"Things moved fast. Edakkal became the panel’s prime exhibit, Dr Manmohan Singh was impressed, and an India that fails to see the existence of fine literary canons in, say, Marwari elevates Malayalam, which should, without any sense of belittlement, share the same room with all its peers—literate or otherwise. Besides pride, there’s a purse of Rs 100 crore, to ‘promote’ a language that’s already in robust health and spoken by millions. To be sure, language scholarship needs all the support it can get. A few years ago, when Kannada and Telugu were seeking classical status, the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock had pointed to the irony. A “cultural ecocide” was around the corner, he warned, for no one would be left in India who could read its vast treasures of non-modern texts in any language outside Sanskrit. This game of competitive chauvinisms, with linguists at the head of the army, behaving like rival cartels, won’t get us out of that destitution. ...But it was in old Tamizhagam that it touched a raw nerve, producing one of the strongest strands of dissent in modern India. Tamil was coming off a half-century-old movement for a return to a pure, de-Sanskritised past. One of its initiators, ironically a Brahmin who had Dravidianised his name, had even sought classical status for Tamil in 1902. By the time it was granted a century later, the arguments had all but been settled; the ideologues, pacified by long stints in power, occasionally raking it up in token form. Classical status was just Tamil’s parting shot to Hindi: buzz off, son, pick someone your size, my fight’s with your daddy. (Sanskrit was becalmed retrospectively; it got classical status a year later, in 2005.) Now, there is a centrality that Tamil stakes claim to in the south, an umbrella quality to the Tamil > Damila > Dravida etymological equation, that causes discomfiture to others. Its emancipatory zeal easily spilt over into a mirrored chauvinism, to which inevitably its peers started responding with their own mini-versions. In this hall of mirrors, family resemblances begat not empathy but sibling antipathy. The domino effect didn’t take long. Telugu and Kannada—with their own history and self-image, and always slightly raw on the question of Tamil—sought parity. (Granted, 2008.) And now Malayalam, in eager me-tooism. Now history has almost become farce, and we only need to wait for the counter-counter-wave, for language chieftains north of the Vindhyas to point out one by one, justifiably, that they all have a history as old and voluminous. Once we have finished stoking and feeding the endless appetite for self-valorisation our literate elites seem to have, we will be presented with a country rippling with classical languages!"
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 14:18:51 +0000
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