How to Talk About Our Languages

Sailen Routray 

The story of language-based nationalism in India tends to get told through two dominant modes. One mode is situated more or less within nationalist historiography and imagines neat equations between territories, peoples, languages and nations derived blithely from classical European models. The other mode is a critique of this set of stories, and tends to characterise such linguistic nationalism as being representative of particular class interests, and therefore, as not forming the basis for ‘popular’ nationalism.

The book ‘Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue’ by Lisa Mitchell challenges both these modes of narrativising by arguing that before we can posit any relationship between shared ‘mother tongues’ and imagined nations we need to critically interrogate the idea of the historical existence of mother tongues in India.

She uses the example of Telugu to illustrate her points. In the process of political re-organisation of India in the post-independence period that was based on linguistic criteria, the case of Telugu and the state of Andhra Pradesh is an important one. The primary subject of the book is not the Andhra movement per se; rather it takes the pre-history of this movement as its object of analysis.

With the advent of colonialism, the patronage system and technologies of literary production in Telugu underwent a radical transformation in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. With the beginnings of printing and the influences of the imperatives of the colonial educational system, memory was increasingly devalued as a technology of education, with primers taking the place of pundits.

Key to such shifts was the creation of new sets of practices related to lexicography, translation and grammar.  Dictionaries changed from being aids to specific literary practices such as creation of kaavyas to aids in general education that established one-to-one symmetries between languages. The increasingly important practices of translation added on to such processes by naturalising a theory of perfect translatability of all languages and linguistic practices.

Thus, speech registers such as Telugu were transformed from being context-specific tools to ‘languages’ with universal aspirations with which one can transact any social act. Mitchell characterises this shift as a morphing from a heteroglossic social space to a polyglossic / monoglossic one.

This led to a process involving a certain personification of registers of speech such as Telugu wherein languages could be born and they could die. Telugu instead of being a characteristic of a land, started becoming characteristic of a people. This ‘subjectification’ of Telugu paralleled the domestication of western literary forms such as biography and novel, and the concomitant creation of the individual subject.

These processes created language as a foundational category in South India, a category that increasingly commanded the affects of large sections of population in the twentieth century, finally culminating in the creation of linguistic states in the post-colonial period. Mitchell does not see the movement for the creation of a state uniting all Telugu speaking people as reflecting only upper-caste, upper-class interests. She argues that the movement for the creation of Andhra state saw participation by subaltern communities, although the logic of this participation is not reducible to that of linguistic nationalism.

This book has all the markings of a classic. It promises to become indispensible to all future discussions surrounding language, politics, and nationalism in India. It is theoretically astute, light yet surefooted in its arguments, and deserves a wide readership across the human sciences disciplines and among general readers.

Details About the Book: Lisa Mitchell. 2009. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.  281 pp + xx, ISBN 978-0-253-22069-.

Note: A version of this discussion was first published in 2012 in the journal Contemporary South Asia 20(2).