How 1,500 languages disappeared from Census data in ten years Premium

The three-part lecture on ‘India as a linguistic civilization’ was part of the Obaid Siddiqui lectures by Archives at NCBS.

When the 1961 census of India was completed, data showed that 1,652 mother tongues were spoken in India. Ten years later, in 1971, the next census took place. This time, circumstances had changed.

The Bangladesh Liberation War broke out in 1971. The uprising by Bangladeshi nationalists to attain independence and self-determination was also a war of two languages – Urdu and Bangla.

(Known as East Pakistan until then, Bangladesh was separated from West Pakistan geographically and located about 1,600 km away. The region comprised a majority of Bengali Muslims who were infuriated by attempts of suppression from West Pakistan including efforts to erase Bangla from administrative, political, cultural and educational spaces.)

This got the Indian government nervous about displaying the country’s language diversity. Subsequently, a condition was introduced that a language would be recognised in the census only if more than 10,000 people spoke it. As a result, the 1971 census had only 109 languages.

That was one of the fascinating excerpts from history that Dr. G.N. Devy, renowned literary scholar and historian, presented before the audience on the second day of Obaid Siddiqi Lectures by the Archives at NCBS.

The three-part lecture by Mr. Devy, who is the recipient of the second Obaid Siddiqi Chair in the History and Culture of Science at the Archives at NCBS, looked at ‘India as a linguistic civilization.’

“Multilingualism and language diversity started receding from the government records in the 1970s. In 10 years between 1961 and ‘71, about 1,500 languages were knocked out from the data, and today when you look at the government data, they recognise only 122 languages. Out of those, 22 are scheduled languages,” said Mr. Devy.