ALL the manifestations of knowledge go to prove that ‘language is eminently a social phenomenon’ (Meillet) and in a sense covers perhaps the widest area of human activities. It is the most common heritage of man. Even the barbarians and uncivilized people, living in the remotest and the darkest corners of the world, have some means of vocal communication that approaches speech or language. However limited, poor, inorganic and complicated it may be, it has the basic quality of communicating to others the feelings and experiences of the social life of a group of people at various levels.

That is how language becomes not only the proud possession of a people, but its invaluable and sure weapon to forge ahead by accumulating knowledge and dispensing it, binding one generation of people to the other and imparting a sense of the continuity of culture, history and tradition. It has been called the oldest witness to history and the socio-cultural progress of man because it has revealed whatever is in him and around him.

Language thus becomes the integral part of man’s individual self as well as of his group consciousness, involving both his subjective thought and world outlook. In short, language is the key to culture and a symbol of man’s conscious effort to capture the past and to plan for the future.

It is this vital yet intricate role of language which links it to almost all the phases of the social life of man. To become a part of society an individual has to achieve a command over a language or languages, first in respect of mere communication of information and ideas and then of feelings and emotions. At least one language is natural to man, the language which is known as one’s mother-tongue, for the sake of convenience. This language comes to him through breathing the air around and through understanding the environment as soon as the crawling and babbling period is over. Even the child’s early attempt at speaking, known as his ‘individual language’, is a stage of acquiring the language that is ultimately to become his mother-tongue.

The term mother-tongue should not always be interpreted rigidly to mean the language of a child’s mother, as even the acquisition of a mother’s language is subject to the capacity of the child to imitate and learn, provided also that the language spoken by the mother is not quite different from the language of the group of people in immediate contact with the child. The problem is so intricate and important that it will be useful to quote an authority.

Professor Otto Jespersen has dealt with the question convincingly in his famous Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. He writes: ‘How does it happen that children in general learn their mother-tongue so well? That this is a problem becomes clear when we contrast a child’s first acquisition of its mother-tongue with the later acquisition of any foreign tongue. The contrast is indeed striking and manifold: here we have a quiet little child, without experience or prepossessions; there a bigger child, or it may be a grown-up person with all sorts of knowledge and powers: here a haphazard method of procedure; there the whole task laid out in a system (for even in the school books that do not follow the old grammatical system there is a certain definite order of progress from more elementary to more difficult matters): here no professional teachers, but chance parents brothers and sisters, nursery-maids and playmates; there teachers trained for many years especially to teach languages: here only oral instruction; there not only that but reading-books, dictionaries and other assistance. And yet this is the result: here complete and exact command of the language as a native speaks it, however stupid the children; there in most cases, even with people otherwise highly gifted, a defective and inexact command of the language. On what does this difference depend?’

 

Then, rejecting some of the answers to this question as casual and partial, Jesperson gives his own ideas in the following words: ‘The real answer in my opinion (which is not claimed to be absolutely new in every respect) lies partially in the child itself, partly in the behaviour towards it of the people around it. In the first place, the time of learning the mother-tongue is the most favourable of all, namely, the first years of life. If one assumes that mental endowment means the capacity for development, without doubt all children are best endowed in their first years: from birth onwards there is a steady decline in the power of grasping what is new and of accommodating itself to it…

‘Further, we must remember that the child has far more abundant opportunities of learning his mother-tongue than one gets, as a rule, with any language one learns later. He hears it from morning to night, and, be it noted, in its genuine shape…, the language comes to him as a fresh, ever-bubbling spring. Even before he begins to say anything himself, his first understanding of the language is made easier by the habit that mothers and nurses have of repeating the same phrases with slight alternations, and at the same time doing the thing which they are talking about… Then the child has, as it were, private lessons in its mother-tongue… The child has another priceless advantage: he hears the language in all possible situations and under such conditions that language and situation ever correspond exactly to one another and mutually illustrate one another. Gesture and facial expression harmonize with the words uttered and keep the child to a right understanding… Along with what he himself sees the use of, he hears a great deal which does not directly concern him, but goes into the little brain and is stored up there to turn up again later.’

 

These minute and meaningful observations of one of the foremost theoreticians of language do not only determine the nature of the mother-tongue but also its place in the child’s mental and emotional development. This will be the language through which the child is going to sustain itself in his future intellectual and emotional crises, for it has become a part of his being and his personality. This language is not only moulded by the lips of men and women but it moulds also the hearts and characters of those who use it without taxing and exacting effort. It is not only a source of information, but also of association ‘embodied in each word or phrase, as perfume in a flower’.

 

And now the lingua franca. There are countries with a single language (with certain spoken variations and dialects); they do not create such linguistic tangles as those with a variety of languages, claiming different areas and populations. A monolingual country has no problem of a national, official or state language. The mother-tongue of its inhabitants is their common and national language also. There may of course be different levels of the spoken, literary, scholarly and national aspects of the same common language, but they will neither be mutually exclusive nor rivals of each other.

The question of a lingua franca takes quite a different shape in a multilingual country. It can best be illustrated by a study of the linguistic situation in India where the history of linguistic development has been very complex, uneven and controversial. According to Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, first the Negroids came into India from the West; they settled down and then passed on to other regions. Then came the Proto-Australoids; they inhabited the Indian soil, absorbing in themselves the remnants of the Negroid language. A few tribal groups of the Austrics are still found in India, retaining their own speech structure. The Dravidians were the next to cross over into this country, sometime during the fourth millennium B.C. They had their own agglutinating language, the Dravid, which must have been the main language of Pre-Aryan India. The Dravidians built a flourishing civilization before they lost their hold over northern India to the advancing Aryans, who came pouring in during the second millennium B.C. with Sanskrit as their basic language.

In spite of the long process of Sanskritisation, the Dravid has retained its individuality and covers the whole of the southern peninsula with its four distinct forms of speech, if not more. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam have their different regions and are used as the mother-tongue, the literary and cultural language of the inhabitants of those regions, but it is impossible to say which to these could serve as the common language of the whole Dravid area.

The same has been the case in northern India. Sanskrit, the first and foremost language, or the trimmed and refined Prakrit of the old Indo-Aryan family, could never become the language of the common man. We do not know much about the various other forms of speech prevalent at the time, but there must have been some for, if there were none, how could they have been used by Gautam, the Buddha, for disseminating his teachings among the people. Even at that stage it was impossible to envisage a lingua franca for the whole of India or even for its northern part. Pali and Saurseni (which is claimed by some scholars to be the source of even Marathi) seem to hold the ground for a long time but before they could assume the status of a common language, there was the apabhransa revolution, giving shape and form to various sub-regional languages and dialects in its wake.

 

It is beyond the scope of this short article to trace the history of Indian languages, but what has to be noted here is the lack of a possible claim of any one of the various languages to be named as the lingua franca prior to the middle of the 18th century. It was only during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that some of the European and Indian Orientalists began to describe Hindustani, in a very vague and disputed sense, as the lingua franca of India; being a refined form of the khari boli of the Delhi region, it had spread far and wide for various historical, cultural and political reasons.

Almost all the languages and dialects of northern India had branched off from a single stem, but historical forces had not given them equal opportunities for development. The lack of an ideal of national unity and other regional limitations had made them only regional dialects. Hindustani too, in spite of its wide range, could not shape itself into a real lingua franca of India, due to the strong loyalty of the people to local dialects and their attachment to religious literatures. Everyone had a mother-tongue, a regional language and, in some cases, a cultural or religious language, but no single common or national language. We should now try to understand the meaning and scope of what is meant by a lingua franca before proceeding to discuss its relationship with the mother-tongue, in case the two are different.

 

Lingua franca has been defined as a language (or jargon) used over wide areas as auxiliary or secondary to the indigenous form of speech for developing an inter-lingual form of intercourse. Three points emerge very clearly out of this definition. The lingua franca of a country need not be one of the languages of the country where it is adopted. It serves only as a means of intercourse without claiming to be the language of scholarship and culture. And lastly, it is not a substitute for the mother-tongue, but only an auxiliary or secondary mode of speech for inter-lingual intercourse.

It is not necessary for us to accept all the premises, but we have to reckon with a situation where, at times, the lingua franca (developed naturally or artificially) is made to suppress other languages, mother-tongues, of those who are ready to accept the lingua franca only as an auxiliary form of expression and not as their mother-tongue. The presence of several languages in a country is only a linguistic problem so long as it does not become a part of the political game – the manouvering to impose a certain favoured language over others or by suppressing other languages through orders, laws and chauvinistic appeals in the name of patriotism, national unity and the smooth-running of administration. No doubt the unity of language is one of the strongest bonds of cooperation, cohesion and organization, but its imposition will be the very negation of all these binding elements. A lingua franca must grow out of the needs of the people speaking different languages; it should have a natural development in the womb of the desire of various peoples to cooperate and live together.

The relation of the mother-tongue to the lingua-franca can have various forms according to the linguistic affinity or variety of the two, as the case may be. If both are the same, the question of adjustment does not arise. There may be some difference between the day-to-day spoken form and the literary and learned form of the same speech, but it will hardly be utilized by the politicians for their own ends. If, on the other hand, the mother-tongue and the lingua franca are not the same, the differences can be exploited for political, social, religious and cultural ends and can come in the way of cooperation and harmony, stiffening the attitudes of the exponents of the divergent languages.

 

This should not detain us long here as it is not always the linguistic or educational reason which magnifies the differences, but other factors come in and befog the issue beyond recognition. First it was Urdu, in the garb of Hindustani, which practically played the role of a lingua franca, being the most common and intelligible language of the North, from the N.W.F.P. Kashmir, Sind, Baluchistan and the Punjab to the borders of Bengal in undivided India, with big pockets in the provinces of Bengal, C.P. (now Madhya Pradesh), Hyderabad (now Andhra Pradesh), Madras, Mysore, Bombay and Gujarat. Political shifts and landslides, coupled with certain other factors, made it impossible for Urdu to hold its ground.

On another front, Gandhiji began to plead for the adoption of Hindustani as the lingua franca, the national and the state language of India. Hindustani was to be a blend of Urdu and Hindi at speech-level. No doubt it could serve as a lingua franca on that level, but it could evolve into a real and potential national language only in the course of time. The dream of Gandhiji could not materialize and the law-makers decided to adopt Hindi as the official language of the new sovereign republic.

 

Hindi, as it is in use today, is so artificially and unnaturally Sanskritised that it has failed to serve its purpose as a state language or a lingua franca. Dr. Tarachand once remarked that the proposed lingua franca ‘will not come into competition with any of the great provincial languages of India and in no way retard their growth and development. It may not be forced on any one, but it will be learnt by all those who desire to participate in inter-provincial affairs.’ He had the Hindustani of Gandhiji in view when he wrote this, but now it is quite a different picture.

Besides being the official language of India, Hindi is also the state language of U.P., Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and the Punjab. It is the mother-tongue, too, of the millions of people residing in these regions. So there are three different layers of Hindi: Hindi, the mother-tongue of the Hindi-speaking people; Hindi, the state language of various states; and Hindi, the official language of the Union of India. There is bound to be confusion about the nature and standard of this language, about its scope and place in educational and cultural activities. The way the protagonists of Hindi seem to obliterate the various levels smacks of a desire on their part for linguistic supremacy – and the speakers of other languages are rightly afraid of the linguistic anarchy that this generates around the question of the official language.

 

In spite of opposition, protests and confusing proposals and counter-proposals, Hindi has been accepted as the official language of India and we must cooperate to make it genuinely the language of inter-state intercourse: easy, expressive, concise and up-to-date, so that it may prove a cogent link between the speakers of different languages. But, as it is, every thinking man knows that languages are not made to order; the more they are thrust upon people, the more they are disliked and resisted. Those people whose mother-tongue is Hindi may be proud of the fact that their language has been raised to the status of the official language, but they must also know that howsoever small a group or community may be, it loves its own mother-tongue with the same vehemence, reverence and feeling as they love their’s. Any attempt to suppress it will amount to injustice from every point of view because no other language, not even the lingua franca, can take the place of one’s mother-tongue.

We have seen the importance of the mother-tongue in the life of a child, as discussed by Jespersen. Almost all the educationists and linguists are unanimous that education imparted through the medium of the mother-tongue, at least at the primary and secondary stages, is the best mode of integrating the development of a child. The aim of all education is to equip man to develop his creative faculties in such a way that he may play his part in building the social order in which he lives as well as his own personality. To enable man to become a creative partner in the process of social development and adjustment can only be possible if knowledge and action harmonize and go hand in hand during his educational period. This will be facilitated by making education available to the child in the most natural way.

 

The importance of the mother-tongue in education is so glaringly obvious that it can hardly be exaggerated. No education can be complete only through intellectual or informative importation; emotional development is equally necessary for producing a man of true knowledge and true feeling. The emotive value of speech is in no way less important than its informative value, and if we understand its full implications we will realize the value of the mother-tongue in the life of an individual as well as a member of a social group.

India has experienced education through the medium of a foreign tongue. Much has been said for and against this, but what cannot be denied is the colossal waste of energy involved in acquiring even a working knowledge of the alien language. Exceptions apart, very few people can be found to have artistic command over a language which is not their’s and when it has to be used creatively, even the greatest scholars have been found wanting. Creative writing is not the mere use of words as they occur in dictionaries or books of idioms; the writer has to speak through images, symbols and associations. All these have their roots in one’s early association of words with ideas, thoughts, emotions and their background; it is almost impossible to create them artificially.

 

Therefore, usually, a writer is successful only in his own language. No doubt he can express himself in as many languages as he has the power and patience to learn but, when it comes to the pouring out of one’s soul and the depiction of the intricacies of one’s deep emotions, the language nearest to his heart will be the language which he learnt in the lap of his mother. No arguments are required to prove that the education imparted in the mother-tongue is better than that acquired through a foreign language and any number of examples can be cited from the histories of various literatures of establish that very few poets have been recognized as great outside their own language.

Having understood these ramifications of the linguistic situation as it obtains in India today, we can then stand on the more solid ground of democratic progress. The Indian Constitution recognizes some fourteen national languages, with Hindi as the Union language. The question of linguistic states has been solved to a great extent and we can be sure that, as the democratic traditions gain ground and our country comes out of the revivalist morass, other minor maladjustments will also be set right; linguistic boundaries will be adjusted, minorities shall be protected and the Union language shall cease to be a rival of the other great regional languages. But still the question of the place of Urdu – one of the fourteen national languages in India – remains a big enigma.

As a writer in Urdu, and as one who believes it to be his mother-tongue, I have doubts if government, political leaders and social reformers, writers and thinkers in other languages, exponents of the right of education in the mother-tongue and educational philosophers have given sufficient thought to the right of Urdu to have equal status with the other national and regional languages of India. Urdu has no region of its own except Kashmir, which is not its linguistic region, for obviously Urdu cannot be the mother-tongue of most of the Kashmiris.

 

Urdu is being constantly termed as only an off-shoot or variety of Hindi, a foreign language, a language of the Muslims, an instrument of communal hatred and an enemy of India unity. All these contradictory things are said in the same breath to suppress it. Boys with Urdu as their mother-tongue are denied the right of education in their own language. People who know only Urdu are not allowed to move the law courts in their mother-tongue. All this is happening in various parts of the country and no voice is raised against this injustice.

Urdu is made to exist in a vacuum, having no soil of its own. The cries and pleadings of the Urdu-speaking public have so far not been heard only because our thinkers and educationists, linguists and brother-writers in other languages have not made this their own cause. However, this may be a passing phase but, nevertheless, an agonizing phase. All of us who believe in the innate goodness of democratic progress still hope that Urdu will ultimately flourish as the mother-tongue of many and shall contribute to the building up of a powerful, just and progressive social order in India, for Urdu has had a strong democratic and progressive tradition.

 

* Reproduced from ‘A Language for India’, Seminar 11, July 1960, pp.19-23.