Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession

Two: A Telling Example

44 t w o A Telling Example The Value of Speech Few stories in contemporary cultural criticism have been more compelling, it would seem, than those that assert a people has been silenced. Often these narratives are delivered in such stark, life-and-death terms that the audience is left with little room to engage dispassionately with the details of the situation and therefore to make a reliable moral assessment of its complexities. The political battles being waged over recognition of the Rajasthani language, for example, rely on the same polarizing rhetoric perhaps familiar from other places and times. That citizens’ nationalist loyalties would be expressed as reverence for their language as “mother tongue” is not perhaps so surprising, given the Romantic idea of the vitality of the nation figured so prevalently in biological metaphors (as Pheng Cheah points out).1 India’s multilingual situation presents an unusual version of such life-and-death, nationalist-minded A Telling Example 45 devotion, since the limits of any single language’s territory cover only a small portion of the map of the nation; the bid to recognize every language group divides fellow citizen against fellow citizen and in the process threatens to dismember the very India such nationalists are asked to pledge their loyalty to. Moreover, the pulls of regional identification become further intensified by other identitarian allegiances. Language nationalists seem to gain power by identifying the language’s limits and concerns in terms synonymous with a caste group’s, to the exclusion of the others, often claiming shrilly that the silence of the group is equivalent to the extinction of the language, and vice-versa. Lisa Mitchell has shown that during the struggles for recognition of the southern Indian language of Telugu as distinct from Tamil, for example , low-caste speakers were urged to die for a language whose claims and attitudes eventually and overwhelmingly represented Brahmin interests.2 In such a climate, academic distinctions between a language and a dialect do indeed have life-and-death consequences for their speakers as they fight to defend the honor of their language in terms that might be politically successful. Often, then, the revered figure of the mother tongue vies with religion— as Paul Brass notes—to produce a particularly potent symbol of national unity.3 To take one strident but typical example, the Rajputana Liberation Front (RLF) in its recent introductory Web site material pits its own highcaste group—the ruling, landowning Rajputs—over another—the priestly Brahmins—to make a claim of persecution: Ever since the establishment of the neo-Brahminist state in 1947 under Pandit Nehru, the Rajasthani language has been targetted for complete destruction . The alien Sanskritic Devanagari was enforced upon the helpless Rajputs, whilst the ancient indigenous Rajput Marathi script was slowly choked to death. Now, our Mahajani only survives in remote regions. A large number of Sanskritic words were enforced upon the Rajputs, leading to a suffocation of the Rajasthani language. Finally, Rajasthani was declared a dialect of Hindi, meaning that the very language of the Rajputs had been taken away from them. Indeed, the Brahmin-Occupied-Government still refuses to accpet [sic] that Rajasthani is or even ever was an independant [sic] language.4 Part of the logic of the nation-state seized on (quite shrewdly) by the RLF is that power legitimizes certain sectarian interests at the expense of others; 46 A Telling Example the decision to make Rajasthani secondary to Hindi is figured here in terms of caste. This same logic might break down infinitely into any number of categories: Rajasthani nationalism, for instance, can be thought of as consonant or competing with Hindi nationalism or with Indian nationalism; likewise, within the contentious category of Rajasthani, groups identified along geographical region, class, and caste vie for hegemonic control of this particular brand of unity. It is in this regard that the RLF publicly applauds the efforts of seemingly like-minded organizations to establish secessionist movements on behalf of the Gujarat cause and the Maratha Hindutva cause, as well as for a free Dalitstan and Mughalstan for the downtrodden (formerly “untouchables”) and Muslims respectively.5 As we investigate in more detail in Chapter 4, the very gesture of mapping these linguistic (as cultural, ethnic) territories separately—as “not us”—creates problems in the name of solving them. While it is worthwhile understanding in more detail how these divisions of...