"If 70% don’t speak Hindi as their mother tongue, the question of Hindi becoming the official language or the national language of India doesn’t arise" 💜💜💜

On Prof. Ganesh N Devy | In today’s Times of India

#newspaperinlearning

So happy to see Prof. G N. Devy’s interview featured in today’s Times of India, where he emphasises on the need for preserving India’s multilingual character.

But first… Who is this 75-year old Ganesh N Devy? And what are his unique achievements?

Well, G N Devy is a Professor of English who had left his illustrious academic career in Gujarat, for the noble cause of supporting and preserving the diverse cultures and languages of the innumerable indigenous communities of India.

He is an illustrious academic who took upon himself the noble task of doing a nation-wide survey of Indian languages - to identify, document and understand them; especially languages of fragile communities such as nomadic, coastal, island, hill and forest communities.

The Reason?

The previous linguistic survey of the languages of India was done almost a century ago, in British India, that is quite outdated by today’s standards. The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) was a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, conducted between 1894 and 1928.

This monumental ‘British India’ project was the first systematic linguistic survey of the region and was spearheaded by George Abraham Grierson, an Irish linguist and member of the Indian Civil Service).

The survey described 733 languages and dialects. Grierson employed school teachers for much of the data collection, and the absence of trained linguists did lead to several deficiencies in the survey.

During the Post-Independence period, the Government of India initiated two similar surveys, which are yet to be completed.

That’s hence G. N. Devy took it upon himself to bridge the missing gap, and undertook this massive survey, carried out by scholars, writers and activists in partnership with members of different speech communities.

Times of India, 11 May 2025 | Chennai Edition

To this end, he had founded the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), a massive project, which involved around 3,000 volunteers to survey and document all the living languages of India, thereby documenting 780 languages. A survey that resulted in 50 multilingual volumes.

Coming back –

He is an influential literary critic, who works with DNT communities, leading to the creation of the DNT-Rights Action Group.

A voracious writer who has written and edited around ninety books in multiple languages (English, Marathi, and Gujarati) covering literary criticism, anthropology, education, linguistics, and philosophy. His notable books include After Amnesia (1992), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award, Of Many Heroes (1997), A Nomad Called Thief (2006), and The Crisis Within (2017).

A passionate linguaphile, known for his extensive work in language preservation and advocacy for marginalized communities in India.

An accomplished academician, who founded the Adivasi Academy, in Tejgadh, Gujarat, to support and preserve the cultures and languages of Adivasi (indigenous) communities.

A veteran linguist who established the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, in Baroda to focus on linguistic research and publication.

An organic intellectual, in the Gramscian sense, who is also the Founder of the Dakshinayan Movement - A movement of artists, writers, and intellectuals, founded in response to growing intolerance.

A Padma Shri awardee, and a recipient of numerous other awards including the Linguapax Prize (2011), the Prince Claus Award (2003), and the SAARC Literary Award (2001).

A grassroots activist, whose work bridges academic scholarship and grassroots activism, focusing on linguistic diversity, the rights of marginalized communities, and cultural preservation in India.

[On an aside, doubly happy to note that Professor G. N. Devy was with us in the Department of English to give the TG Narayan Endowment lecture, 12 years ago, on 16th December 2013. You may want to read on that, on our past post HERE.]

G N Devy releasing the sixth issue of Eclectic Representations in MCC

Hence, so happy to see G. N. Devy’s interview featured in today’s Times of India, where he emphasises on the need for preserving India’s multilingual character.

In a candid chat with Kamini Mathai, Ganesh N Devy opens up on epistemic shifts, and the future of language in the AI Age, in today’s Sunday Edition of Times of India.

It is in India’s multilingual character that Indianness can be located, says Devy.

Kamini: There has been a pushback against the three-language policy from some states. As a linguist, what are your views on it?

It is good as a normative policy. However, imposing it on all language groups in India is a bad idea as it forces people to study languages that are not in their linguistic family.

Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan family, making it easier for Punjabi speakers to learn but harder for those speaking Dravidian languages such as Kannada or Tamil.

Never in our long history have we had any single pan-Indian national language. India has always been multilingual, and it is in its multilingual character that Indianness can be located.

How did Hindi come to be seen as a ‘unifying’ language?

Hindi was the colonial choice as the number of kingdoms under British rule was much larger in the Hindi-speaking area. So, it became an important language ‘functionally’ speaking until the 19th century, as English was not universally understood by princes.

Post Independence, the Constituent Assembly decided there would be no single national language, but Hindi or English could be used for inter-state communication for 15 years.

Though Hindi was expected to replace English, it could not as it lacks the vocabulary for full administrative or legal use. In fact, no Indian language has the capacity to replace English as the medium of communication.

You contest the numbers that show a growth in Hindi speakers. Why is that?

Because Hindi was expected to replace other languages, it became necessary for the Union govt to show that there is constant growth in the language.

During the 2011 census, which was the last census done and for which data was released only in 2018, the citizens of India provided 19,569 names of mother tongues.

Of these, close to 17,000 were outright rejected and another 1,474 dumped because not enough scholarly corroboration for them exists. Only 1,369 — roughly 6% — were grouped together under 121 labels and presented to the country as languages. Of these, 22 are called the scheduled languages.

Was the elimination of mother tongues done on a scientific basis?

The architecture of the census has its foundation in the principle of exclusion. To use a term from medical science, this act amounts to imposing an involuntary aphasia on citizens.

In this instance, the numbers on whom it is imposed run into crores. The logic was that a language deserving respectability should not have less than 10,000 speakers. On no scientific grounds, a fair decision, but the practice continues.

Most languages I encountered during my linguistic survey had no written form, relying on oral traditions.

The Gondhali community in Maharashtra, for instance, ‘wrote’ in the air — one person moved their arms to convey sentences, and the other understood. This invisible script has been passed down for generations.

When you start looking closely, you will also find that most of the language groupings in the census are forced.

How has this helped Hindi ‘grow’?

In 1971, 20 crore of India’s 54-crore population were listed as Hindi speakers. By 2011, that number jumped to 52 crore, with the proportion rising from 36.9% to 43.6%.

The data for Hindi has been bolstered by adding the speakers of nearly 50 other languages. This includes Bhojpuri — claimed as mother tongue by five crore speakers, and with its own cinema, theatre and literature — as well as languages in Rajasthan, Himachal, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Bihar claimed by six crore people.

Even a language in Maharashtra called Pawari is listed under Hindi. Its speakers do not understand Hindi well, and Hindi speakers do not understand Pawari either.

If we were to remove these languages that are forced to sit uncomfortably with Hindi, only 32% would speak Hindi as their mother tongue.

If 70% don’t speak Hindi as their mother tongue, the question of Hindi becoming the official language or the national language of India doesn’t arise. India has no national language — only official ones.

What is the future of language in the AI age?

Nearly 75% of the world’s natural languages are in decline or nearing extinction. Globalisation, with its push for cultural uniformity, has accelerated this loss.

A similar decline occurred 8,000 years ago with the shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian economies.

The crisis is intensified by AI. Neurologists and linguists warn of reduced memory and disappearing grammar structures, such as the past tense.

What about Indian languages?

India is home to one in eight of the world’s languages. With the deaths of the last Bo speaker in the Andamans and the last Majhi speaker in Sikkim, their languages died too.

Many coastal and nomadic languages have vanished, and tribal ones are fading. The word stock is dwindling too. People now use fewer words; metaphors and proverbs are nearly lost.

In Bengal, for example, heavy code-mixing with English is common. Few can speak a full sentence in pure Bangla. Languages lacking in digital presence like Odia, for instance, will slowly be left behind.

Tamil fares better than Marathi, Telugu, or Bangla, but reading skills among schoolkids remain low. English medium schools are reducing children’s exposure to songs and stories in their mother tongue. As a result, children inherit storylines, not the language,

he signs off, in this insightful interview to The Times of India.

Coming back –

Akin to the concept of epistemic shift, that Devy has mentioned in this above interview, he also talks about a ‘forced aphasia’ something similar to ‘epistemic violence’ that Spivak talks about!

Says Devy -

The most useful indictor of tribal identity is language - the literary imaginations of those communities whose speech traditions face the prospect of forced aphasia.

Most tribal communities in India are culturally similar to tribal communities elsewhere in the world. They live in groups that are cohesive and organically unified.

They show very little interest in accumulating wealth or in using labour as a device to gather interest and capital. They accept a worldview in which nature, man and God are intimately linked, and believe in the human ability to spell and interpret truth.

They live more by intuition than by reason, they consider the space around them more sacred than secular, and their sense of time is personal rather than objective.

The world of the tribal imagination, therefore, is substantially different from that of the non-tribal Indian society.

Once a society accepts a secular mode of creativity, within which the creator replaces God, imaginative transactions assume a selfconscious form.

The tribal imagination, on the other hand, is still to a large extent dreamlike and hallucinatory. It admits fusion between various planes of existence and levels of time in a natural and artless manner.

In tribal stories, oceans fly in the sky as birds, mountains swim in water as fish, animals speak as humans and stars grow like plants. Spatial order and temporal sequence do not restrict the narrative.

This is not to say that tribal creations have no conventions or rules, but simply that they admit the principle of association between emotion and the narrative motif.

Thus stars, seas, mountains, trees, men and animals can be angry, sad or happy. It might be said that tribal artists work more on the basis of their racial and sensory memory than on the basis of a cultivated imagination.

In order to understand this distinction, we must understand the difference between imagination and memory. In the animate world, consciousness meets two immediate material realities: space and time.

We put meaning into space by perceiving it in terms of images. The image-making faculty is a genetic gift to the human mind—this power of imagination helps us understand the space that envelops us.

With regard to time, we make connections with the help of memory; one remembers being the same person today as one was yesterday. The tribal mind has a more acute sense of time than the sense of space.

Somewhere along the history of human civilization, tribal communities seem to have realized that domination over territorial space was not their lot. Thus, they seem to have turned almost obsessively to gaining domination over time.

This urge is substantiated in their ritual of conversing with their dead ancestors: year after year, tribals in many parts of India worship terracotta or carved-wood objects representing their ancestors, aspiring to enter a trance in which they can converse with the dead.

Over the centuries, an amazingly sharp memory has helped tribals classify material and natural objects into a highly complex system of knowledge.

The importance of memory in tribal systems of knowledge has not yet been sufficiently recognized, but the aesthetic proportions of the houses tribals build, the objects they make and the rituals they perform fascinate the curious onlooker.

It can be hard to understand how, without any institutional training or tutoring, tribals are able to design, organise, craft, build and express so well. In contemporary practice, the tribal memory is greatly undermined.

There is a general insistence that tribal children attend schools where non-tribal children attend school, that they use medicines manufactured for others and that they adopt common agricultural practices.

All because the world has very little time to listen patiently to the tribals, with their immense knowledge and creativity. We have decided that what is good for us is good enough for them. In the process we are destroying a rich vein of our cultural heritage.

A proper understanding of the tribal imagination can add to our literature and art. Indian literature has been burdened for the last two centuries by the ‘perspective imagination’ of Western origin.

Because our systems of knowledge have been more or less replaced by Western systems, the tribal is now the only Indian unaffected by the colonial consciousness. To pose the question of memory once again may thus help rekindle our culture.

A vast number of Indian languages have yet remained only spoken, with the result that literary compositions in these languages are not considered ‘literature’. They are a feast for the folklorist, anthropologist and linguist, but to a literary critic they generally mean nothing.

Similarly, several nomadic Indian communities are broken up and spread over long distances but survive as communities because they are bound by their oral epics.

The wealth and variety of these works is so enormous that one discovers their neglect with a sense of pure shame.

Some of the songs and stories I heard from itinerant street singers in my childhood are no longer available anywhere.

For some years now I have been collecting songs and stories that circulate in India’s tribal languages, and I am continually overwhelmed by their number and their profound influence on the tribal communities.

The result is that I, for one, can no longer think of literature as something written. Of course, I do not dispute the claim of written compositions and texts to the status of literature; but surely it is time we realize that unless we modify the established notion of literature as something written, we will silently witness the decline of various Indian oral traditions.

That literature is a lot more than writing is a reminder necessary for our times,

says G N Devy, in the introduction to his 2002 book titled, Painted Words.

You may want to read more on G N Devy’s tribute to his friend Mahasweta Devi, on her passing away, in our past post HERE.