“Wall of Words”: Fakir Mohan Senapati, Premchand, and The Language Controversies in Late Colonial India

Linguistic controversies in one particular region of India often get treated as discrete units, as if such controversies have never had any bearing on other languages and regions in the subcontinent. I attempt a corrective to such insular approaches by juxtaposing various linguistic identity-based struggles in nineteenth-century India to demonstrate that there are several common players who operate across various linguistic zones and who are often inconsistent in their views and analyses. This essay examines the various linguistic controversies by organizing them along three broad axes with overlaps: the specialist, the instrumentalist, and the literary. The first set of controversies was conducted in jargon-ridden scholarship within newly emerged disciplinary practices such as philology, pedagogy, and linguistics. The secondary set of controversies was the concerns of intellectuals, missionaries, educationists, and scholars who were engaged in discharging juridical–administrative responsibilities. At the tertiary level, the controverters comprised the practitioners of literary culture. The essay shows how the cultural expressions within different linguistic groups inherit and share these derivative discourses while employing linguistic strategies as part of their linguistic–identitarian aesthetics. The essay, finally, argues for a need to evolve a more integrative methodology to “do” comparative literature in South Asia.