Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Letter from Potti Sriramulu addressed to B. Lakshminarayana, a Madras lawyer, dated September 15, 1952, reproduced in the English-language periodical Indian Republic, December 21, 1952, and cited in B. Sreeramulu, Socio-Political Ideas and Activities of Potti Sriramulu (Bombay: Himalaya, 1988), p. 198. 2. K. V. Narayana Rao, The Emergence of Andhra Pradesh (Bombay: Popular Prakasan, 1973), p. 32; Sreeramulu, Socio-Political Ideas, pp. 200–201; B. Maria John, Linguistic Reorganisation of Madras Presidency (Nagercoil: Ajith, 1994). 3. Following Nehru’s announcement at the end of 1952, Andhra State was officially brought into existence the following year on October 1, 1953. Although subsequently largely erased from public historical memory, the inclusion of the city of Madras within a new Andhra province was actually the central issue that motivated Sriramulu’s decision to undertake his fast. By 1952, and even earlier, there had existed widespread agreement that the districts consisting of an uncontested Telugu-speaking majority should be formed into a new state (Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 114). It was the controversy over the multilingual city of Madras that was holding up action, and it was to demand a Telugu linguistic state with Madras as its capital that Sriramulu explicitly launched his famous fast. Although Sriramulu’s death is today celebrated as the act that launched the agitations that finally brought into being a separate Telugu state, because Nehru’s decision to form a new Andhra State explicitly excluded the city of Madras, Sriramulu would most certainly have considered his fast a failure. 4. Sheldon Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998), p. 64; Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Coconut and Honey: Sanskrit and Telugu in Pre-Modern Andhra,” Social Scientist 23 (1995), p. 25; Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 16. 5. Amanul Huq, International Mother Language Day: Bangla Souvenir, translated from the original Bangla ed., Ekusher Tamasuk by Ahsanul Hoque, Amanul Huq, and A. U. M. Fakhruddin (Dhaka: Shahitya Prakash, 2004). 6. Paul Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (New Delhi: Sage, 1991), p. 175; Kanwar Jeet Singh, Master Tara Singh and Punjab Politics: A Study of Political Leadership, 1978. 7. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue, p. 1. 8. Controversy over the establishment of Hindi as the sole national language in the decades immediately following independence, particularly in those regions of India (such as the south) where Hindi is not widely spoken, has ensured that English has continued to be used as an official language. 9. Government of India, “Eighth Schedule,” Constitution of India: Updated up to 94th Amendment Act, http://lawmin.nic.in/coi.htm, p. 229 (accessed February 20, 2008).  Notes to pages 5–10 10. The 1961 Census of India—the first census to be conducted following the 1956 All-India Linguistic State Reorganisation—identified 1,652 distinct “mother tongues” in use in India, grouped under 193 language headings and associated with one of four language families: Indo-Aryan (54 languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati), Dravidian (20 languages, including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam), Tibeto-Burman (98 languages), and Austric (20 languages), B. Mallikarjun, “Mother Tongues of India according to the 1961 Census,” Language in India 2, no. 5 (2002), www.languageinindia.com (accessed June 17, 2007). 11. Government of India, Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, “General Note,” http://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_ Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/Language/gen_note.htm (accessed February 20, 2008). 12. Ibid. 13. Government of India, Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, “Scheduled Languages in Descending Order of Speakers’ Strength, 2001,” http://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_Online/ Language/Statement4.htm (accessed February 20, 2008). 14. Government of India, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Education, “Languages and Media of Instruction,” Fifth All-India Educational Survey, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Department of Education, 1990), http://www.education.nic.in/ cd50years/g/Z/H7/0ZH70E01.htm (accessed June 17, 2007). 15. J. C. Sharma, “Multilingualism in India,” Language in India 1, no. 8 (December 2001), http://www.languageinindia.com/dec2001/jcsharma2.html (accessed June 17, 2007). 16. Prior to independence, the British colonial administration separated the states of Bihar and Orissa from Bengal on a linguistic basis in 1936. The Andhra movement was the first successful movement to achieve linguistic statehood following Indian independence in...