Languages in India.

Back in 2013 I posted about the New Linguistic Survey of India and its founder, Ganesh Devy; now the New Yorker has run a feature article about him and his work by Samanth Subramanian (archived), and it’s a good read. (Trigger warning: the author is not a linguist, so some statements about language may be upsetting to those of excessively scientific sensibilities.) Some excerpts:

In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli. It, too, refers to language, but its more accurate meaning is “that which is spoken.” In its sense of the oral, it hints at colloquialisms, hybridity, and a demotic that belongs to the streets. The insinuation is that a bhasha is grander and more sophisticated than a boli. The language of language infects how we think about language.

For more than forty years, the distance between these two words has preoccupied the literary scholar Ganesh Devy. He knows precisely when it all began. In 1979, as he was completing his Ph.D. in English literature at Shivaji University, in the Indian city of Kolhapur, he found in the library a commentary on India’s censuses. The 1961 census had identified sixteen hundred and fifty-two “mother tongues”—many of them, like Betuli or Khawathlang, with speakers numbering in the single digits. But the 1971 census listed only a hundred and eight; the hundred-and-ninth entry was “all others.” That made Devy wonder: What had happened to the other fifteen-hundred-odd languages, the various boli deemed too unimportant to name? “The ‘all others’ intrigued me, then it bothered me, and then I got obsessed with it,” Devy said. “Literature is a product of language, so at some point I thought, When I know that so many other languages have been masked, do I not have any responsibility toward them?” […]

Over the years, Devy has taught literature, won the Sahitya Akademi award—perhaps India’s highest literary honor—for a work of literary criticism, crusaded for the rights of India’s Indigenous communities, and founded a tribal academy in a forest two hours outside Vadodara. But the capstone of his career is the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (P.L.S.I.), which has enlisted more than three thousand volunteers to map India’s motley splurge of languages for the first time in a century. The exercise began in 2010, and the results have been published in state-specific volumes bearing olive-green dust jackets, with names like “The Languages of Tripura Part 1” and “The Languages of Kerala and Lakshadweep.” In April, Devy, the chief editor of the project, will submit the manuscripts for five additional volumes before beginning the last book of the series: his diagnosis of the health of India’s languages.

Sometimes a language withers because of customs we consider normal, and even desirable: intermarriage, migration, participation in the global economy. But Devy believes that any progress incapable of giving people the means to keep their language is no progress at all. […] In India, the politics of language have always been especially overt: in the constitution’s aversion to designating a national language; in the north’s leverage over the south; in the demarcation of states along linguistic lines. Invariably, Devy said, the people who speak many of the languages grouped under “all others” in the 1971 census also live on India’s economic margins. In 2010, the death of Boa Sr, a woman in her eighties who was the last known speaker of Bo, a language of the Andaman Islands, marked the extinction of a tribe that had been forcibly resettled around the archipelago and subjugated by the mainland. Bo might have been outlived by another Great Andamanese language, which in turn may feel menaced by Bengali, which itself feels the encroachment of Hindi—languages turning turtle all the way down. […]

Devy and his wife, Surekha, a retired chemistry professor, live in the town of Dharwad, in a small, neat house surrounded by guava and coconut trees. Their shelves are lined with books that have survived repeated cullings of their library. Devy now holds an academic post at a Mumbai university, and he lectures constantly around India; when he’s home, his living room hosts impromptu symposia. One afternoon, some friends dropped in for a chat: an archeologist, a lawyer, a literary scholar, an activist, a college principal. Each took or declined a cup of tea, then waited for the talk to ebb before speaking up, like a pedestrian dashing through a break in traffic. I counted four languages: Hindi, Kannada, English, and Marathi. Devy is in his element in these conversations—so immersed that, on occasion, he will talk over others saying their piece. “I still work four or five hours a day on the P.L.S.I.,” Devy told me. “The rest of the day, I philander in this way.”

Among the books on Devy’s shelves are the maroon volumes of the original Linguistic Survey of India, conducted by an Irishman named George Grierson between 1896 and 1928. Grierson held a string of roles in the British Raj, but he’d long been an ardent linguist, so coming to India must have felt like being a botanist who was dropped into the Amazon. With the help of district officials and schoolteachers, Grierson collected “specimens” of each language: a standard list of two hundred and forty-one words and test sentences, a passage of text, and a translation of the Biblical passage about the prodigal son. In all, Grierson identified a hundred and seventy-nine languages and five hundred and forty-four dialects—the distinction between language and dialect being entirely his own. The experience moved him. At journey’s end, he wrote breathlessly, “I have been granted a vision of a magnificent literature enshrining the thoughts of great men from generation to generation through three thousand years.”

The survey was an imperfect enterprise. Grierson gathered plenty of material in northern India, where people speak languages from the Indo-European family, and from the east’s Sino-Tibetan tongues. But he got almost nothing in the south, so Dravidian languages barely figure in the survey. For several languages, he never received a complete set of specimens. Nevertheless, Ayesha Kidwai, a linguist at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, admires Grierson’s work for its openness to linguistic variations (or “shades,” as he calls them), its grammatical scrutiny, and its care in laying a base for further scholarship—on how Indian languages ought to be grouped into families, or how linguistic traits have diffused and converged across these families. […] Since Grierson, though, there has been no similar linguistic survey in India—or indeed, Kidwai says, in comparably polyglot countries like Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia. Around 2005, the Indian government briefly proposed an update to Grierson, but then lost interest. At which point Devy thought, Why wait for the government to initiate the survey? Why should ordinary Indians not step in instead? […]

Devy’s project has its critics, both mild and severe. Since neither he nor many of his surveyors are professional linguists, the entries aren’t academically rigorous, as those in Grierson’s survey were. “I wouldn’t necessarily make this criticism,” Peter Austin, the former director of the endangered-languages program at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told me. “But some people might say, ‘This is just a bunch of waffle about this language, and that’s a bunch of waffle about that. We can’t compare the two.’ ” Kidwai finds the collections of lore and songs, and also the grammars, inconsistent, and sometimes entirely absent. But she also thinks that the very idea of the classic linguistics survey is defunct. In India and other developing countries, she said, there are few monolingual speakers: “No language lives alone in a person.” Equally, she added, every language exists on a spectrum; Hindi comes in several flavors, a variation the P.L.S.I. fails to capture.

Devy acknowledges these shortcomings. He describes the survey as “more ethnographic than scientific,” arguing that it reveals not so much the structure of language as the structure of Indian society. And it gives hope to communities worried about the future of their language. “If they want to lead a movement to preserve it, they have something to start with now,” he said. […]

Like many Indians, Devy grew up effortlessly multilingual. He spent his childhood in Bhor, a small town a few hours southeast of Mumbai, where his father serially set up and bankrupted businesses: a grocery store, a milk co-op, a timber depot. At home, the family spoke Gujarati, the language of their ancestors. On the streets and in school, Devy spoke Marathi, the language of the state in which Bhor lies. A mile away from his house was a small library, holding abridged Western classics in Marathi translation. Devy would check out a book—“Tarzan,” or Charles and Mary Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare”—finish it by the time he reached home, and return for another. When his family moved to Sangli, a bigger town nearby, he picked up Hindi in movie theatres, and in his early teens he heard English frequently for the first time, words like “city bus” and “milk booth.” In school, he learned not only Sanskrit but also, from his classmates, the dialect spoken by a community of stone-crushers called Wadars. “These children were so full of colorful words of abuse—it was the greatest fun,” Devy told me. “It unfolded a vast cosmos before me of how the human body’s intimate spaces could be described.” […]

When Devy was thirteen, his father abandoned the family. They moved to a shack with a tin roof, and Devy occasionally worked after school, as a street vender or a furniture porter. Twice he started undergraduate studies but left after a year; the second time, he moved to Goa, working in a bauxite mine by day and then cycling to a library to read English books with a dictionary by his side. He felt that English met his curiosity about the world in a way that Marathi literature did not. “I thought English was a condition of modernity—of having a social condition beyond caste and religion,” he said. […]

For Devy, the third time around, university stuck: he got a B.A. in English literature, then went to Kolhapur for a Ph.D. He resolved to burn through the Western canon at the rate of three hundred pages daily, often spending entire nights in the library. One day, he spotted a young woman studying and went up to talk to her. “Before I even knew her name, I’d asked her to marry me,” Devy said. Surekha remembers the episode the same way, but she noted, with a laugh, “I’d studied in Marathi and wasn’t very conversant with English. When he started speaking in English, I probably didn’t understand what he said.” Kolhapur was just an hour north of where Surekha had grown up, but her version of Marathi was so different from Devy’s that when he first visited her family, he told me, “I made them laugh. They’d look at my lips when they moved!” The papaya has a feminine gender in Devy’s Marathi and a masculine gender in Surekha’s. “Even today, when we go to the market to buy fruit, we try to correct each other,” he said. […]

Like Devy, Austin believes that the modern erasure of languages is not an organic, irreversible process. He has witnessed resurrections—of Gamilraay, for example, an Australian Aboriginal language that he researched in the seventies. Gamilraay was in such a parlous state, he said, “that the most any individual would know was about two hundred words—very common words like ‘hand’ and ‘meat’ and ‘shit.’ ” Today, the language is taught in schools and universities, thanks to Austin’s success in documenting it, in addition to remarkable grassroots organizing. It’s the kind of comeback that Devy hopes the P.L.S.I. will facilitate. “For a long time, I thought this was literary and cultural work,” Devy said. After a conversation with a sociologist friend, he realized that he “was saying things with great political implications—that to talk culture and challenge culture is deep politics.” […]

The P.L.S.I. has identified seven hundred and eighty languages in India, in every conceivable state of health. (Devy thinks he may have missed a hundred or so.) Nandkumar More, a professor of Marathi, wrote about Chandgadhi, which he spoke while growing up, in a village near Maharashtra’s border with Goa. Chandgadhi is shaped by Konkani and Kannada, but dusted with English and Portuguese, vestiges of the community’s mercantile past. In the language, More found imprints of the local geography: there was a tool called the hendor, forged to break up the region’s sedimentary rocks, and another called the gorab, a bamboo-leaf umbrella that shelters women while they work in the fields during the monsoon. These words were old, and the implements had fallen out of use, but many people still hauled them out of their houses to tell More about them.

In the northeastern state of Sikkim, on the other hand, the social linguist Balaram Pandey had to help write about Majhi, a language he didn’t know, because he could find only one living speaker—an old man who once ferried boats for a living, and who died soon after Pandey interviewed him. “He told me, ‘Nobody understands my language, so I go down to the river and speak to the stones,’ ” Pandey said. Another of Sikkim’s sixteen languages, Bhujel, was once thought nearly extinct, but in the past decade scholars have developed a script, a dictionary, a digital font, and textbooks for it. In 2022, the Sikkim government added Bhujel to the list of the state’s official languages—a triumph that Pandey ascribes to its inclusion in the P.L.S.I.

Every resuscitated language is a victory, Devy says: “If it’s possible for people to make their livelihoods in their own languages, that’s all that matters. Everything else becomes academic.” Linguistic plurality, by itself, is no guarantor of peace or prosperity—and it may even devolve into a fetish for numbers, Sharma said. But he reads Devy’s enterprise as a democratic one—as a way to steel the spines of people who endeavor to resist. When many languages thrive, Sharma told me, there is the possibility that “the smallest language, the most innocuous dialect, might contain the potential of saying that all-important word: ‘No.’ ”

I love that ending; needless to say, there’s much more at the link.