it for language. He did not mention Hindi once, and what he did mention was the price of everything else.
