Make Love not War

Going Beyond Identity Politics While Thinking about the Vernaculars 

Sailen Routray

Copper plate recording a landgrant by Odia king Purusottama Deba in 1483
(Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons)

If you travel in the shared auto-rickshaws that ply on the roads of the twin cities of Bhubaneswar-Cuttack and work as the muscles of the cities’ transportation system, and you share the auto with a young college-going couple, then often you’ll come across the following phenomenon. Despite the fact that they speak Odia at home, often they would be speaking in Hindi with each other. The fact these are Odia speakers of Hindi will be evident from both the ungrammatical nature of the Hindi being spoken, and its heavily accented texture. Hindi has definitely arrived in the campuses of the Bhubaneswar-Cuttack metropolitan region, and how! Odia is definitely not cool any longer.

But it might not be very productive to see the relationship between the various languages in Orissa through an adversarial prism. But that is what is often done, especially in the spheres of literary and cultural production. For example, poets writing in ‘Indian’ languages such as Kannada, Odia or Punjabi, often are dismissive of poetry written by Indians in English. But many commentators have convincingly argued that this adversarial relationship is of a comparatively recent origin.

For much of India’s cultural history, till the advent of colonialism, a large number of people in most cultural regions were pluri-lingual, spoke a number of languages, and used each one for a specific set of purposes. Amongst litterateurs for example, Brajanatha Badajena, a prolific Odia author who wrote the first recognizable piece of long narrative prose fiction in Odia in the eighteenth century, also wrote in Hindi and Sanskrit amongst other languages. Most Odia writers, throughout the documented history of the literary use of the language, were at least bilingual, if not in possession of the use of more than two languages.

It must be said that often the relationship between languages in precolonial India, even if non-adversarial, was hierarchical. As Sheldon Pollock has so brilliantly shown us, a large number of the modern Indian vernaculars arose in the second millennium of the Christian Era out of a process of contestation between what he terms as the Sanskrit Cosmopolis and the emergent political formations that had their lives intertwined with the vernaculars.

But the relationship between the vernaculars and Sanskrit was not an adversarial one; they existed as a part of the same cultural universe with Sanskrit often providing the templates of cultural usage. There was perhaps never a fight between, for example, a ‘Sanskrit-ite’ and a ‘Bengali’. This was so for a very simple reason. These language-based identities simply did not exist for a large number of speakers of Indian languages.

Letters and digits of Odia Script (Wikimedia Commons)

It was perfectly possible for a Brahmin hailing from the Midnapore area of north-Orissa/South Bengal in the early modern period working in the court of the Nawabs of early eighteenth century Murshidabad, to speak the north-Orissa dialect of Odia at home, do all his (then, it was almost always a ‘he’) official work in Persian, converse with neighbours  in Bangla, write bhajans for lord Jagannatha in the standard kataki Odia, and compose philosophical treatises in Sanskrit without necessarily identifying oneself as ‘Odia’, Medinpuriaa’, ‘Bengali’ or ‘Persian’.

It is not necessarily that most identities including linguistic identities were fluid/fuzzy in pre-colonial India, as commentators such as Sudipta Kaviraj have argued. The fact of the matter was perhaps far simpler. Language was simply not the basis of identity formation. This meant that each language that a speaker had, was used for specific purpose(s), and specific usage did not congeal into specific identities, as Lisa Mitchell has shown for the Deccan in general and Telugu in particular. What I want to argue here is a general normative point from which we’ll come back to the specific case of Odia and Orissa. The position I want to state is this – the very usage of language to further the aims of identity-based politics in India has harmed them by uncoupling them from their ethical and creative moorings.

Orissa was the first province/state to be created on a linguistic basis in India in the year 1936. This took place after a struggle of around fifty years for uniting all regions of British India that had a majority of Odia speakers. Four jātis – Brahmins, Karana/Kāyasths, Khandāyats, and self-proclaimed ‘Rajput’s, were primarily active in this movement for unification (called desa misrana) of Odia-speaking areas of British India. Brahmins, Karana/Kāyasths, Rajputs, and to some extent Khandayats, still retain control over state-level politics in the state. For around 38 of the last 40 years, Orissa has had a Karana chief minister.  This is curious since SCs and STs (a large number of adivasi communities in Orissa have their own languages) consist of nearly forty percent of Orissa’s population.

But while doing ethnographic research in Orissa’s countryside, I have come across a still more curious phenomenon; in Odia-medium government schools, Brahmin, Karana/Kāyasths, Khandāyats, and Rajputs seem conspicuous by their absence. This observation needs to be corroborated by hard data. But the broad pattern is unavoidable; the same jātis that were active in the first third of the twentieth century in fashioning a language-based identity (that eventually led to the creation of the first state created in India on a linguistic basis in 1936) are now abandoning the language wholesale.

At the same time, the structures of power that this language-based identity politics created seems to have entrenched the privileges and positions of these four dominant jātis in Orissa. By creating a type of politics where it is possible to have the identity of an ‘Odia’ without being able to speak the language properly, language-based identity politics has consolidated upper caste power in the state. Because of the unique dominance of language-based identity politics in Orissa, and the exclusivist appropriation of this politics by the upper castes, the stirrings of the subaltern social groups that were vocal in articulating their concerns in cultural regions such as the Tamil and the Maratha ones were subdued in Odia-speaking areas.

This has had a set of peculiar effects. Let us give only one set of examples. Because of the fact that most skilled software and telecommunications engineers seem to come from these four dominant jātis (again, this is anecdotal and needs to be corroborated by hard data), and these jātis have for all practical purposes abandoned Odia language for other ‘hipper’ languages such as Hindi and/or English, Odia is perhaps the only major Indian language for which ‘Google’ search function is not available. Similarly, most mobile phone companies available for sale in India did not have text-messaging facilities in Odia for the longest time; this state of affairs has changed only relatively recently. These are only two instances: the examples can be multiplied.

Cover page of 'Barnabodha'
6th edition of an Odia primer printed in 1896
Author - Madhusudan Rao (1853-1912)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

Since the modernising upper-caste elite has abandoned Odia, and has set itself up as an aspirational class for other social groups, the language now finds it difficult to transition into the ‘post-modern’, ‘post-technological’ era. A conclusion is inescapable now; language-based identity politics and concerns surrounding power have entrenched older forms of jāti-centered political structures in Orissa. Now when the returns from such politics seem to dry up, the four dominant jātis of karanas/Kāyasths, Brahmins, Rajputs, and Khandāyats seems to have abandoned the language.

I want to argue that such a turn of events is unavoidable. In the traditional Indian conception, language or speech (vāc) is a devi, a goddess. If language is used for instrumental purposes, as most identity-based politics does, such a process will create significant distortions. This is not to argue that we abandon our vernaculars. I completely disagree with dalit-bahujan scholars who seem to argue for embracing English and abandoning the vernaculars.

The future of India lies in a plural linguistic universe where the dominance of English and Hindi needs to be contested. But language-based identity in Orissa does not seem to have produced desirable results. Perhaps while speaking and talking about languages we need to get back to the original sense of play and love that our vernaculars invoke. We need to stop playing ‘politics’ with it. We need to make love with our languages, not war.

Note: A Kannada version of this essay was published with the title ‘Odia Matanaaduvudu Hemmeya Vishayavenalla (It is not a matter of pride to speak Odia)’ in the year 2014, as a part of the Deepavali Special issue on Indian Languages of the Kannada newspaper Prajavani. The relevant page numbers are 276-278. Copyright rests with the author.