How India’s many languages can be used as an educational resource

A new project by the Tamil Nadu government identifies the potential of multilingualism to become an educational resource

“We don’t oppose Hindi. We oppose only the imposition of Hindi,” announced Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on January 25 this year. The occasion was Anti-Hindi Martyrs’ Day. Led by E.V. Ramasamy, popularly known as Periyar, during the freedom struggle, and through the 50s and 60s by C.N. Annadurai and others in the DMK, the fierce anti-Hindi protests not only dislodged the Indian National Congress from Tamil Nadu but made a resounding statement about the very nature of Indian federalism: that the principle of unity in diversity, embodied in the Constitution, may not be trifled with.

Yet, the habit of seeing language diversity as a problem has led successive central governments to try to ‘solve’ it by privileging Hindi — which doesn’t amount to actually teaching it in any effective way. The two-language formula has been chanted as a mantra for decades, even as leaders mouth platitudes about protecting the ‘mother tongues’.

At long last, however, in one State — Tamil Nadu — the bitterness left by linguistic double-talk seems to be giving way to a constructive as well as creative approach. Language is being seen through the lens of ‘education for all’ in a federal, egalitarian India. As Stalin went on to say: “We are fond of Tamil, but that doesn’t mean we hate any other language… Those who wish to impose Hindi consider it a symbol of dominance. Just like they think there should be only one religion, they think there should be only one language.”

Hindi is the mother tongue of only 41% of the population, while the country’s Hindi speakers constitute just 53%. But exactly how many languages are there in India? According to the Census of India, 2018, ‘No fewer than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India, as mother tongues, with 21 of them spoken by 10,000 or more people.’

The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution lists 22 official languages, while the People’s Linguistic Survey, run by Bhasha Research and Publication Centre with a team of linguists, social historians and volunteer-activists under the leadership of G.N. Devy, puts the total number of languages at 780 and the number of different scripts at 66.

Given this reality, it is impossible for any Indian who travels, migrates, works, or interacts in any way with others to hold on to a blinkered vision of language. For multilingualism is not just a cultural quirk prevalent in the Indian subcontinent, but actually an artless and utterly natural way of survival. Pointing out that language is intrinsic to humans, Rama Kant Agnihotri, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Delhi, says: “Languages flow into each other. That is the very nature of language, and that is the way that languages flourish. A language degenerates when it is isolated, or tries to be become more standardised or ‘pure’…”

Stressing the imperative need to change the very way we conceptualise language, and to adopt a “pedagogical paradigm of giving it respect and recognition”, Agnihotri warns that the quality of native multilingualism is far too often curbed in the process of formal education. “When a child enters the school environment, she falls silent….” All languages tend to sound like Greek to her, so rarely is she creatively taught any, including the medium of instruction, which may not be her mother tongue at all. So, instead of helping the child learn anything, as any language would normally do, ‘language’ presents itself as a lock on the right to education. In all these years, too few have been given keys to open it for themselves. No wonder children in many parts of the country drop out before middle school.