Why India is not just Delhi….Pritish Nandy

I just read about Koro, the newest language discovered in the world. It has barely 1200 speakers. Threatened by the growing dominance of Hindi, village elders in a remote corner of Arunachal are trying their best to save it.
The North East is full of many such amazing native languages currently being bludgeoned by the onslaught of modernity and the all pervasiveness of what we have chosen as our national language. In Nagaland, 17 survive at the primary school level and only one at the university. In Manipur, only languages of the Kuki tribe have survived. Hamar and Paite exist. Maites have revived their own script. But smaller languages like Koro, Hruso, Miji, Tagin, Galo, Bokar, Padam Pasi, Sherdukpen, Bugun, Bangru, Idu, Digaru, Miju and Puroik Sulung in Arunachal, Deori and Tiwa in Assam, Chiru and Monsang in Meghalaya and the weaker Khasi languages are almost all gone.

This is just in one tiny corner of India. Look at the vast span of this nation and you will figure why, as India asserts itself as one nation, one people, millions of local voices are being silenced. Many of these are tiny voices but they represent the magic and the mystique of India. As these voices die out, so will songs, poetry, folk tales, theatre, local histories, the rich tapestry of sounds and words that make us the amazing nation we are. So it’s not only about languages vanishing. It’s also about histories and cultures disappearing. It is about traditions, never archived, dying out one by one, to leave behind a richer, stronger but lesser India.

This is the price we are paying for modernity and nationhood. The tiny and specific is bludgeoned into silence as the victorious yell of the majority takes over. Call it democracy if you want. Or you can, like me, see it as the very opposite. Inclusiveness does not mean absorbing everything into one boring mainstream that becomes the nation’s voice. (Like Hollywood speaks for America.) The purpose of nationhood, I would like to believe, is to nurture our differences, keep alive the millions of voices that make us who we are. The minorities are not those who we suffer. The minorities are those who we are. For much as you may like to think you are the Indian mainstream because you rahrah Sachin, wahwah Dabangg or parrot the glib clichés of easy secularism, the truth is we are who we were born as. And that’s why I see nothing wrong when the Kashmiri asserts his identity. You can argue with his semantics when he speaks of azaadi but you can’t argue with his search for identity in a nation where we are all losing ours.

I was born and brought up as a Bengali. Just as Sachin was born and brought up as a Maharashtrian. But like millions of others, we have built our lives and careers under the flag of India. But how much of me is Indian and how much, Bengali? How much of young Aditya Thackeray is Indian and how much, Maharashtrian? Does anyone have an answer? Kamaraj, the great kingmaker of Indian politics, never spoke a word except in Tamil. Yet he was the most powerful Congressman of the sixties. No one saw him as parochial. No one thought he was any less Indian. For because being Indian was not such a big deal in those days. A good Tamilian was automatically a good Indian, just as a good Bengali or a good Maharashtrian. Delhi was not India then. It was just another Union territory where, coincidentally, Parliament was. But every state had its identity, its languages, its cultures, its traditions, its histories intact.

But as Delhi grew more powerful, grabbed more authority, subverted more of our freedoms and our identities, regional conflicts have grown, intensified. We have become less of who we are and more of what India (alias Delhi) wants us to be. In the process, we have given up much more than what we have got. A Commonwealth Games at Rs 70,000 crore may be great for Delhi’s ego but, at that cost, we could have ensured no Indian would have ever gone to bed hungry. We boast of cricket and Bollywood bonding India. But these two, between themselves, have killed off a hundred other sports and a million local subcultures that made us the India we once were: a loose federation of many cultures, many faiths, many identities. There was no one Hinduism like the RSS preaches. There was no one Islam like the Islamists talk of. Every community in every region had its own version of their faith, thus enriching every faith. And no, there was no India, no national language, no Doordarshan.

But there were so many Indias in our hearts, so many languages we spoke and understood, so many ways we talked to each other without hate, rancour, coercion. We were the India we chose to be. Not the India, Delhi wanted us to be.