Language was never the primary organizing principle in Indian society, but by 1950s, Indian states began to be re-organized on linguistic lines. How did this change come about? Using Telugu as a case study, anthropologist Lisa Mitchell adduces a wealth of evidence from archives, textbooks, maps, inscriptions, literary works, grammars, lexicons, newspapers, and ethnographic interviews to show that “the linguistic identifications that appear so natural today may have come to make sense only within a very particular restructuring of knowledge, technology, patronage, authority and relations of power during the 19th century” (p. 67).
Chapters 1 and 2 document the shift to a the conception of Telugu as an explicit maker of identity, one in which the language is personified, with such attributes as a birth, development, family tree, kinship ties, and even possible death. Before 1830, Telugu coexisted with many other languages in a complex multilingual network. The Census, starting in 1881, asked for “mother tongues,” establishing language as a distinguishing feature. Literary forms, such as the biography, paved the way for “language to become its own subject” (p. 88). People identified themselves as Telugu or Tamil speakers even in a multilingual household (p. 97).
In Chapter 3, “Making the Local Foreign,” Mitchell shows how the meaning and scope of traditional knowledge got distorted. While pre-colonial Indian grammars defined categories of the lexicon in terms of appropriateness for literary compositions and comprehensibility beyond the local, colonial administrators, influenced by the new nineteenth-century paradigm of historical linguistics, re-defined them in terms of etymology. They defined purity based on origin and advocated expunging “foreign” words from Telugu, even when they were in currency (pp. 124–5).
In Chapters 4 and 5, Mitchell shows the consequences of colonial misperception of Indian communication systems: For all its inadequacies, the pre-colonial educational system was pragmatic and attuned to the dynamics of Indian multilingualism where different languages complemented one another for different functions, like registers of a single language: Telugu for music, Persian for administration, Sanskrit for ritual, and so on. The borders of languages were porous; speakers accessed resources of several languages. There was a multilateral borrowing of syntax as well, resulting in linguistic convergence. Millennia of convergence made India a “linguistic area (Sprachbund), a concrete example of “unity in diversity.”
The colonial model, rooted in a monolingual perspective, missed this dynamic ecology and conceptualized a static collection of parallel and autonomous monolingualisms.
Mitchell characterizes this contrast using H.J.M. Maeir's concepts of heteroglossia and polyglossia (Maier, H.M.J. “From Heteroglossia to Polyglossia: The Creation of Malay and Dutch in the Indies.” Indonesia 56 (1993), 37–65), though a more robust and relevant model is available in classic studies on Indian multilingualism by Murray Emeneau, John Gumperz, Braj Kachru, and Prabodh Pandit (see references in Kachru, Braj B., Yamuna Kachru, and S. N. Sridhar (editors). Language in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
This colonial myopia affected many areas: First, languages were to be learned “as discrete and separable objects” (p. 169), with the expectation that most functions be performed in a single language. Second, “pre-colonial lexicons were intended for composing, reading, understanding, or remembering literature. They were in verse, multilingual, and organized according to semantic fields rather than alphabetically.” But colonial lexicons, intended for language learning and translation, represented “an entirely new way of thinking about cataloging and using language” (p. 173). Third, English colonial officials saw translation as a way to convey information not yet known to a new audience, not a retelling or “free adaptation” of that which is already known, as in Indian literature. Fourth, use of “pure” Telugu meant avoidance of borrowed elements and language mixing. Finally, the Spoken Telugu Movement, which advocated teaching a style of Telugu closer to the colloquial, used English as the point of reference.
In Chapter 6, Mitchell shows that the movement for a separate Telugu state that involved the self-sacrifice of a leader and four young men may not have been a mass movement until the very end. This is an appropriate coda for Mitchell's thesis that the concept of a mother tongue would not have come about without a historical construction.
Mitchell's study successfully demonstrates that “The story of colonial encounters with language in Southern India includes the story of efforts to bring very different sensibilities regarding language into a single frame of discourse” (p. 181).
While colonial restructuring of language contributed significantly to the making of the mother tongues, the fact remains that the resurgence of regional languages and the demand for linguistic states in South India served a powerful impulse—cultural unification and political empowerment of people scattered among arbitrary administrative divisions. True, it did not solve the problem of the linguistic minorities. Ironically, it did not even allay the anxiety about the fate, indeed possible extinction of the dominant languages—influx of migrants from other states and the indomitable attraction of English are the new feeders of linguistic insecurity.
