Papia Sengupta (Auth.) - Language As Identity in Colonial India - Policies and Politics-Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

LANGUAGE
AS IDENTITY
IN COLONIAL
INDIA
Policies and Politics
Papia Sengupta
Language as Identity in Colonial India
“The Indian awakening, our distinctive path to independence as Sengupta recalls,

envisaged quilts of interwoven languages expressing a rich, multi-textured land-
scape. British rule used tools of colonial enumeration like the census to compart-
mentalize Indians into sharply separated languages and religions along Westphalian
lines. Naive nationalistic unity-mongering today – Sengupta argues – inadvertently
reinforces colonial compartmentalization, losing sight of that very landscape we
must cherish and strengthen to achieve the uniquely Indian take-off we are des-
tined for. A compelling argument.”
—Prof. Probal Dasgupta, Head, Linguistics, Indian Statistical
Institute, Kolkata
“Papia Sengupta draws our attention to a very serious concern as how non-recog-
nition of linguistic identity can become a source of discrimination, violence,
harassment and torture. It is this action of submerging the diversity and plurality
that brings in chaos and disturbance in Indian society. Her book may serve as a
wakeup call to the Indian administration which is happy to forget that the stron-
gest ecosystems in the world are those which are most diverse.”
—Prof. Anvita Abbi (Padma Shri), Adjunct Professor, Simon Fraser
University, B.C. Vancouver, Canada
“Multilingualism has been a long-standing characteristic of Indian society, and its

persistence during the post-colonial era is not surprising. What is surprising though
is the transformation in the Indian sense of identity, the nation's self-perception,
during the colonial period. Dr. Sengupta's well documented study reveals the
sequential emergence of the linguistically embedded sense of identity brings home
the new burden that language is brought to carry in the nation-India. A systemati-
cally presented argument, proposing a compelling thesis, this work is a must-read
for every scholar interested in Indian nationalism and Indian multilingualism.”
—Prof. G N Devy, Chair, People's Linguistic Survey of India
“Papia Sengupta’s Language as Identity in Colonial India explores the conse-
quences of linguistic policies from the early history of the East India Company to
the present. It unfolds the multi-faceted effects of governmental action in refusing
linguistic recognition, from small tribes to peoples across wide regions, which have
inflicted psychological damage to individuals and economic inequality across
states. This ambitious work analyzes the driving forces of language policies shaping
the history and society of the Indian subcontinent.”
—Samuel Cohn, Professor of History, University of Glasgow; Honorary
Fellow of the Institute of Advance Studies at Edinburgh,
and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Papia Sengupta
Language as Identity
in Colonial India
Policies and Politics
Papia Sengupta
Centre for Political Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi, Delhi, India
ISBN 978-981-10-6843-0 ISBN 978-981-10-6844-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958852
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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For Maa, Jayanta, Aparna and Sharmista
Preface
India is often held to be an ideal model of linguistic diversity management.

The country has been organized territorially into units called states, based
on the majority language spoken in the area. This is so celebrated that it
has been termed by Niraja G. Jayal as, “indeed among the more successful
experiments of institutional engineering in the history of modern India”
(Jayal 2006, p. 47). The rise of the right wing, especially with its emphasis
on making Sanskrit mandatory in school curriculums, raises doubts regard-
ing the success of the languages model in India, but most political scien-
tists seem skeptical about language becoming an issue of conflict; therefore
no alarm is being raised.
Scholars take note of sub-nationalism and ethnic conflicts common to
India without considering the role that language plays. This is surprising,
as language has been at the forefront of movements demanding separate
states in India from the 1950s onwards. This began with agitation for the
formation of a Telugu majority state of Andhra in 1953; then there was
violence over the division of the Bombay Presidency into the Gujarati-
speaking area of Gujarat and Marathi majority Maharashtra, and agitations
demanding the separation of Hindi-speaking Haryana from the rest of the
Gurmukhi dominant areas of Punjab. The entire northeast faced serious
violent uprisings, the solution to which was the carving out of Nagaland,
Meghalaya, Mizoram and Manipur from erstwhile Assam. Language was
not only a factor in north and northeast India, but was central to the
demand for a separate state of Himachal Pradesh. Three new states
(Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand) were formed in the year 2000
with language playing a role in the consolidation of the movements that
vii
viii Preface
ultimately led to separate state formation. In 2003 the Bodoland Territorial

Council Accord was signed by the Indian government, announcing the
formation of the Bodo Autonomous Council. Among other demands
there was provision for the establishment of a Bodo (language) university
in Bodoland. These developments explain the inclusion of the Santhali,
Manipuri and Bodo languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian
Constitution. Presently Gorkhaland is simmering, and there is news of
fresh agitation for a separate state of Tirpraland in Tripura.
Language has figured prominently in politics, education, economics
and post-independence conflicts over distribution of resources and terri-
tories in India. Thus, the lack of interest in and publications on language
issues and identity in India in the last two decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, comes as a surprise. This book has emerged out of my concern
regarding the role of language in identity formation and how linguistic
identity affects one’s well-being in an age where identity has taken center-
stage in world politics. Language identity construction remains critical to
debates on citizenship, belongingness and upward mobility in society
and market, while being equally crucial in accessing basic human needs
such as health, education, employment and social justice and rights.
Language is not just an academic endeavor that needs to be studied,
probed and analyzed, but it is a way of life. Living well depends on lan-
guage, as not being able to communicate in the dominant language(s) of
state can be detrimental to the socio-economic health of individuals and
communities. Minority language speakers are often discriminated against
owing to their lack of fluency in the official language of the state. This
puts a question mark on language use in the education policy followed by
the Indian state, which recognizes the language spoken by the majority
as the official language. In turn this becomes the medium of instruction
and of interview for public services, often leading to disadvantage for and
discrimination against the indigenous linguistic communities. Language
defines individual identity, and one’s linguistic (dis)abilities often lead to
a lack of prestige and confidence. Axel Honneth (1995, p. xii) claimed
that “how we view ourselves is dependent on others,” and that the major-
ity may not assign status and equal respect to tribal languages, thereby
affecting the personality development of individuals belonging to such
linguistic communities. Language is a daily need, and day-to-day activi-
ties such as filing application forms for school admissions, opening bank
accounts, sending money orders and utilizing judicial mechanisms, health
Preface
ix
services and transport facilities cannot be enjoyed fully if written in a

language unknown to individuals and communities.
Language in India: The Colonial Continuum

India became independent in 1947 but it continued to follow the colonial
masters in many ways in terms of administrative machinery, legal codes
and legislative practices. Post-colonial India continued with most admin-
istrative structures and legal codes as followed during colonial rule. The
colonial policy of linguistic hierarchization prevalent during colonial times
with English occupying the highest position in the language ladder,
remained with the exception that Hindi and English both were recog-
nized as official languages of the Indian Union. The identification of intel-
lectual and political elites as speakers of major official languages still
prevails in Indian politics. In contemporary India, the parliamentary right
of members to address and ask questions in their own mother tongue is
often not guaranteed owing to technical inadequacies in recruiting trans-
lators and interpreters. If parliamentarians are not guaranteed the right to
speak in their mother tongue, imagine the plight of common citizens.
The dominance of English may have become a global phenomenon in
recent years, but in India it existed even before independence. I am not
anti-English or anti-any language and believe that the equality of all indi-
viduals and languages may be an idealistic dream, but we should not dis-
own this dream and become players of market forces. Built into languages
are meaning systems, values, the aspirations of people who speak them.
Languages enfold in themselves the whole world for their speakers. While
I take note of the arguments presented by scholars who critique language
preservation and maintenance as high cost and too idealistic in today’s
world, which is dictated by economics, I simply pose the question whether,
in the materialistic societies we live in, all human values should be weighed
by a cost–benefit analysis. In addition, should powerful cultures and lan-
guages rule the whole of humanity in the name of efficiency and economic
opportunities, thereby opposing all diversities of the human race? Are we
moving toward a future where the poor will have no right to survive and
sustain themselves?
x Preface
Some Provocations
My interest in language and language-based identities as a source of dis-
crimination grew out of certain events which shook me deeply. First,
I came across news of a young child from Jharkhand who was beaten regu-
larly by her mother for speaking her mother tongue. The rationale was
that Hindi, the medium of instruction at school, was considered by the
mother to be a prestige language and language of opportunity. She opined
that if her daughter spoke her native tongue she would bring humiliation
upon herself and that her economic opportunities would be adversely
affected. Similarly, during my fieldwork in Belgaum I came across an
elderly lady waiting for a bus at the bus station. When a bus arrived she got
up and asked the conductor in Marathi about the route the bus took.
I assumed she was illiterate, but on inquiring I discovered she was a quali-
fied graduate who was educated in Marathi, her mother tongue. However,
all the bus route numbers were written in Kannada, the official language
of the state, which she couldn’t read. This incident made me realize that
not only education but knowledge of an official language is mandatory
even for something as mundane as traveling by bus. This brings me to a
central question: what is a language? From the Indian state’s perspective
languages spoken by under 10,000 people are not considered languages;
they are mother tongues, and they are not mentioned in any public policy
statements. The three-language formula followed by most states as the
principle on which language education is based mentions mother-tongue
education in primary classes, but the criterion for the recruitment of lan-
guage teachers is based on the ratio of 1:40; that is, one teacher only if
forty students opt for the mother tongue as the medium of instruction.
This remains a substantial hurdle that is cited by most states as the reason
for not granting mother-tongue education to all children: in general, par-
ents opt for the official language as the medium of instruction, keeping in
mind the economic opportunity rationale. These parents cannot be blamed
for wanting a bright future for their children; but the downside is that
many languages become extinct. This is partly because communities often
choose the dominant language for education, in order to give future gen-
erations better opportunities, and partly, and more directly, because state
policies elevate the dominant language at the cost of minority ones.
In a practice unique to India, languages are listed as scheduled and non-
scheduled—according to their inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the
Indian Constitution. This is an arbitrary categorization that affects the
Preface
xi
survival of many languages. The number of scheduled languages is cur-

rently (2017) twenty-two, and there are 100 non-scheduled languages.
The non-scheduled languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people,
but if this figure drops below 10,000 persons then the language’s plight is
clear. It is no longer mentioned in the decadal census nor in any other
governmental document, thereby making it officially invisible. Most tribal
languages fall into this category of non-recognized and uncounted lan-
guages. Such non-recognition remains a significant reason behind tribal
poverty and illiteracy in India. The politics of recognition, Charles Taylor
(1992, p. 25) rightly pointed out, begins with the demand for acknowl-
edging the existence of cultural–linguistic communities. N on-recognition
of these identities leads to ethnic-movements and violent agitations, and is
the cause of malnutrition, infant mortality and impoverishment among
India’s indigenous population.
Linguistic fanaticism has grown in many parts of India. The Maharashtra
Navnirman Sena issued a diktat to the traders of Mumbai to paint shops’
signboards in Marathi. Non-compliance invited looting and burning.
There have been violent incidents against people belonging to the north-
eastern states of India in Bangalore and other parts of India on the pretext
that they are foreign and do not belong to India. The pan-Indian identity
mooted by the national political parties is in friction with the sub-national
and regional identities rooted in ethnicity, language and culture. The recent
rise of the rhetoric of nationalism is intrinsically interwoven with knowl-
edge of a language and religion. Modernity, as Sanjib Baruah (2001, p. xix)
stated, “is not a historical but geographical term” wherein the mass slaugh-
ter of people speaking a particular language and belonging to a religious
community is “a form of political expression.” Such a situation demands
urgent attention in order to delve into, probe and elucidate the relationship
that language has with culture and identity, to express and elaborate the
critical nature that language has in terms of nation and nationality and
political gimmicks, without ignoring the fact that language plays an impor-
tant role in political movements: these rise owing to discrimination and
injustice that are faced because of one’s cultural–linguistic affiliation.
A deeper understanding of present language problems in India demands
revisiting colonial policies and politics, as contemporary language issues
has their roots in the colonial period. The book aims to fulfill the gap
which exists in contemporary literature in India. Few monographs have
been dedicated principally to linguistic politics in colonial India, to closely
examining the inseparable relation of language and identity construction
xii Preface
that is inherent to the development of nationalism. However, some major

works on language development in different regions of India have been
published by historians in the last two decades. Remarkable among them
are Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue (1997), Christopher
R. King, One Language and Two Scripts (1999), Ayesha Jalal, Self and
Sovereignty (2000), Chitralekha Zutshi, Language of Belonging (2003),
Martha Selby and Indira Vishwanathan (eds.), Tamil Geographies (2008)
and Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotions and Politics in South India (2009)1.
A single work elaborating colonial language policy and its impact on iden-
tity construction in India is absent, however. I investigate here the follow-
ing questions. How did the colonial policy elevate language from being a
social marker to a political one? How did language play a critical role in the
development of intellectual elites in India—this process falling into the
same colonial trap created by the patriarchal beliefs of the colonizers? Why
can the construction of different self(s) in India be attributed to develop-
ments in Indian historiography written in vernacular languages? This has
relevance today, as most of the diverse social groupings in India emanated
during the colonial period. How did scientific categorization by the colo-
nial administrators lead to language becoming an integral identity marker?
Language was a part of the nation-state design, and was carried forward as
such by independent India’s political leaders. Post-independence Indian
politics witnessed the rise of regionalism and separatism, with language
forming the core of most such movements. This could be why language
has been neglected by political thinkers in Indian academia, as it was iden-
tified with separatism and regional fervor. Indeed, India underwent reor-
ganization of her territory on a linguistic basis. I do not claim that this has
resolved all issues, but argue that language is as integral to politics in India
as religion, and scholars cannot afford to neglect this critical aspect of
shaping politics.
Organization of the Book

The purpose of this book is to rethink language as an identity marker, not
only at individual level but in the community and the nation. The work
does not prescribe a formula but aims to initiate serious public debate on
language and its use in public and private spaces in India. How can linguis-
tic identity and its non-recognition become a source of discrimination,
violence, harassment and torture? I believe the plausible answers can be
found through democratic debate and deliberation, which remain the
Preface
xiii
most constructive means of reaching consensus through the voicing of a

variety of opinions, while at the same time respecting the views of those
who are not in agreement. Diversity and difference need to be respected,
as people belong to different cultures, follow varied faiths and speak
diverse languages. But humanity demands that diversity and difference are
given due recognition as shaping identities that make humans human.
Chapter 1 begins with the theoretical underpinnings that link language
to identity, drawing on different strands of philosophical thinking from
ancient and modern times. I argue that linguistic identity is critical to
human understanding as well as to conflicts about space and territoriality
in the contemporary world. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the historical
background of language during pre-colonial to colonial times in Bengal
and other regions of India. Translations of Indian texts in English paved
the way for British penetration into Indian society, transforming the East
India Company from a trading company to a private ruling agency through
the use of language, colonizing not just Indian markets but minds. This
was to have a very long-term impact on the future of Indian thinking and
knowledge production. Chapter 4 analyzes the East India Company’s
adoption of the surveying and data collection of Indian castes, languages
and race as the initial steps to gain knowledge about the society. I discuss
how the tools of data collection relating to language and religion in India,
in the form of census and surveys conducted by British officials, became
useful tools for the categorization and stratification of India’s population.
This chapter examines the role of newspapers, intellectual writings in the
development of nationalistic fervor in India. It also looks at colonial poli-
cies on language and education, and their impact on the development of
intellectual elites in India from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth
centuries.
Chapter 5 explores the evolution and development of multiple selves
in India, showing how nationalism was not a mere culmination or coming
together of different strands of regional aspirations but always had a plu-
ral flavor, showcasing plurality as inseparable from Indian identity. The
development of education in the last quarter of the nineteenth century
saw the rise of feminist voices, subaltern cries and the marching songs of
nationalists, as well as indigenous poetry, verses and storytelling. In addi-
tion, there was the unique experiment of a non-violent path, which took
India to its desired destination of political independence from colonial
rule. Chapter 6 scrutinizes how language was used both by the colonizers
and the nationalists for their respective political endeavors. This chapter
xiv Preface
elucidates India’s linguistic journey from the perspective and understand-

ing of language as politics. I discuss the centrality of language in post-
independent India. The voices of members of the Constituent Assembly
who were arguing for recognition of diverse Indian languages were domi-
nated by arguments and nation-building narratives that prioritized
national security and integrity. Such voices could not be suppressed for
long when India faced movements that demanded linguistic reorganiza-
tion of its territories from the early 1950s. Contrary to the fears of politi-
cal leaders that linguistic reorganization would lead to the disintegration
of the Indian Union, it is now celebrated as an institutional success that
accommodated India’s diversity. Furthermore, the subsequent reorgani-
zation of the northeast, which was not fully based on language difference,
did not result in India’s territorial disintegration either. These movements
can be termed as demanding autonomy rather than secession. In the epi-
logue, I argue that India’s integrity as a country is not threatened by a
recognition of diversity and plurality, the hallmarks of Indianness, but by
the potential dangers of submerging our great diversity of languages and
cultures under the monistic view of nationalism rhetoric, which poses the
greatest hurdle toward building a democratic multination state of India.
New Delhi, India Papia Sengupta
Note
1. Jalal, Ayesha. 2001. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in
South Asian Islam Since 1850. Delhi: Oxford University Press; King,
Christopher R. 1994. One Language and Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement
in Nineteenth Century North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press;
Mitchell, Lisa. 2009. Language, Emotions and Politics in South India: The
Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press;
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 1997. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in
Tamil India, 1891–1970. Berkeley: University of California Press; Selby,
Martha and Indira Vishwanathan (eds.). 2008. Tamil Geographies: Cultural
Construction of Place and Space in South India. Albany, NY: SUNY Press;
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2003. Language of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity
and the Making of Kashmir. Delhi: Permanent Black.
Preface
xv
References
Baruah, Sanjib. 2001. India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Jayal, Niraja Gopal. 2006. Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and Governance of
Public Institutions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; United Nations Research
Institute for Social Development.
Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy
Guttmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Acknowledgments
My interest in language goes back to 2002, when I started my doctoral

research, and has continued since then. The fact that there are few publi-
cations relating to the field of language in colonial India that give compre-
hensive details of colonial language policy and its impact on the
construction of identity in the country is my main motivation for writing
this book. A significant cause for my frustration has been the absence of
dialogue and discussion between historians, political scientists, linguists
and anthropologists, a paradox at a time when academia is marked by
interdisciplinarity.
For this journey of more than a decade, I thank my teacher Gurpreet
Mahajan, who not only supervised my doctoral work on linguistic diver-
sity but also guided me towards rigorous research. I express my gratitude
to Abha Banerjee, my home room teacher in Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in
Delhi, who was the first person after my parents to guide me and make me
face my fears head on. Neelam Sood of Kamala Nehru College has always
been appreciative of my academic and cultural achievements.
The book began taking shape during sabbatical leave from Kirori Mal
College, University of Delhi. I am grateful for this as it enabled me to
focus solely on this work without the responsibility of teaching and day-
to-day professional activities. My visit to Tejgarh Bhasha Academy,
financed by the University Grants Commission’s minor research grant in
2013, introduced me to Ganesh Devy, a person deeply committed to the
mission of preserving diverse languages. He inspired me and showed
immense faith in my ability to undertake this ambitious venture.
xvii
xviii Acknowledgments
I thank Probal Dasgupta, Anvita Abbi, Will Kymlicka and Daphne

Romi Masliah for the time they took to discuss my interest in language
research. My research for this monograph profited immensely from the
Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi, the National Archives, Delhi, and the
Central Library of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Web-based research
resources such as Internet Archive deserves special acknowledgment for
making works and rare books on colonial India freely accessible. Google
Books proved valuable for introducing me to new works. I thank the team
of Palgrave Macmillan and Springer especially the senior editor Sagarika
Ghose, Sandeep Kaur and Sudha Soundarrajan for efficient management
and final publication of the book.
The book has been made possible thanks to the efforts of my mother,
who taught me the importance of speaking my own language with due
respect to diverse languages and opposing opinions, which she believes
make individuals human. Not only this work but my entire being is thanks
to her constant support and unconditional love. I have no words but only
silence to express my gratitude; she is the one who can read my silences
effortlessly. Jayanta, Aparna and Sharmista deserve more than my acknowl-
edgment for being there for me, always…
New Delhi, India Papia Sengupta

August 10, 2017
Contents
1 Theoretical Developments: Linking Language to Identity 1
2 The Language Situation in Colonial India: Story of Bengal 17
3 Making Identity Out of Language: Beyond Bengal 37
4 Building Identity: Information, Intellect and Inspiration 53
5 Construction of Plural Selves in India 81
6 Language Conundrum 103
Epilogue 113
Index115
xix
List of Abbreviations
AICC All India Congress Committee

APCR All Parties Conference Report
CA Constituent Assembly of India
EEIC English East India Company
INC Indian National Congress
SRC States Reorganization Commission
VPA Vernacular Press Act
xxi
CHAPTER 1
Theoretical Developments: Linking

Language to Identity
We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams. We are always
speaking, even when we do not utter a single word. We speak because
speaking is natural to us. Man is said to have language by nature.
Wilhelm von Humboldt in Martin Heidegger 1971, 85
Abstract This chapter gives a detailed analysis of theoretical development

that links language to human identity. Historical insights from Western
and Indian philosophy of language is analyzed by outlining how language
shares an intimate relationship with nationhood, being and belonging.
It is argued that knowledge- transmission, interpretation, epistemological
understanding and information- generation are impossible without lan-
guage, be this words, symbols, signs. The chapter asserts that the hierar-
chical relationship between writing and speech needs to be challenged as
the history of many cultural communities is based on oral narratives.
Keywords Language • Identity • Nation • Philosophy of language

• Orality • Culture • Knowledge
Humans identify themselves in multiple ways. These different and at

times distinct identities are distinguished from each other in linguistic
expressions, as much they are defined and understood through language.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

P. Sengupta, Language as Identity in Colonial India,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7_1
2 P. SENGUPTA
We cannot imagine assigning identity without language, as imagination is

conducted in language and identities—from naming to higher forms of
the “epistemology of testimony” (Fricker and Cooper 1987, p. 57) is
unthinkable without language. This starts with our name, which is the first
known sign of identity; that is, how the world knows you and how you
introduce yourself to the world are both language dependent. People who
are not known to us personally may perceive us by our physical attributes,
such as skin color, sex, hairstyle and clothes. Thus, humans make sense of
the world around them primarily in two ways: through sensing the physi-
cal world and giving names to objects in order to identify them, and sec-
ondly by knowing, in other words being told by elders, teachers and
parents. Naming and “knowing by transmission” therefore become the
main sources of language, which leads to knowledge (Chakrabarti 1992).
The next critical question that emerges is whether words can truly
depict reality. In Plato’s Cratylus, Socrates argued that naming was the
true depiction of the object, which remains central to many approaches to
the origin of language. But Plato was not fully convinced that language
can truly depict reality:
Since words are already a physical imitation of reality, both poetic manipula-
tion and critical study of language can only fix man’s attention on a level
inferior to reality itself. The inherent human element prevents language
from being completely faithful to reality. Faithfulness to nature determines
the worth of language. (Partee 1972, p. 114)
Heraclitus, coming before Plato, theorized the “notion of interpreta-

tion,” as determined by logos (Hussey 1982, p. 35). Logos, in Greek
philosophy to the Gospel of John, is regarded as the “most multifaceted
word in Greek language” and can be equated with various English words
such as composition, to gather and to take account of (Hoffman 2003,
p. 27). Be it composing or naming, the function of language is not limited
to identifying external realities. Humboldt proposed that “language is con-
nected to mental power of humans,” which is the source of linguistic and
cultural diversity and is the external expression of the inner human mind:
the “feelings, desires, thoughts and beliefs responsible for development of
culture” (Humboldt 1999, p. xi). Humboldt pronounced language to be
energy (energia) and a product of human nature, “an involuntary emana-
tion of the mind, a gift fallen to human by their inner destiny.” Language is
thus not a means to an end; humans did not plan to construct language, but
it came naturally (Humboldt 1999, p. xi). Humboldt’s lucid exposition on
THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS: LINKING LANGUAGE TO IDENTITY 3
the naturalness of language and its relation to humans established the insep-
arability of people and language. Language is not only the opening to a
world of knowledge but a window for self-understanding. We are thinking
beings and to think comes naturally. Since language brings out our internal
feelings, thoughts are innate in language, which then forms “the formative
organ of thought” (Humboldt 1999, p. xvi). Such epistemology substanti-
ates that thinking is impossible without language. This is also true of people
who cannot speak or hear: they depend on sounds or sign language in order
to assign meanings to the objects of the world.
Stuart Elden’s reading of Heidegger argued for logos as speech, while
Heidegger, noting the zoon logon echon (Aristotle’s “rational animal”),
asserted that, “logic was a science of the ways ‘being’ was addressed and
articulated.” This logic for Heidegger was “hermeneutical ontological
logic, looking at the interaction of being, truth and language” (Elden
2005, p. 283). Like Humboldt’s brilliant treatise expounding language as
mental power, Deborah Modrak’s disquisition on Aristotle asserts that in
De Interpretation central elements of Aristotle’s thinking are words, “the
meaning bearing mental state [pathema] and the object in the word
[pragma] the referent of the word, elucidating the crucial relation between
word and mental state and mental state and objects of the world” (Modrak
2001, pp. 2–3).
The divine origin of language, as opposed to the constructivist–
evolutionary theory which opined language as a construction which devel-
ops and changes with the developments in the human socio-political
environment, can be traced back to antiquity. The popular myth about the
Tower of Babel and the creation of linguistic diversity, a punishment visited
upon humans by God for having dared to build a tower to reach God’s
abode, emanates from Genesis 11:1–9 (Ross 1980, p. 714). This myth and
others have attracted significant attention in modern linguistics, especially
with regards to theories about the origin of languages. What is remarkable is
that this divine babel (or confusion) of languages was used by humans to
form the basis for identification of their communities. God may have suc-
ceeded in creating diverse languages, but His success in creating divisions on
language grounds remained a dream, as modern times have witnessed terri-
tories, empires and kingdoms which speak different languages becoming
integrated, and the disintegration of peoples that speak the same tongue.
The United Kingdom is the oldest example of speakers of different languages
(Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and English) forming one empire in the modern period,
whereas speakers of the same language(German) broke into two states,
4 P. SENGUPTA
only to reunite again after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most post-colonial
countries are multilingual, a few examples being India, South Africa, Malaysia
and Indonesia. Therefore, there are states where speakers of distinct lan-
guages live side by side as citizens.
The German scholar who has been credited for spearheading research
into language diversity and the valuing of the diversity of languages as
human creativity, through the refutation of the functional theory of lan-
guage (proposed by the British empiricist who claimed language was
merely a communicative medium), is Gottfried Herder (Forster 2002,
p. 324). Asserting the inseparability of language and thought, Herder pro-
claimed that “language sets limits to human cognition” (Forster 2002). If
thoughts are dependent on language, as he asserted, then identity of self,
thoughts and ideas about what comprises the self and other, mine–thine,
we and they are linguistically conceptualized. There is disagreement as to
whether language and thought are one and the same or whether language
is the mere external representation of inner thoughts; but my objective in
this work is not to analyze these dissenting approaches. What I intend is
limited to demonstrate that identity and language are inextricable, which
essentially means that my position is in congruence with that of Herder’s.1
His ingenuity lies in his locating of “culture as encompassing all human
creativity and pursuing a line of argument for the right of the colonial cul-
tures to be free from domination, inviting respect” (Spencer 2007, p. 83).
In this he seems to be an influential forerunner of Nietzsche,2 and of Karl
Marx’s critique of European modernity. Herder’s significance, especially
for language students, also lies in his admiration for the diversity of cultures
and his lack of acceptance of the general European position of dominance
or the universalizing of the Western way of life as the best formula. Herder
was against the Western fetish for “standardization and systematization”
(Dallmayr 1997, p. 105). But the reaching out of modernity, true to its
idea that universality was the product of the knowledge hegemony of the
Western powers over the world, has had a colossal impact on the different
cultures of the world; so much so that almost all cultures have been divided
into two major schools of thought, modern and traditional, wherein mod-
ern generally connotes thoughts that are influenced by European ideas.
Herder is important as it was he who explained that the roots of identity lie
in ‘difference’—a very strong and seemingly paradoxical yet fundamental
proposition today, thanks to the unprecedented d evelopment of identity
politics. Explaining Herder’s position on difference, as based on his con-
ception of language, Karl Menges stated:
If thought is based on language, then every identification is linked to a process

of differential signification that sets it apart from others. That setting apart,
however, is essential for it to become identical with itself. For just as presence
arrives only through absence so does identity define itself only through differ-
ence from others. (Menges 1995, p. 12)
Herder’s contribution to language scholarship and diversity studies was

his urge to “displace the word ‘reflection’ with ‘recognition’ as an inclu-
sive identification of the particular” (Menges 1995, p. 12). Bimal Krishna
Matilal, a well-known Indologist, expressed a similar line of argument in
his postulation of the philosophy of language in Vedic tradition, the
“navya-nyaya,” wherein “difference defines identity” or “absence of dif-
ference as identical” (Matilal 1990, pp. 155–158); that is, an object being
different from others is similar to its own kind. This is true for people and
communities where language is an inherent identity marker. A language
becomes identity or the variable that identifies people speaking it, and
speakers of the same language form a community owing to the common-
ality of language.
Indian Philosophy of Language

The Indian philosophy of language can be tracked back to the Rig Veda,
considered the oldest among the four Vedas,3 while polytheism believed
the fundamental truth that “the one real [Ultimate] is given different
names of Gods—ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti” (Dutta 1948, p. 551).
A similar exposition was given by Ramakrishna Paramhansa, the nineteenth-
century Bengali priest, when he proposed “joto moth totho poth”; that is,
there are as many opinions (read perspectives) as there are paths to reach
the Almighty. In the early Vedic period, this “real” or “ultimate” finality
was known as Brahma or Brahman,4 the absolute reality from which the
world is born, which sustains it and into which it will finally dissolve. The
Sanskrit sentence sat chit ananda, or reality, consciousness and bliss, ema-
nates from Brahma, which forms the basis of the self and the world accord-
ing to early Vedic philosophy (Dutta 1948, p. 551). The Sankara school
emerging during this period believed that the self is identical with Brahma
and the path to realization of “true self” is through moral discipline,
whereas the Vaishnava philosophy of Ramanujan, Madhava, Nimbarka
and Vallabha distinguishes between God (real, final) and self, emphasizing
that devotion is the true path towards liberation from the cycle of birth
6 P. SENGUPTA
and death (Dutta 1948, p. 552). This difference of beliefs in duality of self
and the Ultimate marks almost the entire philosophy of language in Indian
thought. The post-Vedic Indian philosophical traditions such as Mimansa,
Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya and Vaisesika emerged from the Vedantic tradition,
though there exist differences between these schools.
What then can be called a philosophy of language in Indian traditional
thought? Was the Indian philosophy of language similar to the Western
conceptions that define language primarily as logos or name, as we have seen
in Cratylus? To give a detailed analysis of Indian philosophy as regards the
origin of language is beyond the scope of this book, but what I will do here
is give a sneak preview, if I can use the term, of Indian traditions about the
theory of language, which formed the core of most philosophical schools
in Vedic and post-Vedic India. I undertake this arduous task because most
literature on the philosophy of language consists of philosophical and nor-
mative works that are not taken seriously by students of history, sociology
and politics. This viewpoint is misguided, and often leads to the production
of scholarly and literary work which at best can be called specialized and
not truly inter-disciplinary. For any study on language as identity it is vital
to break these disciplinary boundaries and to bring together strands of
thought from a variety of disciplines, such as history, philosophy, political
theory, sociology, linguistics and education, in order to give a richer and
fuller understanding of the language situation in India. This will enable us
in turn to gain a better picture of language scholarship.
Frits Staal gave a brilliant explanation of the origin of languages in
India, propounding that “to the Indians, language was primarily for doing
and not for naming. Hence, importance was given to performative speech
sets and pragmatics” (Staal 1979, pp. 5–9), This is very different from the
dominant philosophies of language in Europe, which stressed the func-
tional aspect of language as naming. The Vedas elaborate seven varieties of
science, known as ‘vedanga’ (limbs of the Vedas): kalpa (ritual), sulba
(geometry), siksa (phonetics), nirukta (etymology), vyakaran (grammar),
chandas (prosody) and jyotisa (astrology/astronomy (Staal 2008, p. 255).
Vyakaran was an integral vedanga, signifying the centrality of language
accorded by the Vedas which form the backbone of Hinduism, therefore
speaking volumes about the importance given to language in ancient
Indian philosophy. Panini’s Mahabhasiya (Great Commentary) expressed
language as infinite, as the Vedic spirit Brahman (Ultimate) and vak
(speech) cannot be expressed as numbers. Staal’s analysis of Panini and the
Vedas observed that the “Indian philosophy of language emanated from
Brahman and later developed into ‘sutra’ with few syllables which became
the source of ‘paribhasha’ or meta-language” (Staal 2008). He stressed
that language in ancient India was deeply connected to the science of rit-
ual, wherein a universe of language was constructed through the mantras 5
(Staal 1979, p. 10).
The issue of dualism between self and God, as I mentioned earlier, was
central to the Madhyamika school philosophers of language such as
Nagarjuna, belonging to the Buddhist tradition. They believed in the two
levels (dual) of truth: Parmartha or the non-conceptual ultimate truth and
Vyavahara or the conceptual truth. Nagarjuna considered the second to be
the vehicle of the first (Eckel 1978, p. 324). Although he believed in critical
philosophy, using the method of debating with philosophers who held
opposing viewpoints, he also believed in linguistic centrality; that “ultimate
truth cannot be taught without resorting to conventional expressions or
vyavhara” (Vigrahavyavartani, 127 as referred to in Eckel 1978, p. 328).
The Vedic philosophic view of language as God-given was challenged by
Buddhist traditions, which asserted language was a human creation (Coward
1990, p. 3). Such was the opinion of Bhartrhari, famously known as the
“Grammarian philosopher,” to whom can be attributed the view that the
“word is the world” (Aklujkar 2001, p. 456). Explaining Bhartrhari’s posi-
tion, Ashok Aklujkar clarified the various understandings of “word”—as a
physical sound and a mental image in the mind corresponding to the sound.
From the mental entities one can infer word to mean a “whole system of
language, linguistic symbols and the principle on which rests all language
knowing” (Aklujkar 2001, pp. 456–457).
A very significant distinction between modern Western philosophies of
language and the Indian tradition is the question of the primacy of speech
over writing. For the Indians, writing was a corrupt form of language, and
was valued as a teaching tool for those who were not intelligent enough to
remember their lessons (Coward 1990, p. 144). The Western imperial
powers emphasized the importance of writing as a record of history, but in
ancient and medieval India writing was essentially utilized to keep land
records and by kings and rulers in order to write their biographies. Common
people did not write, as education was expensive and not open to all.
Knowledge was therefore mostly orally conceived and transmitted. For
Bhartrhari, there was no knowledge outside the realm of language and
sabdatattva (word principle) (Coward 1990, p. 145). Hence, Bhartrhari
did not believe in the dualism of ultimate truth/reality and believed in oral-
ity. This difference in the conception of language with an emphasis on
8 P. SENGUPTA
speech rather than writing is at the root of the difference between the
Indian and Western philosophies of language. The coming of imperial pow-
ers in India rejected Indian historical advancements as mere abstractions
owing to the sparse written history. This brings us to the question of incom-
mensurability between the Indian and Western philosophies of language,
and I forcefully assert here that two civilizations, communities and cultures
cannot be compared utilizing the yardstick of just one of them.
Language is critical for knowledge transmission. To know is seemingly
impossible without language. For example, “I see a jug of water in the
kitchen.” I don’t need to speak loudly to myself to know that there is
water in the jug, but know it simply by seeing it; that is, through the sense
perception of sight an image is built in my brain, and this is not an abstract
image but a linguistic one. But when I need to convey this knowledge to
another person, I need to speak out (vak) by using a language. Therefore,
to know means to know linguistically. Knowledge of material as well as of
spiritual things requires language. Emphasizing this, Arindam Chakrabarti
focused on the criticality of “transmitting knowledge through speech”
(Chakrabarti 1992, p. 421). Thus, orality and speech lies at the core of
knowledge-imparting in ancient India.
Arguing for such a stand, Bimal Krishna Matilal stated that the Indian
philosophy of language “is based on knowledge revealed by the seers
through language i.e. verbal testimony, which then is the source of per-
ception and inference” (Matilal 2001, p. 6). The Vedic scriptures, then,
are the written testament of the culminated experiences of the seers.
According to Vedic philosophy, knowledge transmission is based not on
sense perception but on trust; it is transmitted from the guru (teacher) to
the shishya (disciple), and experiences are the basis of knowledge. The
sages and seers partake knowledge to their disciples through words, and
the disciples believe the words even without really seeing or experiencing
what they mean. In such a tradition of knowledge dissemination, where
oral narrations are based on readings and experiences, trust is vital. Such a
view, resting on language and “linguistic utterances” as a means of knowl-
edge based on trust, might seem unbelievable to modern rational beings
(Matilal 2001, p. 6).
Orality and Oriental Languages

It is true that even in this age of technologically advanced high-tech surveil-
lance mechanisms people elect their political representatives based on media
reports and rigorous publicity about the performances of political leaders.
Undoubtedly, we criticize the media as biased and market-oriented, yet

people still believe in media reporting and news enough to allow them to
shape their choice of leadership to form democratic government.
Information then becomes a source of knowledge creation in humans. Oral
expressions are an important part of knowledge creation and transmission
integral to Oriental and African epistemologies, wherein knowledge is
transmitted through oral narrations based on interpretations of the clan
elders, passed from one generation to another and founded on trust. Jan
Vansina, in his extraordinary work Oral Traditions as History, saw speech as
inherent in the civilizational development of many societies. Presenting an
authoritative account of oral traditions as history, Vansina insisted that “cul-
ture is reproduced by remembrance put into words and deeds” (Vansina
1985, pp. xi–xii). Such an endeavor cannot be completely erased of human
passion and feelings, which then become intrinsic to language. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, in his work Essays on the Origin of Languages and Writings related
to Music, described the Oriental languages as the most ancient languages
based not on “didactics or method but on feelings.” He asserted that the
idea that “language originated as a means to express human need is non-
tenable as the first natural effect of need was to separate men and not to
bring them together” (Rousseau 1998, p. 293). Validating speech not only
as natural but also closer to human agency and feelings, he further argued
that Oriental languages are more speech-based than the European ones:
Our languages are better written than spoken, and there is more pleasure in
reading us than there is in listening to us. In contrast, when written, Oriental
languages lose their life and warmth. Only half of the meaning is in the
words, all its force is in the accents. To judge the genius of the Orientals by
their books is like painting a man from his corpse. (Rousseau 1998, p. 317)
Rousseau’s importance as a philosopher lies not just in his sympathy for

and genuine admiration of Oriental civilization but in his recognition of
the incommensurability of judging languages and people of different cul-
tures by the same yardstick. This is illustrated in his Essays, where he
remarked that:
To appraise men’s actions properly, they have to be considered in all their

relations, and this is what we have not at all learned to do. When we put
ourselves in the place of others, we always put ourselves there such as we
have been modified, not such as they have been, and when we think we are
judging them by reason, we are only comparing their prejudices with ours.
(Rousseau 1998, p. 317)
10 P. SENGUPTA
Herder valued diversity, and was one of the first to voice this concern:
It is reasonable that cultures [languages] that have provided the horizon of

meanings [identities] for large number of human beings of diverse character
and temperaments—are almost certain to have something that deserves our
admiration and respect, even if it is accompanied by much that we have to
abhor and reject. (Herder as cited in Charles Taylor 1994, p. 101)
It is a fallacy to compare cultures, but one concept that seems to have

been equally adopted by almost all major cultures in the world is the
ideological link between identity and the concept of nationalism or
belonging to a nation. Academic scholarship in the post-Cold War phase
predicted the fading of the nation-state owing to the rigorous advent of
globalization in the last decades of the twentieth century. However, this
prediction has not come true, and, contrary to such thinking, nationalism
has made an even bigger comeback in world politics. The new avatar of
national identity coupled with intense competition for control of eco-
nomic resources have led to an increase in conflicts based on identity,
specifically national identity. Political theory is once again faced with the
dilemma of answering difficult questions regarding immigrants’ rights,
citizenship, belonging to a state politically as opposed to culturally.
Language’s inseparability from identity has been accepted by most think-
ers, but whether it is a central issue in terms of national identity is an issue
of contention. Some scholars term language as a variable or a part of
nationalism in as much as national sentiments are spread through the use
of language. Others give a more substantive role to language. Since to
think as a nation requires some commonality, language, along with cul-
ture, race, ethnicity, religion and kinship, plays a significant character in
bringing people together and binding them in a spirit of nationness. Any
discussion about nation must consider that nation and identity are very
complex and multifaceted concepts and among the most debated, not
only in the realm of political and social sciences but in terms of their
impact on scientific and technological developments. My objective here is
not to delve into definitions of nation or the criteria which are necessary
in order to call a people a nation. I will only discuss nation in as much as
language signifies identity, specifically national identity, and how this con-
nection of language with national identity has transformed language from
social identity marker to national identity marker.
Language Identity: Being and Belonging to a Nation

Nationalism6 as a modern concept was born in medieval Europe.7 The
medieval universities of Europe formed guilds of students called nations,
deriving from the Latin word natio, meaning to be born in. The member-
ship in these guilds was based on one’s place of birth. This development
first took place at the University of Bologna, and was followed by other
universities in Italy, Spain and Portugal, and a few in France. Comprising
those foreign students who came to learn under great teachers but did not
have civil or political rights, being away from their own land, these guilds
were granted privileges by the kings and the Church as they brought pros-
perity to the land. Students coming to these universities also became
members of their respective nations, according to the place of their birth
and origin (Rait 1912). Thus students were categorized into nations based
on birth and language. This development can rightly be termed the begin-
ning of the concept of nation, and it culminated in the modern conceptu-
alization of the nation-state, which took the whole world by storm. One
of the pioneer scholars who worked on the idea of nation was Ernest
Renan. In his lecture What is a Nation? (Renan 1992), he refuted the
claims of commonality of race, language, religion and community of inter-
est as being essential for nation formation but emphasized geography,
memory and people’s “will” to live together. Renan’s positioning of
nation as being formed by the willingness of people necessitates that the
common will is generated by and transmitted among people. How can
‘will’ generation and transmission take place without language? Renan’s
answer is commonality and forgetting, two important criteria in the gene-
alogy of a nation. He asserted that commonality of suffering unites people
more than joyous events. His position—that if people want to stay
together, their will dictates nation formation, is path-breaking research.
Elie Kedourie put forward a similar argument: I would argue that his and
Renan’s position differ, but they are similar in that they view language as
critical. The only difference is that Kedourie emphasized a single language
as an identity marker, whereas for Renan it was common suffering—or
as I call it the language of suffering—that is the common bond.
Commonality in terms of pain, discrimination and violence joined peo-
ple who spoke different languages to form a collective identity through
the language of suffering. Language then becomes important for Renan’s
idea of nation because suffering needs a medium for its transmission.
Ernest Renan differed from Kedourie not on the importance of language as
12 P. SENGUPTA
forming identity but on the basis of a single linguistic variety as being

essential for nation construction. People speaking different languages,
belonging to varied language groups, can form a nation if they feel like
one collective: this brings us to Renan’s important projection that “peo-
ple’s will” to stay together is a “daily plebiscite,” the most significant con-
dition for becoming a nation. The reason I am discussing Renan here is
because his approach that one language, religion or culture is not the
necessary condition for forming national identity is relevant to our under-
standing of post-colonial countries, which have exhibited to the world
that nationalism can exist in a territory with diverse languages and religion
where being subjected to humiliation, discrimination and torture by the
colonial master becomes the unifying force. In fact, colonial nationalism
most often used the language of the colonizers as the communicative
medium for people speaking diverse languages, thereby making the colo-
nial tongue the lingua-franca that joined people of different languages
into the common thread of nationalistic feelings. Thus, even if we take
Renan’s position that it is people’s will that is the determining factor for
forming a nation, language is still important as will is expressed and shared
through language.
The modern understanding of nation and nation-state is distinct from
what in the ancient world was understood as civilization. This brings us to
the two varieties of nation, with a political unit being distinct from the
cultural-linguistic unit (Suleiman 2003, p. 23). The difference between
these two forms of nation is the trajectory. In the former, the state comes
first, then national consciousness and after that nation, whereas in the lat-
ter, national consciousness comes first, then nation and last the state
(Seton-Watson 1981, p. lxvii). The first is distinctly connected to the
Western world whereas the second is important in the non-Western world.
Language plays a critical role in the collective history and imagination that
is shared by communities and gives a sense of belonging to a common
value system.
Nationalism developed in eighteenth-century Europe and was soon
viewed as a necessary condition for enjoying “the right to self-government
or legitimate exercise of power in the state” (Kedourie 1961, p. 9). Since
the European imperial powers colonized major regions of the earth, the
idea spread to the Asian, African and American continents. Designating this
rise of nationalism as “enlightened absolutism,” Kedourie asserted that:
It validated the claim that state is a collection of individuals who live together
to better secure their welfare, within a territory. This is the social pact uniting
men and defining rights and duties of rulers and subjects—and the achieve-
ment or elevated stage of ‘state’ can only be attained when people alike in
culture, language and religion start getting a feeling of oneness to demand
political freedom. (Kedourie 1961, p. 9)
Kedourie’s assignation that the claim for political and territorial inde-
pendence (sovereignty) necessitates that the feeling of ‘us’ and ‘we’ has
already been achieved through the criteria of commonness of culture, lan-
guage and religion. But this does not necessarily connote that people
speaking one language will always claim to be a single political unit or
state. This is not universal, as one witnesses a disjuncture between nation
and state in Arab identity. Sadek Suleiman makes this point poignantly:
The Arab identity, as such, is a culturally defined identity, which means

being Arab is being someone whose mother culture, or dominant culture, is
Arabism. (Sadek Jawad Suleiman 2007)
Arabism and Islam are intertwined concepts, and being Arab is more a
linguistic–religious than a national identity. Relating nationalism to state
boundaries can be problematic in understanding the Arab brand of iden-
tity, which transcends national boundaries. Therefore, for the Arabs, form-
ing one single political sovereign unit comprising all Arabs, a fundamental
feature of the European conception of nation, was not critical to their
identity. Arabs can be citizens of different countries but still belong to
Arab culture and possess Arabic identity. Therefore, the dominant Western
notion that the rightful progression for people who are forming a nation
(common language, culture, religion) as one single political state does not
hold true for all cultural identities.
Notes
1. For Nietzsche refer to Douglas Keller, https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/fac-
ulty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell22.htm.
2. The four Vedas according to Indian philosophy are Rig Veda, Sam Veda,
Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda.
3. Brahman here means the universal and final truth, in other words God/
ultimate authority.
4. Mantra (Hinduism and Buddhism) is a word or sound repeated to aid con-
centration in meditation-Oxford English Dictionary online. https://en.
oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mantra. Viewed on 25th October 2017.
14 P. SENGUPTA
5. For a lucid account of philosophy in early modern India, see Jonardon

Ganeri (2011) The Lost Age of Reason. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
6. For nationalism, see Anthony Smith (1971) Theories of Nationalism.
Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.; Ernest Gellner (1983) Nations
and Nationalism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press; Eric
Hobsbawm (1990) Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; John Hutchinson
and Anthony D. Smith (eds.) (1994) Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
7. For an account of language and communities in early modern Europe
see Peter Burke (2004) Language and Communities in Early Modern
Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; A very enlighten-
ing account connecting identity to the modern concept of nation and
citizen in France is given by Eugen Weber (1976) Peasants into
Frenchman: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, Stanford
University Press. For a brilliant exposition of language and Central
European nationalism, see Tom anz Kamusella (2009) The Politics of
Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
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Ross, Allen P. 1980. The Curse of Cannan, Studies in the Book of Genesis Part 1.
Bibliotheca Sacra 137: 223–240.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. 1998. Essays on the Origin of Languages and Writings
Related to Music. In Collected Works of Rousseau. Ed. and Trans. John T. Scott.
London/Hanover: University Press of New England.
Seton-Watson, Hugh. 1981. Language and National Consciousness. Proceedings of
the British Academy, lxvii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spencer, Vicki. 2007. In Defense of Herder on Cultural Diversity and Interaction.
The Review of Politics 69 (1): 79–105.
Staal, Frits. 1979. Oriental Ideas on the Origin of Language. Journal of American
Oriental Society 99 (1): 1–14.
———. 2008. Discovering the Vedas: Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights. New
Delhi: Penguin Books.
16 P. SENGUPTA
Suleiman, Yasir. 2003. The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in
Ideology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Press.
CHAPTER 2
The Language Situation in Colonial India:

Story of Bengal
Abstract This chapter elucidates the language situation in Bengal when

the English East India Company landed for the first time. Translations
carried by English scholars and officials were initiated to understand India
and its people, facilitating the colonial administrators to penetrate into the
Indian society. Analyzing the first language conflict in colonial India on
the issue of medium of instruction for educating Indians, between the
East India Company officials, the chapter examines British policies on
education in India, specifically the Charter Act of 1813 which laid the
edifice for future education policies.
Keywords Bengal • East India Company • Christian missionaries

• Translations • Vernacular • Anglicists • Orientalists • Macaulay
Language as the basis for identity formation was virtually absent in early
eighteenth-century India. The Dutch and French East India companies
were not interested in the development of the Indian vernacular languages.
Credit for making language a strong foundation of identity construction
goes to the British East India Company (EIC), with its education reforms
in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This will be discussed in
detail in the following paragraphs.
When the EIC landed on India’s west coast, the Portuguese language
had attained the status of lingua-franca between Indians and foreign

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7_2
18 P. SENGUPTA
settlers, including the Dutch, French and Portuguese. EIC servants also
used Portuguese rather than English, as one of the clauses in the Charter
of 1698 to EIC was the condition that proficiency in Portuguese and the
native language(s) was required by ministers of each garrison within twelve
months of reaching India (Marshman 1859, p. 22). The Charter stated:
to apply themselves to learn the native language of the country where they
shall reside, the better to enable them to instruct the Gentoos that shall be
the servants or slaves of the same Company or of their agents in the
Protestant religion … to maintain schools in all its garrisons and bigger
factories. (Nurullah and Naik 1943, p. 45)
In keeping with this clause, the EIC opened St. Mary’s Charity School,
Madras in 1715, followed by two other charity schools in Bombay and
Calcutta in 1718 and 1731 respectively (Nurullah and Naik 1943, p. 46).
In its initial phase of settling in India, the Company continued the tradi-
tion of patronage that had been followed by the Muslim rulers and func-
tioned through the use of Persian, the language of royalty (the official
language of the Mughal court) that was used in administration, revenue
collection and judicial functioning (Clark 1956, p. 454). When the EIC
arrived in India (specifically Bengal), Persian played an influential political
role as the means of negotiation between states, and it was learnt not only
by high-class Muslims but by rich Hindus too; so much so, that in many
cases it was considered more of an achievement than learning Sanskrit,
even among Hindus (Chatterji 1926, pp. 204–205). In Bengal, Persian
was taught by the Bihari, Bengali and Hindustani munshis to the sons of
rich people. The madrasas and maktabs were a popular destination for
Hindu as well as Muslim students, who flocked to learn Persian so that
they could gain employment in the Mughal administration (Marshall
2008, p. 32). The Muslim rule in Bengal transformed Bengali Brahmins
into private secretaries of the kings, and Persian became a popular lan-
guage for entering administrative services (Chatterji 1926, p. 204).
Sanskrit, the language of the Hindu pundits, was restricted to high-caste
Brahmins who discussed the language and its grammar in closely guarded
circles. Nadia, a district of twenty-four paraganas, was the main center of
Sanskrit learning in Bengal (Marshall 2008, p. 29). These Brahmins were
against Sanskrit teaching to the Europeans and other lower-caste Hindus,
and considered it to be treachery and betrayal of their religion. Most
scholars attribute the exclusivity of Sanskrit to the Brahmin community as
THE LANGUAGE SITUATION IN COLONIAL INDIA: STORY OF BENGAL 19
the sole reason for its decline. Sir William Jones, while inaugurating the
Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1783, asserted that the objective of the Society
was to unlock the treasures of Sanskrit (Clark 1956, p. 457), and indeed it
opened Sanskrit learning to the wider world and attracted national and
international scholars.
Analyzing the linguistic situation of Bengal, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed,
a British philologist, mentioned that Hindustani was sparingly spoken in
eighteenth-century Bengal and written in two scripts, the Devanagari,
called Hindustani, and the Persian script, called Moors (Urdu) (Halhed
1778, p. xiii). It was the mother tongue of sepoys and lower-class Muslims,
whereas upper-class Muslims were mostly bilingual, speaking Persian and
Moors (Urdu), but it soon replaced Portuguese as the language of the
bazaar (Clark 1956, p. 456). Bengali had low status, even though it was
the mother tongue of the common population. Furthermore, Bengali
spoken by the educated high class was different from the localized collo-
quial Bengali of the lower classes in urban Bengal. In rural areas Hindus
and Muslims shared the same variety of Bengali, indicating that language
was not intrinsically related to religion among the masses. Not only did
the lower-class Hindus and Muslims speak the similar tongue but also
their religious pilgrimages overlapped, with some pirs, dargahs and even
temples visited by people belonging to both the communities (Marshall
2008, p. 33).
Within the Muslim community, upper-class Muslims who had migrated
from the western region of India traced their lineage to Islam rather than
Bengal and were known as ashrafs or Puritan Muslims. This group consid-
ered the Islam in Bengal to be of a perverted form, and they spoke Persian
and Urdu. The ashrafs did not consider the Muslims of Bengal to be their
equals, and often discriminated against them as outcastes or impure
Muslims, owing to the Bengal Muslims’ allegiance to Sufism and their
proximity to Hindus. Apart from the ashrafs, there existed two other kinds
of indigenous Muslims in Bengal, one group considering Hindus to be
fellow Bengalis and the others sharing a common faith in the Sufi saints,
shrines and dargahs. These two categories were proud of their birth and
the heritage of Bengal, and they had the Bengali language in common. In
fact, language was the common factor between the elitist Muslims and the
local Bengali-speaking Muslims of Bengal (Gupta 2009, p. 31). The indig-
enous Muslim communities of Bengal considered Bengali to be their
mother tongue, which was unique among Indian Muslims, who otherwise
considered Urdu to be their mother tongue.1
20 P. SENGUPTA
Translating from Traders to Rulers

In due course, and with the increased intermingling between the English and
the natives, the officers of the EIC and their families started to understand
Bengali, as they required it to communicate with their domestic servants
and assistants. Halhed’s Bengali Grammar, published in 1778, facilitated
communication between company officials and native Bengali speakers.
Halhed argued for the use of Bengali in place of Persian for public and private
affairs because of its plainness and precision (Clark 1956, p. 458) but Bengali
did not gain an enhanced status until the early nineteenth century.
An important event from the perspective of language development was
the Judicial Plan of 1772, which declared that Muslims and Hindus
involved in civil cases to be legislated by laws of Quran and Shastras
(Hindu scriptures), respectively. This contributed to increasing transla-
tion of various works, and led to the publication of A Code of Gentoo Laws
by Halhed in 1776, providing the EIC with an insight into the Hindu
legal system for the first time and enabling English judges to comprehen-
sively understand Hindu civil laws. These translations encouraged the
founding of the Bengali Printing Press at Hugli with the assistance of
Charles Wilkins, who made Bengali font punches, making it the first lan-
guage to be mechanically reproduced using the printing press (Clark
1956, p. 458). Wilkins also translated the Hindu religious text known as
the Bhagavad Gita into English to get an insight into Hindu society
(Marshman 1859, p. 70). Individuals such as Halhed and Wilkins were
pioneers in the advancement of Bengali language.
Translation played a major role in colonialism throughout the world. To
a naïve mind translation is simply transformation from one language to
another, but it leads to “a production of a new text and is a product of an
‘ímaginary’, in this case colonial imaginary of the natives, what Ricoeur
calls “restructuring of semantic field” (Hannoum 2003, p. 61). Translation
was part of an entire enterprise of knowledge, indispensable for colonial
rule. It was not unique to the British but an integral design that was also
common to French and Dutch colonizers (Hannoum 2003, p. 62). It
became an important tool in the colonial concept of “orientalism,”2 in
which the Indians and other natives were portrayed as illogical, devoid of
reason and rationality, and powerless to present themselves accurately and
therefore needing to be represented (Said 1979, pp. 39–40). Orientalism
was thus the categorization of European knowledge of Indian traditions. In
their quest to organize India’s diverse and seemingly colossal multilayered
culture, the British started looking for written texts as the factual source of
India’s past and translating them. They were the narratives of a minuscule
powerful class, categorizing unwritten cultural practices and an assumption
that the vast mass of Indians as despicable, resulting in the “colonial con-
structionist thesis” (Gelders and Balagangadhara 2011, p. 102). Translations
were the initial path that paved the way for the success of colonialism, not
only as a mechanism to rule natives by knowing but through knowledge
creation from the perspective of the European paradigm, as Hannoum bril-
liantly expounded:
Knowledge was not only the means by and through which colonialism gov-
erned. Knowledge is also regulated by the power of the mental structure
that produces it. Its function went beyond knowing the natives. Colonial
knowledge shaped postcolonial identities; it introduced colonial categories
and institutions that outlived colonialism. Indeed, colonialism produced the
knowledge by and through which it governed. It also transformed the prod-
uct of imagination and, in fact more importantly, the domain, of imagina-
tion [and] assured colonial domination even long after the collapse of
colonial enterprise. (Hannoum 2003, p. 63)
A scrutiny of translations indicates the centrality that was given to the

relationship between language and culture, wherein “the notion of language
[becomes] the pre-condition of historical continuity and social- learning.
Translation, thus, is not merely linguistic but also a translation of ‘thought-
process’” (Asad 1993, pp. 171–172). This refers to “procedures of transmu-
tations of distinct categories and concepts [entangled] in the interplay and
inequality of languages” (Dube 2004, p. 164). Translation as presenting
newer categories and concepts had not yet taken root in this period, and was
to become embedded in colonial narratives of the early nineteenth century.
Promoting Vernacular Languages

for Proselytization
From the early eighteenth to the late eighteenth century, the EIC consid-
ered itself to be the better substitute for Indian rulers, but they had a burn-
ing desire to “emulate the Indian rulers in donating to schools and colleges
and to placate the most influential classes of the Indian people” (Nurullah
and Naik 1943, p. 48). In keeping with this enthusiasm, Warren Hastings,
the first Governor-General of India, started the Calcutta madrasa in 1781,3
22 P. SENGUPTA
and Jonathan Duncan, the Governor of Bombay, established the Sanskrit

College in Benaras in 1791. The madrasa was to educate the youth in
Muslim laws, sciences and literature, whereas the Sanskrit College was
meant for Hindus. This bifurcation of educational institutions on religious
grounds was to have a deep impact on India’s future.
In the late seventeenth century the Court of Directors remained sym-
pathetic towards Christian missionaries’ objectives, allowing them to
embark on the Company vessels to India. Charles Grant, a Christian mis-
sionary, landed in Malda in north Bengal in 1786 and translated the New
Testament into Bengali, using it as a tool to spread Christianity (Marshman
1859, pp. 176–178). William Carey, another missionary, started a school
in Madnabati in 1794, with Bengali, the vernacular language, as medium
of instruction. He was joined by Dr. Joshua Marshman and William Ward
in 1800 (Laird 1968, p. 320). The three, famously known as the Serampore
Trio, soon opened more schools in Serampore as well as in Jessore, and in
1818 they established the famous Serampore College. They taught ethics,
geography, astronomy, history and science in the vernacular languages and
translated many English textbooks into the vernacular. Some scholars
believed that the introduction of vernacular schools was not the brainchild
of Carey, and that the concept was already being experimented with by the
English Dissenters, who in early eighteenth-century England dissented
from the use of Latin and Greek as the medium of instruction in higher
studies and replaced these languages with the vernacular, English (Laird
1968, p. 321). Whatever is the case, it remains fundamental that at the
start of vernacular education in Bengal, Bengali was elevated from its low
status to the medium for imparting knowledge.
The Serampore Trio also came to be known as the Serampore Missionaries.
Their main aim was to proselytize Indians, but they did not pressurize stu-
dents into any Christian religious action in order to enjoy the benefits of the
institution (Potts 1967, p. 121). The Serampore Missionaries favored the
use of vernacular languages for education. In the controversy which later
took place between the Anglicists and the Orientalists, the missionaries were
transformed into a third group called the Vernacularists, because of their
continued emphasis on the use of vernacular languages as the medium of
instruction in schools (Laird 1968, p. 99). They were successful in making
education attractive among the natives, and within two years there were
8500 students in their schools. Carey also started two vernacular magazines,
the Dig Darshan and Samachar Darpan, in 1818 in order to provide read-
ing matter in simple language. Education was used as “a key instrument” by
the Christian missionaries in India and elsewhere as the first step towards
spreading Christianity (Laird 1961, p. 97).
Bengali became the preferred language for education owing to the
efforts of the missionaries. Recognizing this, William Wilberforce pro-
posed the inclusion of Christian teaching through Bengali and the intro-
duction of English education for upper-class Bengalis within the clauses of
the Bill of 1793 (Clark 1956, p. 458).4 This proposal was rejected because
of the EIC’s policy of non-interference, and their emphasis that civil ser-
vants should learn the native language rather than Bengali speakers learn-
ing English. The EIC policy of religious neutrality, although it found
admirers in the Court of Directors as well as among upper-caste Hindus
and Muslims, was criticized as a veil that allowed the Company to hide its
Christian character. John Clark Marshman, an English journalist and later
a missionary, assertively argued that:
It is to be lamented that the public authorities in India have been too much
disposed to keep their religion in the background, as if they were ashamed or
afraid to acknowledge it in the presence of the heathen. This timid policy has
not prevented the torrent of an exterminating mutiny, and this of itself fur-
nishes a strong argument for the adoption of a more dignified course. It is a
fallacy to suppose that we shall lose the confidence of the natives by the
manly avowal of our creed. The Hindoos and Mahomedans are men of such
intense religious feeling that they cannot be expected to entertain any respect
for those who do not manifest the same strength of attachment to their own
religion. They cannot believe in the existence of religious indifference and
perfect neutrality has only tended to bring our motives under suspicion, and
to complicate our relations with them. (Marshman 1859, pp. xi–xii)
Such allegations did not deter the EIC’s policy of non-interference in

religious matters and missionaries began to be strictly dealt with by the
EIC, who held that the preaching of Christianity was a root cause of grow-
ing suspicion among religious Indian natives towards the Company, thereby
weakening its power in India. The development of the utilitarian school
pioneered by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill and later followed by John
Sturt Mill in England also supported the policy of neutrality as religion was
viewed merely as a safeguard of social order (Mill 1825). The rising tide of
utilitarian ideas, envisioned the “end of education to render the individual,
as much as possible, an instrument of happiness, first to himself and next to
other beings” (Mill 1825, p. 3). But EIC and her Court of Directors were
not fully successful in stopping missionaries travelling to India, and by
24 P. SENGUPTA
1815 there were around two hundred missionary-run Bengali medium

schools in Calcutta.
The EIC’s statesmen, such as Lord Wellesley, were deeply committed
to spreading education in Bengal. Wellesley established the College at
Fort Williams in Bengal in 1800, and this was to embrace the teaching of
Greek, Latin and English classics along with history and sciences. Classical
oriental languages such as Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit continued to be
learnt and taught, but Fort Williams introduced vernacular languages such
as Hindustani, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Canarese (Kannada)
as learning mediums. Wellesley favored a uniform system of study at the
primary level of education among young civilians of all the presidencies
(Marshman 1859, p. 144), enforcing the study of Bengali on members of
the civil services. His endeavors were not appreciated by the Court of
Directors, who held that educating the native Indians and introducing
them to science and Western education was not appropriate; and in 1802
the Court of Directors ordered the abolition of the Fort William College
(Marshman 1859, p. 166).
The EIC faced protests and demonstrations in England thanks to the
wrath of various Christian missionaries as well as the English aristocracy,
although for very different reasons. Christian religious organizations
attacked the anti-missionary stance of the EIC, holding it responsible for
the degenerating morality among EIC officials, whereas the aristocracy
was jealous of the huge wealth that the Company had amassed since 1757,
and demanded an investigation into the Company’s accounts as well as
focusing on the inhuman behavior that was meted out to the natives. This
led to the passing of the 1774 Regulating Act, which established a Royal
Court in Calcutta that provided protection from the Company’s oppres-
sion for the native Indians. Another action of the EIC which aroused the
wrath of the English aristocracy and missionaries alike was the Company’s
sanctioning of funds to build a Hindu temple on the banks of the Ganges,
together with the establishment of a college in Benaras to inculcate Hindu
laws, literature and religion among the youth. The Company’s motive in
all this was purely commercial. It was drawing revenue from Hindu idol
shrines in Gaya, and opening another temple meant an increase in reve-
nues (Marshman 1859, p. 47).
The disagreement between the missionaries and the EIC regarding edu-
cation was due to differential objectives. Missionaries were driven by reli-
gious and philanthropic ideals and therefore supported education for all,
whereas the Company, with the motive of making profit and collecting
more revenue, was in favor of education that was limited to the upper classes.
The missionaries criticized the EIC’s indifference to the development of

education for the poor natives in Bengal and argued that the Company,
driven by political ambitions, was only patronizing schools for the upper
classes. The missionaries were in favor of using the local vernacular lan-
guages in order to educate the indigenous population of Bengal in place of
the classical languages such as Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic that were used in
Company-sponsored schools.
Between 1774 and 1794, Indian affairs were frequently discussed in the
British Parliament, with statesmen such as Edmund Burke, William
Windham and James Fox studying Indian civilization. These intellectuals
were concerned about the lowering morals and greed of the EIC’s officials
and began to pressurize the government to deal strictly with the Company.
Edmund Burke, a champion of human rights, vehemently opposed the
inhuman behavior of the EIC to her Indian subjects. Drawing Parliament’s
attention towards the Magna Carta, the great charter of natural rights,
Burke argued that the Charter of the Company was not formed on the
Magna Carta’s principles. Declaring that the monopoly of the EIC had
led to a “chartered rights of men,” a violation against the natural rights of
mankind, Burke proposed the cancellation of the EIC’s political power
(Burke 1990). In his famous speech that favored the Fox Bill for national-
ization of the EIC, he argued:
I freely admit to the East India Company their claim to exclude their fellow-
subjects from the commerce of half the globe, claim to administer an annual
territorial revenue of seven million sterling; command an army of sixty thou-
sand men; and to dispose, (under the control of a sovereign imperial discre-
tion, and with the due observance of the natural and local law) of the lives
and fortunes of thirty millions of their fellow-creatures. All this they possess
by the charter and by acts of parliament, and all this I freely grant. But grant-
ing all this, they must grant to me in my turn, that all political power which
is set over men, and that all privilege claimed or exercised in exclusion of
them, being wholly artificial, and for so much, a derogation from the natural
equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or other exercised ulti-
mately for their benefit. (Burke 1990, p. 5.16)
Though Fox’s Bill was defeated in the House of Lords, the fact it was
debated at all was enough to stir the English Parliament to examine the
misdeeds of the EIC’s officers. Meanwhile the missionaries continued
their attempts to pressurize the government to allow them access in India
so that they could perform their religious duties of spreading the Gospel.
26 P. SENGUPTA
1813 Charter for Education in India

The Minto Minutes formulated by Lord Minto in 1811,5 could rightly be
called the precursor to the 1813 Charter. The Minutes not only focused on
the diminishing number of learned men in India but also elaborated on the
state of decay of “science and literature of a nation particularly distin-
guished for its love and successful cultivation of letters in other parts of the
empire” (Nurullah and Naik 1943, p. 64). The agitations by missionaries
in England, the efforts of some EIC men who admired the oriental lan-
guages and political sentiments in England against atrocities committed on
the native subjects together led to the passage of the 1813 Charter, which
for the first time made education the direct responsibility of the EIC—and
also allowed missionaries to work freely in India. The Charter endowed “an
amount of 10,000 pounds for revival and improvement of literature and
promotion of sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in
India” (Zastoupil and Moir 1999, p. 163). It has rightly been termed as the
event “leading to English literature making inroads in India” (Vishwanathan
1987, pp. 1–2). The Charter also required officers to report on “what
ancient establishments still existed for the diffusion of knowledge,” and to
this end they were to conduct surveys and collect data. These surveys later
developed into the very first reports on indigenous education and the
schooling system in Bombay, Bellary, Bengal and Canara.6
Market to Mind: Language as Entry Pass

The Charter led to the first language controversy in modern India. This
focused on the question about the course to be taken for educating
Indians, and two opposing schools emerged within the EIC. The first,
Orientalists or Classicists, supported by Hastings and Minto, mainly com-
prising the old EIC officers who were strongly driven by the idea of not
agitating or intervening in the conservative Indian society of Hindus and
Muslims, preferred a synthesis of Eastern and Western cultures. On reli-
gious and language issues, they believed in toeing the line of the earlier
rulers, the Mughals. The second school comprised of the younger genera-
tion of EIC officials, headed by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who served
on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, and Lord
Bentinck, Governor-General of India, wanted “substitution of Western
culture for the Indians and to create a class of persons who would be
Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, moral and intellect”
(Macaulay Minutes 1835 as cited in Nurullah and Naik 1943, p. xvi). This
school was called the Anglicists.
The Orientalists argued that the Indians “may not learn the sciences
through European languages as they are biased against it,” and hence the
classical languages of India had to be utilized as the medium of instruction
if ever English science was to make its way into Indian society (Marshman
1859, pp. 120–121). They viewed the abolition of education in classical
Indian languages as breaching the commitment to the Company’s policy
of respecting and “upholding the Islamic and Hindu traditions, which was
a way of conciliating high society Indians by showing respect and
admiration for indigenous languages and culture” (Evans 2002, p. 261).
Prominent among the Anglicists was Macaulay, who owing to his evan-
gelical upbringing was an ardent advocate of English education, which he
believed would cure “darkness by remedying the disorders that has crept
in the Indian society” (Lynn and Moir 1999, p. 83). Macaulay was influ-
enced by Charles Grant, who postulated that English education and
Christianity “would alter a ‘morally decadent society’” (Evans 2002,
p. 263). They argued that the policy followed by the Company was parti-
san and that following oriental ideals would prove to be beneficial only to
the upper-class orthodox and conservative Hindus and Muslims, not the
general masses. The disagreement between the two groups was not lim-
ited to the medium of instruction and the aim of education. In addition,
the Anglicists demanded the closing of the Calcutta madrasa, in order to
replace religious education using state funds with secular Western educa-
tion. Determined not to let this happen, Henry Troby Prinsep, an Indian
civil servant and later the Education Secretary to the Government of
Bengal, argued that:
The madrasa/madrassah (sic) is the only link through which the Government
has any connection whatsoever with the instruction of the Muslim youth of
Bengal. It [is] an endowment made by Warren Hastings more than 50 years
ago … and is not one of the passing institutions of recent establishment.
(Nurullah and Naik 1943, pp. 99 and 102)
This controversy needs to be probed deeply, as it was not merely a con-

flict between groups regarding the medium of instruction but a dichot-
omy in interests and objectives with the Classicists, whose intention to
colonize India was driven by the objective of being highly successful in
exploiting the sub-continent’s wealth. To this end they wanted to become
28 P. SENGUPTA
significant-players. This required their understanding the rules of the

game, which explains why they followed the path of the Mughal rulers.
The Anglicists were not content with being players and winning the game,
in other words monopolizing India’s markets, but wanted to change the
game itself. They wanted not just economic extraction but to penetrate
the Indian cultural ethos for successful completion of cultural imposition
on the Indian subjects. This new game required a new language, code and
rules, so that they would rule India’s mind and not just the market. The
new epistemological framework that they aspired was of portraying the
natives as the “other,” with their culture being demonized as inhuman,
barbaric, uncivil, devoid of any rational thinking; on them the superior,
scientific and civilized culture of the “self,” the English way, was to be
imposed. The Anglicists viewed this as their duty towards their nation and
religion—that it was the white man’s “civilizing mission” to create a class
of persons who would be “Indian in blood and colour but English in taste,
moral and intellect” (Macaulay 1835). By ridiculing, humiliating and
degrading the Indian native cultures, the newer generation of EIC suc-
cessfully implanted a belief in many Indian minds about their inferiority.
The Anglicists created a new class of intellectuals—Indian by birth but
English in their thought processes—as well as many who were somewhere
in the middle. This colonial schema is still very much prevalent in the his-
tory writing of most erstwhile colonies: they find themselves trapped in
this ontological net, even when venturing into writing post-independence
narratives, which superimpose the structure of dominance through lan-
guage, signs and symbols.
Classicists were satisfied with a market monopoly and economic gains,
while believing in the richness of Indian languages and cultures. The
Anglicists, on the other hand, changed the earlier EIC blueprint in order
to suit the needs of the newly acquired role of sovereign ruler. They were
influenced and assisted in this venture by the rising tide of economic writ-
ings and theories of capitalism in the United Kingdom,7 as well as the
development of the philosophy of the nation-state, which helped to build
a nationalist Pax Britannica with the Union Jack flying on most territories
of the world. This colonial and imperialistic design of the EIC was to be
facilitated by young officers who caricatured the Indian value system
unlike their predecessors who romanticized it. Both equally contributed
to the territorial, intellectual and epistemological triumph of Britain on
India, leading to what Ashis Nandy (1983, p. 64) called the “uncolonized
mind,” which I suspect remains colored by colonial thought with the
recovery of the uncolonized self an extremely difficult venture, if not

impossible. The next section presents an analysis of the development of
language education in colonial India, emphasizing the role of Macaulay,
Bentinck and Charles Wood.
English Education for Un-English India

India’s English education system has its genesis with the missionaries, but
the policy papers were provided by Lord Bentinck and Baron Macaulay.
Macaulay presented his famous Minutes on Education 1835 to Bentinck,
elaborating on the need for English language education in India. “English,
he emphasized, should not only be taught as a language but also should
form the medium of instruction at college level” (Cutts 1953, p. 824).
Macaulay was swayed by the utilitarian ideas of John Stuart Mill. His objec-
tive in introducing English education was, he stated, to “produce a class
who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern”
(Cutts 1953, p. 825). He was certain that English education was not meant
to transform India but to assist the English officers. In his Minutes, Macaulay
argued that establishing his position was best for the English economy:
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spo-
ken among the natives of India contain neither literary nor scientific informa-
tion, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from
some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into
them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement
of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies
can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular
amongst them. What then shall that language be? One-half of the committee
maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend
the Arabic and Sanscrit [sic]. The whole question seems to me to be—which
language is the best worth knowing? I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit
or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their
value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit
works. I have conversed with men distinguished by their proficiency in the
Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valua-
tion of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who
could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the
whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the
Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the commit-
tee who support the oriental plan of education. (Sharp 1920, p. 107)
30 P. SENGUPTA
Macaulay questioned the Orientalists about the usefulness of teaching

European science in Arabic and Sanskrit, and whether it was possible that
Hindus who believed in such irrational things as kings ruling for 33,000
years would ever be convinced by Newton’s laws and John Locke’s philoso-
phy. To do justice to English scientific teaching and learning necessitated a
European language as the medium, and what better than English? Not only
was Macaulay certain of the backwardness of the Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic
languages as carriers of scientific rationality, but his views were also economi-
cally beneficial to the EIC. Bentinck found Macaulay’s education policy in
tune with his own administrative ideals. He argued that if English was the
medium of instruction, more and more English-proficient Indians could be
hired at a much lower cost, cutting the expenditure incurred by the
Company’s treasury (Cutts 1953, p. 829). Lord Bentinck’s evangelical back-
ground also made him lean towards Macaulay’s rational and English-oriented
education policy. They agreed on three areas: firstly, a British curriculum in
English would be cost effective; second, it would lead to the elevation of
Indian morals and intellect; and third, through the spread of English lan-
guage, people would start to understand Christian principles and convert to
the new rational and scientific faith. One can find traces of the political econ-
omy of education in Macaulay’s arguments when he argues that:
We are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanskrit students while those who learn
English are willing to pay us … why then is it necessary to pay to learn
Sanskrit or Arabic? … On all subjects that state of the market is the decisive
step. (Sharp 1920, pp. 107–117)
The Orientalist argument based on political liberty, economic indepen-

dence and pride in one’s own cultural background as essential for enhanc-
ing Indian happiness was defeated by Macaulay’s strong appeal to political
economy and English supremacy. The controversy finally introduced
English as the official language in India. Bentinck preferred “Europeanization
of the Indian society” (Rosselli 1974, p. 209) as the road appropriate for
the fulfillment of his “liberal imperialist” vision:
Measures of doing away with cruel customs and favoring European knowl-
edge were to him a constellation of measures aimed at enhancing a “national
character” and urging India towards substantial self-rule … Hindus may
learn English to act as agent of making united regenerated imperial India.
(Rosselli 1974, pp. 210 and 215)
Percival Spear, a well-known English historian, presented a balanced

view on the language controversy. His thesis pointed out that the division
between the Orientalists and Anglicists was “acute not as to the teaching
of English” but the fundamental difference of opinion was about the cen-
trality attached to English as being crucial in terms of “educational
value” (Spear 1938, p. 78). The supporters of English-only education
were prejudiced and thought “English as the open sesame of western civi-
lization” (Spear 1938, p. 81). English was demanded for its “worldly
advantages not cultural values” (Spear 1938, p. 95). The two schools
believed in paradoxical principles: the Orientalists (Classicists) were fol-
lowers of Burke’s teaching of liberty and natural rights, whereas the
Anglicists (Westerners) believed in the Benthamite principle of utility as
the highest ideal. Another rationale that Spear provided was the incompa-
rability of Indian and Western education as they were based on completely
diametrically opposed worldviews, the Indians aiming at spiritualism
whereas the Western pursued materialism. Spear described the Western
genius as “constructive ingenuity” as opposed to the Indian genius of
“constructive simplicity” (Spear 1938, p. 86), defining constructive inge-
nuity as “leading to ceaseless elaboration and creating wants,” whereas the
Indian education system aimed at the transfer of traditional knowledge
from one generation to the next rather than creating new knowledge
based on wants. The true aim of education “was that it fit into man’s social
and intellectual environment as well as inspire him to rise beyond it”
(Spear 1938, p. 86).
The education policy of elevating English education has also been stud-
ied in terms of the fallout of the renaissance paradigm in Europe. India was
seen as an old civilization untouched by the renaissance and reformation,
and it was believed to be in need of regeneration in the same way as Europe
had been (Chatterjee 1975, p. 310). The coming of the EIC into contact
with the natives produced a “social churning” in Bengal, with the rise of a
neo-rich class of Bengali bhadralok (Kochar 2008, p. 45),8 who played a
critical role in the development of an education policy that was also seen as
a class act; in other words, “British rulers versus Bengalis bhadralok and
Bengali bhadraloks versus Bengali labour class” (Acharya 1995, p. 673).
Tracking the origin of Indian nationalism to the rising popularity of English
literature among Indian elites, Chatterjee asserted that the initial Indian
intellectuals such as S.N. Banerjee aspired for a “blend of all that is great,
noble, manly and worthy of imitation in the West with all that is gentle,
spiritual, tender and sweet in the East” (Chatterjee 1975, p. 317).
32 P. SENGUPTA
One of the most conspicuous documents on Indian educational policy

during the British rule in the mid-eighteenth century is Sir Charles Wood’s
Education Dispatch of 1854. This has been called the “Magna Carta of
English education in India” (Moore 1965, p. 70). In 1853, on the eve of
renewal of the EIC Charter, a parliamentary enquiry was held to “decide
the terms of the charter.” Evidence was provided to the Lords Committee
on the “disparate nature” of education in different parts of British India.
It was the first “serious and sympathetic” enquiry into India’s education
system undertaken by the British Parliament (Gupta 1999, p. 34). Wood
was the President of Board of Control from 1853 to 1855 and the
Secretary of State for India from 1859 to 1866. Though not fully
acquainted with British policies in India, he was convinced of the need for
a reformation of education policy (Moore 1965, p. 75). Discussing the
objective, R.J. Moore retorts that it was:
Develop[ing] a ‘general scheme of practical education as part of a larger

policy for regenerating the country … favoring the introduction of scholar-
ship to provide a path from lowest school to the highest and ultimately to
technical and professional careers. (Moore 1965, p. 80)
Though the Education Dispatch is popularly associated with the name

of Wood, one cannot deny the influential role of Lord Dalhousie and Lord
Canning, the Governor-Generals of India between 1848 and 1862, in
framing it (Gordon 1968, p. 389). The Dispatch brought education in
India under governmental responsibility. Wood was against exclusive
schools and favored the establishment of schools for those who could not
afford education on their own. His remedy was the creation of an educa-
tional system from primary schooling to higher university degree in place
of the disjointed education system that existed in British India. Some of
his recommendations require our attention, as his policy was followed
with some modifications in post-colonial India. These include a separate
Public Instruction Department for the administration of education in each
presidency, a system of inspection of all educational schools and the estab-
lishment of three universities on the model of the University of London in
Bombay, Madras and Calcutta (Emmot 1965, p. 167). There was also
provision for a system of grants in aid to be provided to schools in need,
the opening of teacher training institutions, vernacular languages to be
utilized as the medium of instruction for mass education and the promo-
tion of women’s education. Even though the Woods Dispatch emphasized
vernacular education, English education had by then become popular as a

“synonym to power, status and means of upward mobility” (Raina 1989,
p. 38). This was to remain the case in the decades to come.
Notes
1. See, Rafiuddin, Ahmed. (1981) The Bengal Muslims, 1871–1906: The Quest
for Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press; Nilanjana Gupta. (2009)
Reading with Allah: Madarsas in West Bengal. New Delhi and UK:
Routledge.
2. I use Orientalism as is used by Edward Said (1979) in his book Orientalism.
3. Also known as Madarsa Aliya. For a detailed analysis see Robert Ivermee.
(2015) Secularism, Islam and Education in India, 1830–1910. Pickering
and Chatto Publishers Limited.
4. William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was an educationist and English
politician.
5. Lord Minto was the Governor-General of India from 1806 to 1813.
6. Present-day Karnataka, a state in southern India.
7. Some prominent economists were Adam Smith (1776) Wealth of Nations,
David Hume (1741) A Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Concerning
Human Understanding (1748).
8. Bhadralok means prosperous well-educated people, mainly Bengalis belong-
ing to Kolkata. The term bhadra connotes gentle, well mannered and
respectable.
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London/New York: Routledge.
CHAPTER 3
Making Identity Out of Language:

Beyond Bengal
Abstract This chapter examines the linguistic situation in different parts

of India, highlighting Punjab, Kashmir, North-Western Frontier Provinces,
Madras, Mysore, Gujarat and the northeast regions. The colonial admin-
istration’s decision regarding official and court languages led to a situation
in which languages were identified and named, thereby developing the
idea that written languages were superior to oral ones, stratifying Indian
society through language. This further transformed the Indian situation
from identity of language to language of identity, and linking language to
religion led to divisions in Indian society. The chapter argues that identity
based on languages is a colonial construct.
Keywords Identity of language • Language of identity • Mother tongue

• Standardization • Communalism
Most works on colonial India concentrate exclusively on Bengal. This is

justified by the fact that Bengal was the first region to fall under the British
imperial suzerainty. But the language situation in other parts of the coun-
try was equally affected by colonial rule. Studies such as Kenneth W. Jones,
Socio-Religious Reform Movements (1989) and Religious Controversy in
British India: Language Dialogues in South Asia (1992), Christopher
R. King, One Language and Two Scripts (1999), Sumathi Ramaswamy,
Passions of the Tongue (1997), Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty (2000),

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7_3
38 P. SENGUPTA
Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of Belonging (2003), Lisa Mitchell,

Language, Emotions and Politics in South India (2009), Martha Selby and
Indira Vishwanathan (eds.), Tamil Geographies (2008) and Sudipta
Kaviraj, Imaginary Institutions of India (2012) present rigorous scholarly
research that focuses on specific regions and/or religions. There is a dearth
of literature collating the language situation in different parts of India, the
exception being a few edited volumes such as Braj Kachru, Yamuna Kachru
and S.N. Sridhar’s (2008) Language in South Asia and Shailendra Mohan,
Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta and Imtiaz S. Hasnain’s (2013) Alternative Voices:
(re)searching, Language, Culture and Identity1. This chapter attempts to
fill the gap in the literature by throwing light on linguistic identity forma-
tion in different regions of India, going beyond Bengal.
To do justice to a complete understanding of the construction of iden-
tity based on language one needs to understand the critical role played by
the colonial state in India. Often linguistic and religious identities were
amalgamated, but even this identification of language with a specific reli-
gion is an English discourse—especially in the case of Urdu with Muslims
and Sanskritized Hindi with Hindus. In India during the eighteenth cen-
tury no religious community had monopoly over a particular language
and the concept of mother tongue was virtually unknown (Pollock 2006,
p. 49). The colonial state played a pioneering role in constructing linguis-
tic identity, starting from giving names to different Indian languages.
Hunter pointed out that “all language names in India though taken from
indigenous nomenclature were invented by Europeans” (Hunter 1909,
p. 350). Linguistic identity in India emanated from the colonial masters’
obsession with classifying and categorizing people on the basis of their
language for administrative convenience and the fulfillment of economic
motives. To substantiate how language as the basis of identity formation
was derived from English modernity, we will examine the language situa-
tion and how it was transformed through standardization and identifica-
tion by the colonial administration. This led to the conjoining of language
with religion and script, again something unfamiliar to the Indians. The
following paragraphs illustrate the process of linguistic identity formation
during colonial rule in the different regions that form India.
Linguistic Situation in Northern India

India was a land of diverse languages, but language as identity is a modern
phenomenon and a residue of colonial administrative policies, coupled
with the development of print media publishing in vernacular languages.
MAKING IDENTITY OUT OF LANGUAGE: BEYOND BENGAL 39
The print media became a site of competition, posing one language against
the other, especially intermingling linguistic and religious identity, for
example in the case of Punjabi in Gurmukhi to Sikhism, Hindi-Hindustani
in Nagari to Hindus and Urdu in Persian script to Muslims (Jalal 2000,
p. 124). Because of colonial rule, language for the first time became a
mark of communal identity. Language as a ground for identity was not a
common feature in pre-colonial India, and as an essential criterion for this
had not taken root (Kaviraj 2012, p. 141). Punjabi was spoken alike by
Hindus and Muslims of the North-Western Provinces (NWP). Similarly,
Bengali was spoken by people of Bengal irrespective of their religious affil-
iations. Languages in India, before the coming of the colonial rulers, were
neither divisive nor the basis of identity formation. A diversity of languages
existed within its space and geography, but that is not the same as linguis-
tic identity. This developed in India during the latter half of the nineteenth
century when British officials carried out surveys for their own administra-
tive convenience and undertook educational reforms. These later assigned
community identity based on language to people who did not speak the
standard languages, and dialects and admixtures were seen as belonging to
“bastard” language communities by the British (Jalal 2000, p. 107).
Rather than risking the stigma of being identified as a member of one of
these “bastard” language communities, people started identifying them-
selves as members of the nearest standard language community for the
purposes of government censuses and other enumerations. This eventually
led to the death of many local spoken language variants.
The colonial state’s zeal in managing the colossal Indian empire led to
the imposition of their knowledge on the Indian languages, organizing
them by identifying and naming them. This was the first exercise in adopt-
ing European categories for India’s linguistic mosaic. The journey from
identification of language to language of identity (Jalal 2000, p. 124)
began when territories where a language was spoken and written in the
official script were defined and tied down. This marked an important
development because the hierarchization of written and spoken language
was undertaken by the colonial masters, who then chose a script that was
appropriate for writing a spoken language. From this came the imposition
of the Persian script for Urdu and Nagari script for Hindavi in the NWP,
creating an artificial divide by imposing two scripts on the same spoken
language (King 1994). Another reason which led to divisions between
communities was that Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu) was encouraged as the
medium of instruction in schools in NWP, but for employment knowledge
of the official Persian language was required. Economic issues led to
40 P. SENGUPTA
conflict among the vernacular elites, and soon the Hindi/Urdu divide
became rigid: Hindi and Urdu were defined as the languages of Hindus
and Muslims respectively. This furthered the building of a communal
identity based on language.
Declaring Persian to be the official language of colonial administration
also resulted in identifying Hindustani/Urdu with the “Muslim past”
(Jalal 2000, p. 105). Tracing the genesis of the language policy of the
British colonial state, Christopher King (1992, p. 124) asserted that the
declaration of Persian as the official language (following the 1837 British
policy) sparked a conflict of interest between the “vernacular elites”,
though Hindi/Urdu were encouraged as a medium of instruction in mid-
dle and high school, for employment in the colonial administration they
seemed unworthy, devoid of any official recognition. Ayesha Jalal (2000)
went deeper into this explanation, putting her finger on the question of
identification of language, unique to the NWP. Arguing that Hindi/Urdu
were the same language before the advent of the British, Jalal explained
that, in their zeal for empirical and orderly categorization of the colossal
empire, the colonial state introduced artificial distinctions and categories.
Further, she reiterated that:
the linguistic categories were a colonial invention-vitiating attempt to proj-

ect Hindi and Urdu as symbols of a coherent Hindu and Muslim identity
respectively. (Jalal 2000, p. 103)
A pertinent point made by Jalal while analyzing the Hindi/Urdu/

Punjabi situation in NWP and Punjab was the recognition that was
granted to a language based on script, thereby distinguishing a written
from a spoken language, one being script-dependent, the other script-
independent. This difference is relevant in understanding the politics of
language, the most fundamental distinction being that written language
is associated with power and prestige whereas spoken is considered infe-
rior with no standing. Standardization can take place in a written lan-
guage with norms and codes that are identified by government and
educational or literary institutions, but spoken languages are identified as
dialects without any script, hence signifying illiteracy (Bright 2012).
Spoken language is a lived experience which changes much faster than a
written language, as writing, with its grammar and vocabulary, gives a
sign of permanence.
[In] converting the identity of language to fit regional specifications for

education and employment, the colonial state and an alert segment of
Indian society, had created a definite niche for the politics of language. (Jalal
2000, p. 137)
In contrast to the NWP, in Bihar, where the colonial administration

changed the language of the court from Urdu to Hindi in 1881, the
Hindus and Muslims both voiced their opinions against such a move. This
case is unique, as most studies deal only with the separatism which the
British sowed between the two major religious communities. In Bihar
the communities were united on the language issue, as Mohammad Sajjad
stated:
The Kayasthas [Hindu] were trained in the Perso-Arabic language and

script and had their own Kaithi script as well, which made them protest
against Nagari [script]. Another script in vogue was Mithiliaskshar or
Tirahitiya for Maithili language. The controversy [introduction of Hindi]
did not create sharp communal divide along religious lines. (Sajjad 2014,
p. 53)
The intercommunity relations were further strengthened owing to the

establishment of many joint associations in the 1860s, examples being
Anjuman-e-Islamia in Arrah and Bhumihar Brahman Sabha. A distinctive
feature in Bihar was the translation of Western science books into Urdu,
establishing the mother tongue as a viable medium for scientific instruc-
tion, and the opening of Anglo-vernacular schools by Imdad Ali in Gaya
and Bhagalpur, under the guidance of the Bihar Scientific Society (Sajjad
2014, p. 51). The context in Bihar was different from the state of affairs
in United Provinces or NWP; here the Wahhabi movement led to anti-
colonial feelings, but realizing that British dominance was a reality, the
Wahhabis along with many educated Muslim, Hindu scholars and
intellectuals started educational institutions and schools (Sajjad 2014,
pp. 48–49). These sabhas, anjumans and madrasas as well as numerous
Urdu newspapers, promoted tolerance, unity and brotherhood (Sajjad
2014, p. 53). All the above factors allowed Bihar to be one of the last
regions to fall under the shadow of communalism.
In Punjab, it was more about identity of language than language of
identity, as was the case in NWP (Jalal 2000, p. 103). Hindustani was a
composite of Brijbhasha, Khariboli, Awadhi and Bhojpuri, a language
42 P. SENGUPTA
Ghalib and Khusro named Rekhta, renamed Urdu by the colonizers (Jalal
2000, p. 106). Punjabi was not unique to any religious community, but
the colonial administration’s identification of Punjabi in Gurmukhi script
with Sikhism gave it a religious coloring (Jalal 2000, p. 107).2 Therefore,
in Punjab the script became the distinguishing factor in identifying Sikhs,
Muslims and Hindus. The colonial state played politics of script by identi-
fying the same language with three different scripts based on religious
affiliation: Nagari script with Hindus, Urdu with Muslims and Gurmukhi
script with Sikhs. This is because Hindi as Khariboli was different from
Urdu as Khariboli only if written in a script other than Persian (Jalal 2000,
p. 106). Hence, Persian was discarded. The arbitrary imposition of script
on Indian languages by the British rested on the prioritization of script
rather than spoken language, wherein script became the divisive
mechanism. The same language written in two different scripts could be
completely illegible in one of its forms to native speakers. Hence, in Punjab
there existed a huge “gap between language of administration and lan-
guage of people” (Jalal 2000, p. 109). The prioritization of script was
continued by the Indian administration even after independence; in fact
languages without script were not considered rich enough to be defined as
languages, and were put into the category of dialects. Whereas language
scholars and linguists agree on the pre-eminence of speech rather writing,
attributing script to be an incidental and not integral feature of any
l
anguage, reiterating that “anything could be written in any script”
(Choudhury 2013, p. 210).
Moving from Punjab further north to Kashmir, it may be seen that a
manifestation of class identity became vital in the language and education
of the people. Kashmiri education in pre-colonial times was rooted in the
traditional diversity of Kashmir’s communities. This underwent change
during the rule of Maharaja Ranbir Singh, as he patronized education
especially encouraging it through the medium of classical languages such
as Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. His objective was to encourage the
“exchange of ideas” through the translation of Sanskrit scriptures into
Arabic and Persian and Arabic and Persian works of philosophy into
Sanskrit (Zutshi 2003, p. 172). Education was beyond the reach of the
common people of Kashmir as elsewhere in India, as mass literacy was not
a known phenomenon in the Indian subcontinent at this time.
In 1889 Kashmir came under British residency, which eventually led to
the “centralization and bureaucratization” of education to a colonial
design (Zutshi 2003, p. 173). Owing to the rigid class distinction among
Kashmiri Muslims and greater apprehension among the Muslim masses,

education was not very successful among lower-class Muslims. The Punjabi
Hindus of Kashmir were economically better off whereas numerous
Muslims remained low-scale agriculturalists. Education did not reach the
lower Muslims because Dogra state followed the colonial policy of educa-
tion with all its shortcomings. The lower-class Kashmiri language-speaking
Muslims remained illiterate for a long period following the upper-class
Muslims’ favoring of the Persian language and Urdu becoming the lan-
guage of administration. State schools followed Urdu as the medium of
instruction. This situation persisted until 1912 when the Inspector of
Schools of Dogra state ordered that Hindus should be taught in Hindi
and Muslims in Urdu for “successful moral religious education,” making
Hindi and Urdu synonymous for Hindus and Muslims (Zutshi 2003,
p. 194). This state-driven policy did not recognize that neither the
Kashmiri Hindus nor Kashmiri Muslims spoke Hindi or Urdu but Dogri,
a distinct language (Zutshi pp. 194–195). The first English medium
school was started by the Christian Missionary Society of England in
Srinagar in 1880, available only to those in the urban region, and compul-
sory education for boys was introduced in 1931 (Yassen 2014, p. 10). The
role of the colonial state in creating linguistic identities in India was so
deeply embedded that it continues even in present day India.
The edifice of linguistic identity in Bengal has its origins in the colonial
state administration and the works of Bengali social reformers. The iden-
tity of Bengalis is unique element in that they are called Bengali Hindus
and Bengali Muslims, and not the other way around. This emphasizes that
the language identity of Bengali was established before the Hindu and
Muslim division, which underwent a transition under the East India
Company (EIC), following its policy of divide and rule in Bengal:
The British played up the Hindu-Sanskrit quality of Bengali by identifying it

as an Indic-Hindu language, while erasing the Arabic elements within
Bengali, to counteract Islamic domination. (Spivak 1996, p. 21)
Language played a vital role in conceptualizing identity in colonial

India and maintained its cardinal place along with religion when it came
to identity in South Asia. Unlike the upper-class Hindus in Bengal who
were keen on English education, the Bengali Muslims resented English
language and education (Emmot 1965, p. 162). They were not as adapt-
able as the Bengali Hindus to the changed circumstances. One reason for
44 P. SENGUPTA
the Muslim rigidity in not accepting British rule was that the Muslim
community, being the ruling class under the Mughals, was more anti-
British than its Hindu counterparts, who were the subjects whether under
the Mughals or the English. Hence, there was a constant refusal on the
part of the Muslims to learn English or to study European science (De
1995, p. 16). This situation changed, but the adaptation of Muslims to
English was concentrated on their efforts towards “Islamization” and not
because they accepted Western science and knowledge. There was a dis-
tinction between the social reform movement led by Rammohun Roy and
those by Muslims such as Nawab Abdool Luteef and Syed Amer Ali of
Bengal. Whereas Roy targeted the evils of Hindu society and the need for
reform, the Muslim elites held the Hindu zamindars and modern educa-
tion responsible for their deplorable status (De 1995, p. 17).
Language and Identity: Southern India

Language identity in Southern India endures as a matter of passion and
devotion. Sumathi Ramaswamy, in her brilliant exposition on Tamil, elab-
orated the identifying of the Tamil language as gods and goddesses, a
phenomenon sui generis to the rest of India, called tamilpparru, meaning
Tamil devotion (Ramaswamy 1997, p. 6). This collusion of language with
divinity can be seen elsewhere, in the case of Sanskrit and Persian for
Hinduism and Islam respectively but what is special about Tamil is the
treatment of a language not only as holy because it is spoken by the Gods
but holy as God itself. Ramaswamy analyzed how Tamil devotion became
the very foundation-stone of the identity of “Tamilian”.
Language has been transformed into an object of devotion in the course of

social mobilization and political empowerment of its speakers … how
language devotion produces the modern Tamil subject tamilian, the

‘Tamilian’ as an entity whose subjectivity merges with the imagined self of
Tamil. Body, life, self: all these dissolve into Tamil. Devotion to Tamil, ser-
vice to Tamil, the sacrifice of wealth and spirit to Tamil: these are the
demands of tamilpparru at its radical best. (Ramaswamy 1997, p. 6)
The devotion to language is quite a common feature among Tamil

speakers, but there was no homogeneity among them over the meaning
of their language. This was because of the different experiences and
r
elationships that individuals had with their languages owing to their
e conomic, social, caste and political standings. The birth of tamilpparru

needed an impetus from British rule and English language. Hence, the
phenomenon was more prevalent during the early twentieth century and
came back forcefully during the making of independent India’s new
constitution.
Describing the language education system of Madras in the mid-
nineteenth century, Charles Trevelyan remarked that though comparatively
less was done in Madras Presidency in terms of native learning, knowledge
of colloquial English was much common in Madras than in Bengal
(Trevelyan 1838, p. 178). This can be attributed to the efforts of the
Christian missionaries. In 1790, the Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge opened schools for natives which eventually became St. Peter’s
College, Tanjore. The missionaries of the American Board opened several
schools between 1834 and 1835 in which education was imparted in
English. Another missionary institution, the Missionary of the Scottish
Church, established an English-medium institution in Madras. Several
other schools and colleges were opened in Madras Presidency in both rural
and urban areas to promote and encourage the urge towards learning
among the local people (Report of the Education Commission India 1883,
p. 10). The rise of missionary work, especially its role in the advancement
of English, might have become a cause of concern among the Tamil
Hindus, leading to the birth of tamilpparru in later years. Madras was a
multicultural hub with different languages existing side by side. The com-
ing of the “printing press played a major role in advancement of Tamil lit-
erature” (Ebeling 2010, p. 19), just as it impacted all Indian literatures.
Close to the idea of tamilpparru, in Tamil there emerged the Telugu
feelings of Telugu talli (mother Telugu), associated with the “protection
and patriotism with Telugu language, Telugu Talli ” (Mitchell 2009,
p. 12). The attachment to a language not merely as a tool for communica-
tion but as an intrinsic individual identity is dependent on the power rela-
tion and status attached to it. All these variables come to play in an
individual’s choice of language use (Ramaswamy 1997, p. 9).
Language in Western Regions of India

Bombay Presidency was the major center of colonial control in west India,
comprising Gujarat, Kathiawar, Surat and Ahmedabad, along with Kutch
and adjoining areas. The Bombay Board of Education was set up in 1840
and the first educational institutions were established by the religious
46 P. SENGUPTA
societies of America, England, Scotland and Ireland, who competed to

outdo the others in opening schools in the newly acquired territories
(Education Commission Report 1883, p. 11). In 1814 the American
Missionary Society opened a school for boys and ten years later a girls’
school. One person who contributed immensely in the field of education in
Bombay was Mountstuart Elphinstone, the Governor-General of Bombay
from 1819 to 1827. He recognized Gujarati as the language of courts in
Gujarat and replaced Persian (Cotton 1911, p. 167). He was in favor of
both vernacular and English language education, and his efforts towards
building the educational structure of Bombay led to the formation of a
Society for the Promotion of Education for the Poor in 1820, through
which education in Bombay was to be conducted for the coming sixteen
years (Cotton 1911, pp. 192–193). His policy of education was to make it
available to the poor natives, and to provide them with books and texts on
European knowledge and science in native languages. The Elphinstone
College, which was established in 1827 using donations from citizens for
teaching English and European languages, literature and arts, towards the
time of Elphinstone’s retirement from the Governorship of Bombay, still
stands today. Sir John Malcolm, who took over from Elphinstone in
November 1827, was not keen on English education for the native Indians
and made it a criterion for entering administrative services, as much as it
was the duty of the EIC’s servants to learn the language of the land they
were employed in. In his 1828 Minutes, he asserted that:
I have on political grounds a consolation, derived from my conviction of

the impossibility of our ever disseminating that half-knowledge of our lan-
guage, which is all any considerable number of the natives could attain. It
would decrease that positive necessity which now exists for the servants of
Government making themselves masters of the languages of the countries
in which they are employed and without which they can never become in
any respect competent to their public duties … They [natives] should have
the advantage of translation from our language of the works which are best
calculated to improve their minds… (Malcolm Minutes 1828 in Sharp
1920, p. 144)
The attempts of the local people as well as the government led to the
flourishing of schools in Bombay between the 1840s and 1881. There
were 2387 indigenous schools with 70,514 students in 1855–1856 which
increased to 2922 schools and 77,000 students in 1870–1871; the num-
ber of government-run schools underwent remarkable growth from 220
primary schools and 176,690 students in 1855–1856 to 3811 primary

schools and 243,959 students in 1880–1881; from two art colleges and
103 students in 1855–1856 to three art colleges and 311 students in
1880–81; from seven professional colleges with 311 students in 1855–1856
to eleven professional colleges with 1061 students in 1880–1881 (Sharp
1920, p. 36). The figures above prove that there was a substantial increase
in the number of education institutions as well as the number of students
in government schools in Bombay.
Mridula Ramanna, in her detailed article on Bombay, states that
English-educated Indians were mainly absorbed in government jobs and
that English became the means for attaining better livelihood and employ-
ment (Ramanna 1992, p. 716). She claimed that the “English educated
formed a homogeneous group showing similar socio-economic origins
while those educated in vernacular schools came from a wider range of
castes and communities” (Ramanna 1989, p. 203). This distinction
between the two education systems led to the development of “colonial
bilingualism” in western India, with the “English language and knowl-
edge system becoming the yardstick against which native cultural and
social practices were to be measured” (Naregal 2001, p. 101).
English-educated scholars, such as Vishnushastri Chiplunkar,3 were
responsible for starting Marathi bilingual magazines, such as Nibandhmala
in 1874, and for establishing the Chitrashala Press in 1877, which gave a
huge impetus to the development of Marathi literature (Chandra 2009,
p. 202). Similarly, Bal Gangadhar Tilak started the Kesari and Mahratta
newspapers in Marathi and English respectively, which revitalized Hindu
patriotism and offered a critique of the mission education system (Chandra
2009, p. 204).
Language in Northeast India

While NWP, south India, Bengal, Bombay and Punjab were undergoing
the drawing and redrawing of linguistic boundaries under colonial influ-
ence, Northeast India was experiencing alienation because of the “hege-
monic and divisive” colonial policy (Samuel 1993, p. 91). The hill tribes
in the region were virtually cut off from the plain population. The EIC’s
outlook towards Northeast India was guided by the inner line system of
1873 which was also known as the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation.
This prohibited the free entry of British subjects into the area in order to
maintain monopoly over tea, oil and other forest resources. Any outsider
48 P. SENGUPTA
required a state permit to enter. In Assam, before the advent of British

colonial rule, the Ahom dynasty ruled for more than 600 years and
Assamese identity was based on the integration of different ethnic com-
munities. The British introduced Bengali as the official language of Assam
in 1836, thinking Assamese to be a variant of Bengali, and this brought
protests from the Assamese as well as the missionaries, who were in favor
of using the local vernacular to spread education and Christianity (Bhaumik
2009, p. 72). The protests resulted in British recognition of Assamese as a
language to be used in judicial and revenue proceedings in the Kamrup,
Darrang, Nowgang, Sibsagar and Lakhimpur districts of Assam. This
development led to bitterness between Assamese and Bengali speakers,
which was to last for another century at least.
Assamese demography underwent a transition in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, with the British bringing in Munda, Oraon and Santhal
people from the Jharkhand area to Assam to work in tea plantations
(Mahanta 2013). In 1897 the Assam Association asked the government to
encourage settlement by outsiders in the large and unused lands of Assam,
and this resulted in the arrival of Bengali settlers. The Bengali speakers
started demanding Bengali medium schools for their children, leading to
separate schools for Assamese and Bengali speakers in Assam, encouraging
alienation of the two communities. By 1931 the Bengali speakers com-
prised nearly 50% of Assam’s population. This threatened Assamese iden-
tity, which in turn led to conflict between the Bengalis and Assamese
(Bhaumik 2009, p. 73).
The construction of language-based identity in colonial and post-
colonial India can be viewed from the paradigm of the “derived” discourse
of European nationalism (Chatterjee 1986) and the rise of the nation-state
as a conceptual framework in Europe, with language defining nationality
and belongingness. In Europe, the dawn of the nation-state brought
about homogenization in terms of language and religion within national
boundaries. India on the other hand was diverse and heterogeneous, but
the British obsession with implanting their home policies on India coupled
with their profit-making intentions lead to the germination of political
identity in India based on language.
In the preceding paragraphs of this section, I have elaborated on how
the colonial administration and its policies were responsible for the emer-
gence of linguistic identity in India. Not only was the EIC responsible for
the emergence of linguistic identity but it was equally implicated in the
creation of “subaltern identities,” what Steven Jones, explaining Gramsci’s

concept of hegemony, defines as “identities of groups and individuals
whose active consent is needed for the maintenance of a leading group’s
authority and who form a part, albeit a subordinate part, of the power
bloc” (Jones 2006, p. 58). In the Indian scenario, this identity of the sub-
altern was conferred initially on the English-educated middle-class
Bengalis. This situation remained quite strong in the nineteenth century,
with the emergence of middle-class Indians who were supportive of British
rule, but changes began to occur in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, owing to the emergence of nationalist thought within the English-
educated middle class of India, who
[while] accept [ing] the claim to universality of the modern framework of

knowledge which emerged out of Enlightenment asserted the autonomous
identity of a national culture. Thus, nationalist thought simultaneously rejects
and accepts the dominance of an alien culture. (Chatterjee 1986, p. 11)
Though Chatterjee’s explanation is related to nationalist thought, it is

equally compelling in analyzing language identity construction in India,
which remains intrinsic to the development of nationalism. The concept of
“language as definitive of nation” is a European by-product and is theo-
rized at length by scholars such as Herder and Fichte (Chatterjee 1986,
p. 9), and was unknown to Indians before the coming of the colonizers.
The foregoing narrative about developments related to language iden-
tity in different regions of British India pose witness to the working of an
Enlightenment discourse that emphasized on rationality and defined the
self not only through a language but by a language, a development that
resulted from the Western Enlightenment. It is true that in pre-colonial
India there existed high languages such as Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic
spoken by the rulers, elites and intellectuals and in contrast vernacular and
colloquial languages spoken by common people, but the identification of
language as fundamental to one’s identity was missing. Sanskrit was pri-
marily identified as the language of the Brahmins, owing to the caste sys-
tem prevalent in Hindu society, and Arabic and Persian were significant for
the Muslim rulers, as the Quran was written in Arabic and Persian was the
language of administration and judiciary. But it was not a necessary condi-
tion of being a Brahmin or a ruler that one had to be well versed in Sanskrit
or Arabic. What changed with the British was the classification and
50 P. SENGUPTA
categorization of Indian people. Earlier, religion and caste had been the
defining principles, based on community and collective identities, now
language also became vital. The caste system from ancient India built on
the hereditary division of labor and jobs remained in place with some
changes during Muslim rule in India, as the Muslims also, following the
Sharia, believed in hereditary offices. In the nineteenth century the EIC
systematically broke this established organization of Indian society. But
even in this breakage they were not completely successful. They added
other categories to classify the Indian population, and language was one of
the strongest constituents of identity construction. My intention is not to
hold up the division of people among castes and religion as better than
linguistic categorization, but only to press the point that language identity
emerged and developed in India owing to the policies and practices of the
EIC and British rule. This baggage of colonial modernity was carried on
in India into the post–colonial phases and spilled over into the twenty-first
century. The question of language still exists, and survives at different
times at the core or on the periphery of Indian politics.
Notes
1. Kachru, Braj, Yamuna Kachru and S.N. Sridhar. 2008. Language in South
Asia. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press; Mohan,
Shailendra, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta and Imtiaz S. Hasnain. 2013. Alternative
Voices: (re)searching, Language, Culture and Identity. UK: Cambridge
Scholar Publishing.
2. See Jaswinder Singh (2011) Religious and Historical Paradigms of the Sikh
Identity, unpublished PhD thesis submitted to the Department of Religious
Studies, Punjabi University Patiala; Puller, Brittany Fay (2014) Sikhism
Represented: The Creation of Sikh Identity, Senior Thesis, Lake Forest
College Publications.
3. For a detailed analysis of Vishnushastri Chiplunkar see Anant Shankar Ogale
(2013) Bhashashivaji Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, Pune: Continental Prakashan.
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CHAPTER 4
Building Identity: Information,

Intellect and Inspiration
Abstract This chapter studies how indigenous historiography was the

first step in perceiving India as a nation. It investigates the role of print
media, intellectuals, scholars and poets in the construction and consolida-
tion of national identity by highlighting economic drainage and the pov-
erty of the Indian masses owing to colonial exploitation. The chapter
narrates how data collection, surveys and reports about the languages and
religions of Indians equipped the colonial administration in politicizing
religious–linguistic categories.
Keywords Newspapers • History writing • Vernacular Press Act • Drain

of wealth • Surveys • Census • Rhetoric
The 1857 rebellion successfully evoked the feeling of being subjected to

foreign rule, leading not only to economic exploitation but also to cultural
impoverishment and encroachment of land. Though this feeling was scat-
tered across India, nonetheless it laid the foundation for the development
of nationalistic feelings among Indians. This was the period when emo-
tional steps towards self-determination, the very first stage towards nation-
alism, were taken, as Elie Kedourie forcefully asserted:
National self-determination is, in the final analysis, a determination of the

will and nationalism is, in the first place, a method of teaching the right
determination of the will. (Kedourie 1961, p. 81)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7_4
54 P. SENGUPTA
Patriotism gradually spread across the country and developed into

Indian nationalism due to the persistent hard work, determination and
dedication of scholars, poets, folk artists, writers, intellectuals and the
common people, all of whom passionately contributed to shape public
opinion in order to inculcate the spirit of freedom and a distaste for servi-
tude and subjugation under foreign rule. Provoking this feeling involved
touching popular spaces. This was done through patriotic songs and
poetry, which spread knowledge about the suffering of the Indian masses,
who were burdened with economic exploitation, draconian colonial laws
and discrimination, and provoked them to come out into the open to fight
against discrimination and injustice.
The successful induction of nationalism required the conceptualization
and construction of the Indian self, a mammoth task in a country that had
diverse languages, distinct cultural practices and different religious senti-
ments. Another hurdle was that the history of India was mostly written by
foreign scholars who were not aware of the common people’s history. The
Indian masses had imbibed slavery and servitude as their destiny. They were
a population lacking in self-respect and dignity. Hence, restoration of
respect and confidence among such individuals required indigenous his-
tory writing –a narration, living account, written by indigenous people
and not a “foreign” imposed historical view of Indians as “effete” (Rosseli
1980). The existing indigenous works on historiography were more region
or empire specific, and pan-Indian history was missing. This can be attrib-
uted to the fact that India, territorially as one sovereign country, came into
existence only after attaining independence in 1947. Hence, Indian intel-
lectuals had double work. First, they had to inculcate the feeling of self
among Indians, which required tracing a history that glorified indigenous
languages, cultures and acts of greatness; and second, they had to promote
nationalism in order to move forward to political independence.
Vernacular Historiography and Cultural Identity

Constructing, identifying and understanding the self is a highly complex
phenomenon—reflective, responsive and reactionary. It is reflective
because the self reflects the culture, context, space, language, religion,
faith and values amid which an individual is born and brought up by elders
and family members. Certain features of the self arise in response to other
cultures and communities. How one is defined and (un)recognized by
“others” often leads to a particular response by a cultural community
BUILDING IDENTITY: INFORMATION, INTELLECT AND INSPIRATION 55
towards members of another cultural community. The reactionary charac-

teristics which define self are reaction to the others; that is, to people
belonging to different cultures, religions, language groups and so forth.
We identify ourselves at times vis-à-vis our position in relation to others.
Therefore, identity of self is highly complex and the work of a long and
ever-evolving historical process.
Indian history until the mid-nineteenth century was not indigenous, as
it was mostly written by foreign scholars such as Hun Tseing, Fa-Hieng
and Ibn-Batuta, whose writings can be at best called travellers’ accounts.
Self-identification requires more than such foreigners’ account. It entails
going back to the past by tracing traditions, customs, heritage, folklore
and cultural roots to construct a vision of the historicity of a community.
All this was required to transform Indians from British, degraded, brown,
poor, illiterate subjects into self-respecting indigenous selves, fundamen-
tally requiring a sense of history. As Axel Honneth puts it succinctly,
The right to self-determination necessitates the construction of the indigenous

“self” which in turn is premised on “self-realization.” (Honneth 1995, p. xiv)
The initial indigenous historians such as Nilmani Basak and Tarinicharan

Chattopadyay, and later R.C. Majumdar, R.C. Dutt, Dadabhai Naoroji
and Ramkrishna Viswanath, who undertook the task of writing history in
which they stressed the “unjust” rule of the British in India by contrasting
them with earlier rulers, especially the Mughals, who unlike the British
made India their home. Language is intrinsic to history writing not only
as a medium but also as the very ingredient through which human identity
construction is spelt and understood. It is impossible to talk about the his-
tory of self without language. Hans-Georg Gadamar presented this inher-
ent relation articulately in his groundbreaking work Truth and Method:
Human self is not only social but one constructed upon language—one can-
not separate language from thoughts and understanding … to speak is to
translate thoughts into words and that comes from understanding the mean-
ing that the words convey … understanding resides in language. It is
through language that we define and assign identity to ourselves and others.
(Hans-Georg Gadamar 1989, p. 404)
Creation of the Indian self was undertaken by Indian intellectuals who

used indigenous languages, as they argued that native history could not be
comprehended, constructed or expressed in a language that was foreign to
56 P. SENGUPTA
the community whose history was being written. Indian historians felt that
the Indian past could be represented more authentically in indigenous
languages rather than in English (Guha 1997, p. 187–188). Such an idea
was spearheaded by Nilmani Basak, one of the pioneers of indigenous his-
tory in India, who wrote Bharater Itihaas (History of Bharata—India) in
Bengali; it was published in 1857–1858. Basak affirmed the claim that
“most of the Indian history written in English presents a biased and ill-
informed account, reflecting a wrong image of India’s past. To remedy
such defects, Basak undertook to writing history of India in Bengali” (Guha
1997, p. 187–88). This was the very beginning of an intrinsic relationship
between India’s past and indigenous language, writes Ranajit Guha:
[The critique by Basak of English-written Indian history] was based on the

belief that there was a special relationship between the Indian past and
indigenous languages, which made of the latter a more competent and sensi-
tive instrument for writing Indian history. Language consciousness was thus
allowed to stand in for self-consciousness so that by the end of 1840s a senti-
ment about matribhasha [mother tongue] had already crystallized into an
ideology. (Guha 1997, p. 188)
Indigenous language as constitutive of self was a topic of interest in

modern philosophy in Europe especially in post-enlightenment Germany.
Nationalism made a powerful entry, equipped with the newly emerging
conceptualization of the nation-state, much more forcefully than the
patriotism of ancient times. The emergence of the nation-state in Europe
made language essential in order to define distinct nationalities, which was
critical in the creation of sovereign states. Language or common speech
was considered a pre-requisite for the formation of national identity. Any
nation that was not a free political state was sooner or later to be captured
and erased of its linguistic–cultural uniqueness. For nations to become a
state was a matter of survival, not choice. Kedourie remarks that:
A group speaking the same language is known as a nation—and a nation

ought to constitute a state. It is not merely that a group of people speaking
a certain language may claim the right to preserve its language, rather such
a group which is a nation, will cease to be one if not constituted in a state.
(Kedourie 1961, p. 68)
Indians were attracted to German and French writings on nationalism,

reading Immanuel Kant and Hegel. Nature does not allow the establish-
ment of universal monarchy, established Kant in his famous treatise Perpetual
Peace (1774), which was written in opposition to the British aspiration of

creating a universal monarchy, one that included India and the East Indies,
Africa, Australia and beyond. The German philosopher Herder argued the
case for the preservation of diversity of languages and cultures as natural,
wherein nature was equated to God. Universalizing diversity by spreading one
language and culture was considered as going against nature. He wrote that:
All his (God’s) means are ends: all His ends are means to higher ends, in
which the Infinite reveals himself. Diversity, then, as much as struggle, is a
fundamental characteristic of the universe. Diversity and not uniformity is
worthy of notice, because diversity is patently the design of God. (Kedourie
1961, p. 56)
The Treatise upon the Origin of Language written by Herder in 1772

announced that:
Language was born as man tried to express his feelings towards things and
events which he came across. Language was originally neither description
nor imitation, rather a living amalgam with emotions which they arouse in
man. The world is a world of diversity and humanity is divided into nations.
Language is the external and visible badge of those differences which distin-
guish one nation from another it is the most important criterion by which a
nation is recognized to exist and to have the right to form a state of its own.
(Kedourie 1961, pp. 62–64)
The evolution and maturing of the nation-state as a statecraft model in

Europe dictated world politics in the coming century, becoming the fore-
most aim for almost all major communities which intended to claim state-
hood based on distinctness. The concept of the nation had a huge impact on
Indian thinking. Yet defining India as a nation in the European sense of the
term is not correct as it doesn’t fit the European mould. Therefore, the Indian
historiographers used the term desh meaning country, based on the “ethnic
singularity of India [which was asserted to be] magnanimous to accommo-
date outsiders” (Iggers et al. 2013, p. 107). The history of India was begin-
ning to be written and published in the 1850s, establishing language as an
index of identity for growing national consciousness. But unlike European
nations where one major discourse on nationalism dominated politics, mul-
tiple discourses on national identity emerged in India with national and
regional existing side by side without major contradiction between linguistic
pride in matribhasha and national identity. The development of India’s
national identity took a path different from the West.
58 P. SENGUPTA
Historians have argued that “people speaking the same language may
produce different literature and vice versa as it is not language alone but a
common aim that goes beyond the exigencies of purely political nature”
which binds people together (Das 1991, p. 2). This was a renewal of the
ancient conceptualization of India, as a geographical unit described in the
Bhishma Parva of Mahabharata, where Bharatvarsha was identified by its
rivers and mountains. Another source of ancient Indian history, Vishnu
Purana II, described Bharat as a multiethnic country (Das 1991, p. 4).
Not only in Hindu mythological writings but also in Urdu and Persian
records of Amir Khusrau specifically in Nuh-Siphir (nine skies), mentioned
animals and birds, vegetables and fruits with different languages that char-
acterized India, “not as a political unit but [territorial] with sense of com-
monality of thought and ideas have been a part of Indian psyche” (Das
1991, p. 4). A growing interest in Indian historiography along with inter-
national scholarship helped historians in India to reflect and engage in the
formation of Indian self-identity.
Information and Identity: The Role of Newspapers

in Shaping the Indian Self
Invoking self-identity and national sentiments was undertaken by newspa-

pers through the dissemination of information, publishing nationalistic
poetry and reporting English atrocities against Indians. The printing press
led to the creation of links between Indians far and wide. News traveled
from one corner of the country to the other. Newspapers became a great
source of nation-building and patriotism among native Indians.
The English-educated upper-class Indian elites started forming groups
and organizations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These asso-
ciations can be classified into two types: social reform associations such as
the Prarthana Sabha, Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, with the aim of
reforming society, and civil associations that represented different regions
of India demanding a say in colonial administration, for example in the
Indian Association and the Indian National Congress. Members of these
civil organizations were mostly lawyers, scholars and intellectuals who pos-
sessed great journalistic style and began to critique and debate the colonial
justification of India’s exploitation. Some of them started their own news-
papers,1 and published nationalistic articles to demonstrate the nature of
British discrimination.
Newspapers started by Indians helped to spread the feeling of restless-

ness among native Indians against British imperial government. They pub-
lished in a variety of native languages, criticizing the Vernacular Press Act
(VPA) and stringent laws against the freedom of the press.2 In the face of
the VPA and under constant British vigilance, Indian newspapers kept on
printing news criticizing the government’s corruption, inhuman behavior
of British administrative officers, misuse of power and position, cruel taxa-
tion policies, felony and assaults. By 1885, Lawrence James reported that
there were some 319 different vernacular titles plus ninety-six English lan-
guage newspapers with a total circulation of 150,000 (James 1994). The
reach of newspapers was enhanced by the introduction of railways and by
1913 the number of newspapers had risen to 165 published in and around
Bombay alone. In Punjab, the readership of Hamdard-i-Hind grew from
500 in 1900 to 3300 in 1903. The number of newspapers published in
English and Indian languages in Madras also increased from fourteen in
1879 to sixty-seven in 1886, and by 1903 there were seventy-four English-
language newspapers, seventy-six Tamil, thirty-nine Telugu, forty-eight
Malayalam, twenty-two Hindustani and thirty-five newspapers in the
Canarese and Sanskrit languages (Indian Newspaper Report 1868–1942,
Part 5–8).
Many Indian scholars have portrayed the print media as pre-eminent
and decisive in the emanation of nationalism in Bengal and the rest of
India. Newspapers in general were critical in disseminating information
regarding atrocities, unjust practices, discriminating behavior and corrup-
tion of the East India Company (EIC) as related to the Indian masses.
Vernacular newspapers, which began in India with the publication of the
Bengali paper Samachar Darpan on May 23, 1818, had expanded their
reach by 1857, with newspapers published in many other vernacular lan-
guages—bringing the number of local dailies to twenty-five as against ten
in Anglo-Indian languages (Chatterjee 1929, p. 162). The VPA had put
constraints on vernacular newspapers but the same did not apply to news-
papers published in the English language. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, a
Bengali language weekly, shifted from Bengali to English within a week of
the passing of the VPA, thereby defeating the British aim to ban the ver-
nacular press in Bengal, and indeed in India at large.
The vernacular press developed and thrived not only in Bengal but also
in Maharashtra in the first half of the nineteenth century. The first step
towards this was laid by the American Marathi Mission in its endeavor to
translate the Bible into Marathi. The Mission established a printing press
60 P. SENGUPTA
in 1816, and this expanded into seven hand presses possessing fonts in
English, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindustani and Zend. Around 790 books
were published in Marathi by 1865 (McDonald 1968, p. 598). Accordingly,
the popularity of newspapers grew immensely in India in the latter half of
the nineteenth century. Newspapers became the most important source
for the generation of nationalism. The editorials and writings which were
published played a critical role in shaping the national self-identity of
Indians.
Unmasking British Economic Exploitation

The task of constructing the self required the deconstruction and expo-
sure of the myth of English supremacy by historically tracing political
development of India before the coming of the British. While newspapers
assisted in shaping self-consciousness, Indian intellectuals undertook
research and scholarship that brought out the real motive of Britain’s
imperialism i.e. the exploitation of India’s wealth. These scholars endeav-
ored to unfold the real character of the British government. They showed
how a change in governance from the EIC to the British Crown did not
change the level of exploitation. Scholars such as Dadabhai Naoroji linked
India’s poverty to imperial rule, and blamed Britain for taking no serious
action towards poverty reduction but rather continuing the exploitation
of the Indian masses in the face of famines and droughts.
To inculcate a feeling of nationalism among Indians and to elevate
them from complete loss of confidence and respect, the prime focus of
intellectuals was on sketching a history of India in pre-colonial times,
when India was a conglomeration of different principalities and kingdoms,
often in conflict with each other but nonetheless ruled by rulers who made
India their home. The attitudinal difference of the English East India
Company from other European trading companies was highlighted, as the
other companies were content simply with grabbing and moving on
whereas the English coveted regularity and tenure, thereby changed the
very character of mercantilism. The British in Bengal learnt the language
of their subjects to have a direct contact with them. Knowledge of indig-
enous language was recognized as a condition for maintenance of the
British rule (Guha 1997, p. 176–177).
The nationalists made use of past conditions to destabilize the present
(Kedourie 1961, p. 75). Writing about exploitative economic policies of
the British in India was undertaken in order to burst the myth of the
British sense of justice. Between 1860 and the 1920s India was rife with
writings linking the economic, political and cultural degradation of India
with British discrimination and the motive of profiteering. The famous
“drain of wealth” theory associated with Congressman Dadabhai Naoroji
formed the backbone of this critique. This theory, that India’s economic
exploitation was the fallout of colonial policy, could be traced back to a
small group of Marathi radical intellectuals, consisting of Bhaskar
Pandurang Tarkhadkar, Govind Vitthal Kunte and Ramkrishna Vishwanath,
who were greatly influenced by their teacher Bal Gangadhar Shastri
Jambhekar (Naik 2001, p. 4429). Bhaskar Tarkhadkar, writing under the
pseudonym “A Hindoo” in the Bombay Gazette, exposed the British eco-
nomic policy, asserting that:
There was nothing [called] beneficient imperialism or altruistic colonial

rule. (Naik 2001, p. 4429)
It was estimated that between 1757 and 1815 one thousand million
pounds was transferred from Indian boards to English banks (Munshi
1946, p. 4). Scholars utilized statistical data to justify their critique and to
establish findings. Bhau Mahajan, editor of the newspaper Prabhakar,
accused the British rulers of treachery in politics, deceit in trade, racial
discrimination, ruining indigenous industry, injustice, draining India’s
wealth and reducing her to poverty and impoverishment (Naik 2001,
p. 4430). Dadabhai Naoroji claimed that “the British gave India peace but
not prosperity, [with] manufacturers [losing] their factories and cultiva-
tors their land,” and “denuded India’s productive capital” (Chandra et al.
2008). In his well-known work Poverty and Un-British Rule in India,
Naoroji stated that:
The present system of government is destructive and despotic to the Indian

and un-British and suicidal to Britain. (Naoroji 1901, p. v)
Naoroji’s work presented a well-balanced analysis of the Indian situa-

tion. He drew heavily on historical records maintained by the British, in
order to establish his claims about India’s struggling economy and the
suffering of her masses, despite the fact that India was essential for Britain’s
development, being the pivot of British empire, if it was lost, the sun
would set on the British Empire. India’s wealth was not only being
drained out but in addition nothing was being done to bring justice to her
starving millions. The attitude of most British officials was complete
62 P. SENGUPTA
neglect towards India’s sufferings, they believed that “India must be bled”
(Lord Salisbury in a Minute dated 26/4/1875 as cited in Naoroji 1901,
p. ix). India was charged for all British interests and territorial aspirations
in the face of famines and epidemics. Indians had no say in the expenditure
of revenue or the government of their country. The power of the govern-
ment was absolute and despotic in its exploitation of Indian resources.
The need of the hour asserted Naoroji, was to “move towards fulfilling the
aspirations of the Indians to self-government under British supremacy or
true British citizenship” (Naoroji 1901, p. xiv).
Dadabhai Naoroji fought against the policy of pauperization of India
and continuously worked to generate public awareness towards the exploit-
ative nature of British economic policy in the sub-continent by reading
papers at the East India Association of London and the House of
Commons, and by writing numerous letters to India’s different financial
commissions. He succeeded in creating awareness not only among people
in India but also among English people and Indians abroad. The economic
writings about India’s grave poverty led many young Indians to demand
self-determination and eventually self-rule. Bipin Chandra terms this “eco-
nomic nationalism” (Chandra et al. 2008). Alongside Naoroji, a group of
nationalistic Indian writers and economists forcefully argued against the
economic policy of Britain through their writings and research.3 Indian
suffering and poverty helped to unite the different sections of society by
raising a common demand for abolition of poverty. Economic hardship led
to a growing mistrust of British administration. Along with Indian econo-
mists, British scholars also condemned the exploitation of India’s eco-
nomic resources. Prominent among them was William Digby, whose frank
opinion of India’s condition was the subject matter of his book Prosperous
British India (Digby 1901). This work became a virtual textbook for
Indian nationalists. Digby gave mathematical statistics to show that India
was heavily taxed, contrary to the views of British officials such as John
Strachey, who held that no country possessing a civilized administration
was so lightly taxed as India. In his reply to Strachey, Digby stated that
taxation should not merely be calculated by the amount paid but needed
to be proportionate to income. He showed that Indians paid nearly a quar-
ter of their income in taxes whereas the Scots paid one-seventeenth (Digby
1901, p. 8). Arguing that the industrial supremacy of Britain owed its
power and position to the wealth appropriated from India in the eigh-
teenth century and linking the drain of India’s wealth to England’s indus-
trial growth, Digby asserted that this was “not casual but causal” (Digby
1901, p. 32). The arguments set out here indicate that the real purpose of
the British administration was economically motivated, and even when
education was introduced it was not to improve conditions for Indians but
to fulfill the administrative needs of the British. Such writings were adopted
by the nationalists to stir up the consciousness and self-determination of
the Indian masses. The nationalists’ call to the people of India was that it
was their moral duty to free mother India from the clutches of Britain.
Publication of letters, minutes and longer works referring to India’s
deplorable economic condition, disease and famines also became a point
of comparison for Indian historians, who used them to compare India
under British rule with Mughal India, and before that the indigenous rul-
ers, thus giving rise to comparative history of India.
Self to Self Determination: Contribution

of Writers and Poets
Literary writers, poets, novelists and scholars also played a significant role
in arousing the sense of self among Indians and uniting them in their fight
for self-determination. Traditional Indian literature was more occupied
with religion, romance, festivals, stories of great kings and emperors, but
a new wave of literary work began to appear in the post-1857 period,
based on the mutiny and its aftermath. Sheikh Imam Baksh Nasikh, a
noted poet in the court of the first king of Awadh, Ghaziuddin Haider,
wrote against British domination as:
My heart is distressed as I have to live in the country (occupied by the

British). To keep my soul in the body imprisoned by the British. (Sisir
Kumar Das 1991, p. 129)
The folk poets composed many poems describing wars, bravery and
martyrs, and asked people to stand against injustice and discrimination.
Sankaran Samaur, a Rajasthani poet, wrote against the British and chided
the Rajput kings who sided with the British during the gadar (the mutiny
as it was known in Rajasthan). Suryamal Mishran (1815–1868), court
poet of Bundi in Rajasthan, wrote his famous poem titled “Vir Satsai” in
the Caran style as a call to arouse bravery among the Rajputs (Maheshwari
1980, p. 196).
64 P. SENGUPTA
Eye-witness accounts of the rebellion of 1857 also exist, notable among

them being Bidrohe Bangali by Durgadas Bandyopadyay (1891) in Bengali
and Majha Pravas written in Marathi by Vishnubhatta Godse (1907),
which presented elaborate details about the mutiny of 1857. Fighan-e-
Delhi (The Lament of Delhi), a collection of Urdu poems published in
1863, described the plunder and ruins of Delhi (Das 1991, p. 130). The
folk poets who until then had written about daily lives and local issues
began to write and compose songs describing the suffering of people
owing to colonialism. Songs were written in praise of Lakshmibai, Queen
of Jhansi, who was one of the most epitomized figures of bravery
who attained martyrdom fighting against the EIC and its policy of
“Doctrine of Lapse,” which was responsible for encroachment of her king-
dom as her husband had no natural born heir to the throne of Jhansi. The
Bundelis of Bundelkhand in western India sang praises to the great queen.
A poem titled “Jhansi ki Rani” (Queen of Jhansi 1930) written later by
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan was inspired by these folk songs. Bankim
Chandra Chattpadhyay’s Anandamath, written in 1882, contained the
Vande Mataram, later to be declared the national song of India and
becoming a call for freedom, wherein the author describes his country as
“mother.” This identification of their country as a motherland inspired
many Indian nationalists to take up arms to protect its honor and dignity.
The partition of Bengal in 1905 acted as a catalyst that sparked patriotic
zeal among Indian poets and writers. Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel laure-
ate for poetry from India, composed the famous song “Amar Sonar Bangla,”
which was to become the national anthem of Bangladesh in 1971. The use
of the Bengali language in order to arouse nationalist and anti-imperialist
sentiments was hugely successful. All factions of the National Congress,
Hindus and Muslims, vehemently opposed the partition of Bengal. But the
British eventually triumphed in arousing antagonism between the two reli-
gious communities in Bengal and India and portraying the Indian National
Congress as essentially a Hindu-dominated body. The culmination of this
hostility was the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. Lord Curzon
announced the annulment of the partition of Bengal in 1911 after fully uti-
lizing the six years from 1905 to 1911 in order to create divisions between
the moderates and radicals in the already fragile Congress, as well as promot-
ing communal separation between the Hindus and Muslims.
Language played a paradoxical role in India: it was the basis of the
rationale on which the partition of Bengal was based, and became the
source of greater nationalistic fervor among poets, as well as giving blood
and spirit to the rising militant nationalist phase of the Indian national
movement. Qazi Nuzrul Islam wrote powerfully on various subjects
affecting common Indians, and penned great nationalistic poems such as
“Joog Bani” (Speech of the Times) in 1920 and “Bidrohi” (The Rebel) in
1922. Nazrul Islam was known as the “bidrohi kobi,” the rebel poet. “Joog
Bani” was banned by the British government, as the words of his poems
were strong enough to stir national consciousness among youth. A few
lines from his poem “Bidrohi” follow:
“Aami doule jaey joto bandhon, joto niyom kanoon shrinkhol
Aami maani na ko kono aayeen”
I am disorderly and lawless,
I trample under my feet all rules and discipline
I the great rebel.
I am the rebel eternal,
I raise my head beyond this world,
High, ever erect and alone! (Trans. Mohammad Nurul Huda, Poetry of
Kazi Nazrul Islam in English Translation, 2000, pp. 12–16)
Ramprasad Bismil, another Indian revolutionary and the founder mem-

ber of the Hindustan Republican Association, also wrote great patriotic
poems. One of the most famous is “Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna” (Desire for
Martyrdom), which was first published in 1921 in a journal called Saba
from Delhi. It opens:
“Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai
Dekhna hai zor kitna baazu-e-qaatil mein hai”
The desire to die [for my country] is foremost in my heart
Let’s see how much strength is there in the arms of the enemy (trans.
author)
Many soul-stirring songs were written by the poet Bansidhar Shukla in

1942, and one of his best (see below) became the marching song of the
Indian National Army, led by Subhash Chandra Bose.
“Kadam kadam badraye jaa
Khushi ke geet gaye jaa
Yeh zindagi ki Qaum ki
Tu qaum pe lootaye jaa”
March step by step
Sing songs of happiness
This life of yours belongs to your country
Give it for her sake (trans. author)
66 P. SENGUPTA
Rabindranath Tagore wrote some of his best pieces during 1905 to the
1920s. He was so enthused by the Swadeshi and boycott movement that
he himself joined it in 1905, later leaving owing to its ‘Hindu orthodoxy,”
instead using his experiences as the basis for his novel Gora, which illus-
trated his faith in humanism as against religious fanaticism.
Gora was an orphan boy of Irish parents brought up by a Brahmin family as

their own child. The boy grew up to be a fiercely patriotic young man and a
defender of orthodox Hinduism. But when Gora finally discovered his
foreign origins he also realized he would be rejected by orthodox Hindu
society where he had invested his trust and his social commitment. That
became his wake-up call about the need to be an Indian without caste or
creed. (Uma Das Gupta 2004)
The British government banned most patriotic literature springing up

in India. Such was the British reaction against the Indian press that Barrier
categorized three phases of the relationship between British rule and ver-
nacular writings: 1907–First World War, a period of control; 1914–1929,
a period of coercion and reconciliation; and 1930–1947, a period marked
by confrontation (Brown 1975, p. 855).
Surveys and Studies: Enumerating Indian Society

In studying language as politics, it is important to go back to anthropology,4
especially the Europeans’ (mostly the colonizers’) way of categorizing
people on the basis of their physical and cultural features. In India, the
EIC was involved in trade and profit, but required knowledge of Indian
society and languages in order to penetrate deeply into the society to gain
greater profit and power. This was a colossal task given the diversity of
India. Therefore, the officials started conducting detailed studies and
research. To facilitate their analysis, the colonizers categorized people by
religions, language and regions. Categorization and classification were
considered to be scientific exercises that were useful in the study of objects,
species, plants and animals, and in understanding them in a systematic
manner. The classification of people of India by basing their identities on
religion, caste, language and region allowed the British to discover how
many people spoke particular languages, how many followed certain reli-
gions and how many people belonged to different castes and tribes.
This in turn created the notion of majorities and minorities. This is
not to imply that there were no hierarchies in traditional Indian society,

but publishing data in the manner of a census or in the form of other
publications made the categories more pronounced and visual. An increas-
ing interest in the study of cultures, racial and ethnic features, and the
physical characteristics of lesser known cultures led to the rise of the disci-
pline of anthropology. This development was significant in Britain, and
India with its obvious diversities became the laboratory for such research
and scientific enquiry, beginning with educational surveys.
The passing of the Charter of 1813 by the English Parliament brought
education under the EIC’s remit, and this led to data collection on the
indigenous system of education. The first order to collate this data was
given by Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, in 1822, and a similar
order was passed by Mountstuart Elphinstone in 1823 in Bombay
(Nurullah and Naik 1943, p. 2). These enquiries, however unsatisfactory,
are the first source of information about Indian education in the eigh-
teenth century. The reports collated statistics on the number of schools,
students and teachers, and Munro’s explored the language of instruction
followed in Madras at that time. Munro presented a review of the report:
Of a population of 12.5 million there are only 188,000 receiving education.

This is true of the whole population but not the male … the proportion of
[educated] men is much greater. I am inclined to estimate the portion of the
male population who receive school education [as more] because we have
no returns from the provinces of the number taught at home. (Nurullah and
Naik 1943, p. 5)
A scholar worth mentioning in any discussion on language in India, espe-

cially for his detailed survey of the indigenous education system which
includes empirical data, is William Adam, a Scot who came to India in 1818
and was the editor of the two newspapers the Calcutta Chronicle and the
India Gazette. Adam submitted a three-volume report entitled Vernacular
Education in Bengal and Behar from 1835 to 1838. This traced the genesis of
the first vernacular school in the Dutch fort of Chinsura, started by one Mr.
May, a missionary. His efforts increased the number of schools to sixteen
with 951 students by June 1815. Captain Stewart of the Church Missionary
Society started a school in 1816 in Burdwan in Bengal (Adam 1868). These
schools started by Christian missionaries faced quite a few prejudices, mainly
from native Indians. There was distrust regarding their intention in estab-
lishing schools, as most native Indians conceived the purpose of such schools
68 P. SENGUPTA
was to convert them into Christians. There were numerous hindrances faced
by Mr. May, such as the schools being very far apart, which required the
effort and hard work of long journeys for the teachers and high-class Brahmin
boys, who comprised nearly one-third of the total students, objected to sit-
ting alongside the lower caste students. May’s efforts were successful in the
end, slowly but gradually natives started sending their children to his school
rather than to those run by Indian kings and princes, as the latter were biased
against lower-caste Hindus.
David Hare, a Scottish watchmaker, made a remarkable contribution to
education in British India. His name is remembered thanks to the first
English college in Bengal that he started in 1817. It was originally called
the Hindu College, later renamed the Presidency College. Hare, along
with a Sanskrit scholar named Raja Radhakant Deva, established a Central
Vernacular School prior to 1817 which had 200 male students and was
considered the best vernacular school of the day (Adam 1868). In this
school Hare encouraged the students to be regular in attendance and to
concentrate on education. He adopted a scheme of incentive by which
any student who was not absent for a month was awarded eight annas
(a penny). The best students went to the Hindu College. The Central
Vernacular was one of the first bilingual schools in Bengal where from
sunrise to 9 a.m. classes were held in the vernacular language, from 10.30
to 2.30 p.m. English was taught, and again until sunset vernacular educa-
tion was imparted. In 1818, the Calcutta School Society was founded,
under Hastings to:
assist and improve existing schools and to establish and support any further
schools for more general diffusion of knowledge and to select distinguished
talents and provide them higher degree with a view of forming a body of
qualified teachers and translators … instrumental in enlightening their coun-
trymen and improving the general system of education. (Adam 1868, p. 8)
All these efforts resulted in the number of vernacular schools rising to

115 in 1821, with 3828 scholars. Education was also introduced in jails.
This was experimented for the first time in Mainpuri and then in Agra, as
“nothing can be as conducive in improving discipline as education” (Das
1991, p. 13).
The Northwest Provinces found a veritable educational messiah in Mr.
Thomason, Lieutenant Governor, who was an ardent believer in popular
education. He firmly believed that vernacular languages should be the
medium of instruction and relegated English to the colleges. In 1845, he

issued a circular emphasizing that people’s requirements should be taken
into account when providing education, and thus he opted for vernacular
languages, reading and writing stressing on the need to teach mensuration
(the art of measuring), which was important for the measurement of land.
Mr. Thomason favored a greater participation of local people in the educa-
tion system rather than spoonfeeding them. To this effect he issued a cir-
cular stating that “carry the people with you, aid their efforts rather than
remove from them all [stimuli] to exertion by making all the effort your-
self” (Marshall 2008). Thomason attained the title of “father of vernacular
education in north India” for his contribution.
The surveys and studies undertaken by English scholars during the
nineteenth century were later to become the source of linguistic identity
and the classification of language families into Aryan, Dravidian and tribal
languages. Some pioneering works on language, from a linguistic perspec-
tive, are William Wilson Hunter’s A Comparative Dictionary of the
Languages of India and High Asia (1868), John Beames’ A Comparative
Grammar of Modern Aryan Languages (1872), Robert Caldwell’s A
Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of
Languages (1856) and Rudolf Hoernle’s A Grammar of Eastern Hindi
compared with Gaudian Languages (1880).
The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland seconded William
Hunter to India and allowed him four months’ leave to bring out his work
on Indian languages. Hunter made interesting observations, such as that
the Todu-Toduva and Malabari are distinct languages, while the Chinese
language had influenced the languages of Central Asia and many Himalayan
tribal languages. His study detailed that many of the non-Aryans take their
tribal names from the word for “man” in their respective dialects—in
Rajmahalis, Malis, Kumis, Angami and Dumis “mi” stands for “man.”
Hunter identified five families of languages in India, namely Aryan,
Dravidian, Munda, Mon-Khmer and Tibeto-Chinese. The oldest of these
is Munda, which he attributed to be the vernacular of the Aryans who
crossed Hindukush and spread their language across the whole of north
India to Dibrugarh in Assam and Kanara (present-day Karnataka) (Hunter
1868, pp. 17–24).
English officials recognized that local vernacular languages were useful
in administration and for communication with their domestic servants.
The missionaries also found these languages of greater utility in spreading
Christianity. Thus, they established vernacular schools and translated
works of English into the Indian vernacular languages. Another important
70 P. SENGUPTA
feature of these schools was that they did not discriminate entry on
grounds of caste or birth, thereby encouraging education among non-
Brahmins and lower-class Muslims.
Another significant publication was Herbert Hope Risley’s The People of
India, which was published in 1915 and earned him the Order of
Companion of the Star in 1904 and the Knighthood of the Order of the
Indian Empire in 1907, in recognition of his services as an administrator
and anthropologist. William Crooke, the editor of Risley’s work, stated:
The value of Risley’s work on the ethnology of India has been widely recog-
nized. He was a pioneer in the application of scientific methods to the clas-
sification of the races of India. (Risley 1915, p. xvi)
Risley’s work opened doors for further research into race in India. But
such works were not utilized purely for scholarly purposes, as there were
inbuilt politics and prejudices involved when writing about the colonized.
The biases were further grounded and justified by putting the tag of “sci-
ence” or “scientificity,” with Laura Dudley Jenkins rightly asserting that
“colonial anthropology” introduced “categories of identity authenticated
by science and in turn reinforced those identities,” exemplifying the cate-
gory of caste (Jenkins 2003, p. 1144). But this also applies to language.
The English officials such as Risley and Grierson, who produced the enor-
mous Linguistic Survey of India in sixteen volumes published between
1903 and 1928, enumerated the languages in India. Their study listed the
number of languages spoken on the sub-continent and introduced the
concept of mother tongue. Though studies such as this opened up the
area of language studies in India, enumeration led to the development of
concepts such as majority and minority languages, tribal languages and
dialects. Languages were those which had a script, whereas dialects were
the oral tongues. Europeans were biased against oral languages, and this
crept into Indian scholarship too, with Indian scholars following the colo-
nial categories and conceptualization.
Information about language as mother tongue was included as a cate-
gory in the census of India first in 1881 and thereafter in the 1931 census.
It is important to understand that “censuses not simply reflect social real-
ity but constructs that reality in turn and [is often used to] divide national
populations into separate identity categories” (Anderson 1991; Appadurai
1993; Kertzer and Arel 2002). Dominique Arel affirmed that the impor-
tance of censuses was their confirmation of truth about the social compo-
sition of a society and asserted that:
The ultimate register of numerical truth is the census, constituting the privi-
leged medium of the state which, while targeted at individuals, bestows
group recognition and proportion. The statistical representation is inti-
mately related to concepts of nationality and language. (Arel 2002, p. 94)
Language is intrinsically related to nationality, a concept which was

developing as a core area in nineteenth-century scholarly debates. It was
“agreed to be the only valid category which could statistically capture
cultural nationality” (Arel 2002, p. 95). The British, in order to establish
and justify their superiority over the colonies, projected the colonial sub-
jects as diverse and uncivilized, opposed to the homogeneous and civilized
British, resulting in the ethno-religious and linguistic division of the sub-
continent of South Asia that continued to be “governable” even after
political independence (Shani 2006). Such taxonomy of cultural identities
ascribed to Indians in turn led to the ranking of religion and language
categories. This ranking ensued hierarchies, giving rise to prejudices and
abhorrence. Though stereotypes existed in Indian society as in any other,
the science of classifying people on their so-called differences established
divisiveness more starkly. David Lelyveld strongly argued in relation to
colonial history that analysis was encompassed by concepts and categories
of colonial hegemony:
For the so-called primordialists, unashamed orientalists at heart, the identi-

ties of religion, language, and caste define clearly bounded populations held
together by perceived commonalities of culture, mutual loyalty, and practi-
cal interest. Whether or not, these groups become locked in conflict or can
be accommodated to each other, they are founded on a fundamental and
prior separateness. (David Lelyveld 1993, p. 666) (author’s emphasis)
He reiterated this point:
Starting with William Jones, the British developed from their study of Indian
languages not only a practical advantage but an ideology of languages as
separate, autonomous objects in the world which could be classified,
arranged and deployed as media of exchange. Different languages had dif-
ferent histories, the histories of the people who spoke or used them to create
literatures; and these could be studied comparatively and used to make sense
of the advantages that some nations had gained over others [in the course
of] history. (David Lelyveld 1993, p. 670)
72 P. SENGUPTA
Middle-Class Intellectuals
Using language as a vehicle for spreading ideas of community and nation
was evolving in India. The rise of vernacular languages brought forth a
new emerging middle class, which was educated in the English language
and had its roots in the feudal class but developed a liberal outlook.
Equipped with English education and concepts of liberty and freedom,
members of this class used vernacular languages tactfully in order to gen-
erate mass support for the cause of Indian nationalism. Lord Ripon had
already predicted this as early as 1884, stating that “there are few Indian
questions of greater importance in the present day than those which relate
to the mode in which we deal with the growing body of natives educated
by us in Western education and learning” (Briton 1967, p. 68). Ripon was
pointing to the new class of educated Indians whom the British govern-
ment had failed to absorb in the administration of India (Briton 1967,
p. 68). This class mainly comprised young English-educated men, and
according to Ripon they:
needed to be involved in administration because they were of no less intel-

ligence, maturity and competent, if ignored [they] would turn their faculties
against the British government and excite the minds of the masses with the
same discontent which seethed on their own. (Lord Ripon to Kimberley as
referred in Briton 1967, p. 71)
Lord Ripon’s intuition was not groundless, and the discontent among
middle classes and intellectual elites led to the establishment of small and
large regional associations, such as Bangabhasha Prakashika Sabha (1836),
founded by Raja Ram Mohun Roy, supporting the cause of liberty, democ-
racy and nationalism; the Zamindari Association (1836), founded by
Dwarkanath Tagore; the British India Society (1843), founded by William
Adam; the British Indian Association (1851) which was formed by merg-
ing British India Society and the Zamindari Association; the Bombay and
the Madras Native Associations, both formed in 1852; Poona Sarvajanik
Sabha (1870), founded by Govind Ranade; and the Indian League (1875),
founded by Sisir Kumar Ghosh, which was later merged with the Indian
National Association (1876), which had been formed by Surendranath
Banerjee and Ananda Mohan Bose. Politics was played through language
in most of these associations, as politics is founded upon speech or rhetoric
(Elden 2005, p. 291). This takes us back to Aristotle, who stated that:
language is one of the natural bases of the virtues of social and political rela-
tions … it can be put to various uses and in any of the uses put, contravene as
well as accomplish the purpose which it is directed. (McKeon 1946, p. 193)
Language is not only mere speech, but through speech it signifies just
and unjust, right and wrong. This ability of language to express human
thoughts through words and convey it to others is itself a political deed.
In India, language became politics even before the rise of nationalism. The
British introduction of education, and the translation of ancient works of
Persian and Sanskrit to understand India better and to rule it effectively,
had already initiated the process of utilizing language as politics. In the
aftermath of 1857, Indian journalists, leaders and scholars began using
languages, vernacular as well as English, actively to communicate with the
public and to inform them about British policies and their effects on
India’s people, society and cultures. On their part, the colonial administra-
tion was particularly careful in “repairing the cracks in the colonial discur-
sive edifice and did this by translating proverbial speech” considered to be
related to the tradition and customs of the common people. In this man-
ner, caste writings were printed—and caste became an important identity
marker in understanding Indian commoners. It therefore found its place
in the census planned and calculated by the colonizers (Raheja 1996,
p. 495). This development had language as its companion.
The second half of the eighteenth century is significant from the per-
spective of language and identity-building in India. Lord Dalhousie’s twin
policy of “consolidation of British territories in India and embracement of
new technology” were both decisive not only as a cause of the 1857 rebel-
lion but also in bringing Indian people closer to each other, owing to the
introduction of railways and postal services under Dalhousie (Metcalf and
Metcalf 2006, p. 96). His first policy angered the princely states, especially
in central India, as he brought under British suzerainty any state that had
no natural heir to the throne. This policy, popularly known as the Doctrine
of Lapse, was successful in bringing seven central Indian princely states
under the EIC’s possession within seven years without wars and any
money being spent. Dalhousie’s second policy of technological develop-
ment i.e. railways and posts, allowed scattered and isolated Indian associa-
tions to exchange ideas and thoughts, and this brought to the fore the
need for a lingua-franca to facilitate dialogue and discussion among these
different indigenous bodies. English was the obvious choice due to most
Indian intellectuals’ ability to understand the language, but institutions such
74 P. SENGUPTA
as Brahmo Samaj under Rammohan Roy and Arya Samaj showed their
preference for Hindi as the link language for interregional communica-
tion, Even though Roy was an ardent believer in Western knowledge and
the English language and Dayanand Saraswati a critic of English language
and knowledge, both favored Hindi (Dasgupta 1970, pp. 80–83).
The newspapers, printed articles and novels produced during this time
presented the growing class tensions in India. In the literary field the
works of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Nazir Ahmed, Harishchandra
and Keshav Sen in the vernacular languages created new publics and
spaces, thereby connecting them to modernity. Western models were
transformed and internalized through the addition of a local flavor, and
vernaculars shaped the identities relating to region and religion (Metcalf
and Metcalf 2006, p. 122). Scholars such as Ramvilas Sharma perceived
the “modernization of Hindi literature as a causation of the revolt of
1857” in his work Mahavir Dwivedi Aur Hindi Navjagaran (Rawat
1998, pp. 95–96). The idea of renaissance or navjagaran originated espe-
cially in north India, owing to the location of the rebellion of 1857—that
is, central India, Bihar, Meerut, Jhansi, Bundelkhand and Delhi. This
brought people speaking Bhojpuri closer to those speaking Khari boli.
Analyzing such ideas, one can infer that the rebellion of 1857 acted as an
integrative force that brought people speaking different languages together
against the colonial masters for the first time, thereby generating national-
istic feelings, however nascent.
Swarupa Gupta demonstrates the linkages of growing nationalism in
India specifically in Bengal to the etymological development of the con-
cept of samaj, a social collective especially of the literati of Bengal that was
an indigenous concept forging connections between modern nation and
the historical community (Gupta 2006, p. 273). However, she expresses
the difficulty of surpassing the Western paradigm while going beyond the
derivative models that study Indian nationalism as a concept developed
and dictated by the contextual flux of the interface of modernity and tra-
ditionality in nineteenth-century British Bengal.
The notion of a nation in colonial Bengal was produced through a complex

interaction between re-orientations of indigenous ideas of past unities and
the historical circumstances of the modern period. (Gupta 2006, p. 274)
The prioritization of the social over the political was a deliberate

attempt by literary scholars to build a notion of nation that was based less
on blood and more on belonging, stressing the feeling of living together
in a shared neighborhood as inculcating a notion of nation and not solely

based on commonality of language and religion as Western models of
nationhood were. This was necessitated by the presence of diverse castes,
languages and religions, which was different from Great Britain. This
brings us back to the role of language as an agent that cements bonds
between different cultures, religions and language communities of India
by spreading information and shaping public opinion about the common-
ality of a “culture of suffering” under the British raj.
Two forces can be seen at this time: the growing awareness of British
atrocities against Indians and the incomplete or partial knowledge and
disregard of the EIC towards Indian culture and religions. The EIC’s poli-
cies were based on partial knowledge of local culture and often built on
“broad generalizations” (Green and Deasy 1985, p. 16) without factual
basis. Unlike early Muslim rulers in India, the British administration did
not involve the local Indians in higher ranks and Indian cultural sensitivi-
ties eluded them. This can be seen by them remarking that:
India did not constitute a nation in the European sense of the term nor did
it share a common culture or a common language or religious heritage.
(Green and Deasy 1985, p. 16)
This alienated understanding of India was reiterated by Sir Syed Ahmed

Khan, who held that the non-admission of Indians into the legislature and
administration combined with inaccurate knowledge of the manners, cus-
toms, usages, habits and hopes of Indian people was the main cause for the
1857 the mutiny (Majumdar 1957, p. 22). With no or meager participa-
tion of native Indians in administration, the British officials started ruling
India with laws and procedures that appeared strange to the populace. The
interaction and interdependence of customs and usages with laws under
the rule of a legal system was foreign to the cultural practices, customs and
rituals of India. To top this, the British colonial masters had been con-
stantly intervening with the customary laws that had been prevalent in
India from time immemorial. Here Foucault’s comment on the West as
possessing no alternative of representation, analysis and formulation
besides legality (Foucault 2003, p. xvii) and laws seems appropriate. EIC,
in its zeal to be the white savior of un-civil Indians, missed out on the fun-
damental nature of customs, faith, cultural practices and community habits
to Indian society rather than legal sanctions, which in pre-British India
remained mostly limited to agrarian taxes and duties levied by rulers. Such
gross intervention, incomplete knowledge and understanding of Indian
76 P. SENGUPTA
cultures on the part of the British needed a jolt, and this came in the form
of the 1857 mutiny and revolt. The revolt made the EIC take cognizance
of the path they were following and of the ultimatum that they could not
continue to rule India from such a narrow perspective. The EIC was
responsible for the emergence of two diametrically opposite energies which
were now merging. The first of these was modernity and the modern
European idea of the liberty of humans, a principle followed by most
reformers who were engaged in reforming Indian religions and cultures.
The second force was the development of a universal “culture of suffering”
among Indians by the continued use of coercion, force and violence, which
sowed the seeds of unity among the diverse cultures of India.
Notes
1. Prominent among them were: Voice of India (1883) started by Dadabhai
Naoroji, Amrita Bazar Patrika (1868) under Sisir Kumar Ghosh and
Motilal Ghosh, Kesari (1881) and Maharatta (1881) under Bal Gangadhar
Tilak, Sudharak (1887) started by Gopal Ganesh Agarkar and edited by
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, The Bengalee (1879) by Surendranath Banerjee,
India Mirror (1861) by Manmohann Ghosh, Devendra Nath Tagore and
Keshub Chandra Sen, The Hindu (1878) by T.T. Rangachariar,
G. Subramanya Iyer and others, Bombay Chronicle (1910) by Firoze Shah
Mehta, The Leader (1909) and Hindustan (1936) by Madan Mohan
Malviya, Independent (1919) by Motilal Nehru, Mooknayak (1920) by
B.R. Ambedkar, Al-Hilal (1912) by Abdul Kalam Azad, The Indian
Sociologist (1905) by Shyamji Krishna Verma, Navjiwan (1929) Harijan
(1933) and Young India (1919) by Gandhi, Vande Mataram (1905) by
Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghose.
2. For selected news pieces criticizing VPA and highlighting British atrocities,
See the following: Ashruf-ul-Akhbar, 21st June 1880; Lok Bandhu 28th
June 1891; Roznamcha-i-Qaisari (Allahabad) 15th September 1901;
Najm-ul-Akhbar 16th August 1891; Bharat Jiwan, 5th November 1894.
3. Famous among them are Govind Mahadev Ranade, Romesh Chandra Dutt,
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Bholanath Chandra, G.S Iyer, G.V. Joshi and later
Bipin Chandra Pal and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Newspapers such as Amrita
Bazar Patrika, a Bengali daily, The Hindu, the quarterly Journal of the
Poona Sarvjanik Sabha, and the Kesari and Maratha newspapers regularly
carried articles reflecting the poverty of Indians.
4. For an anthropological analysis of India, see R. Srivatsan (2005) “Native
Noses and Nationalist Zoos: Debates in Colonial and Early Nationalist
Anthropology of Castes and Tribes”, in Economic and Political Weekly,
Vol. 40(19):1986–1988.
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CHAPTER 5
Construction of Plural Selves in India
Abstract This chapter discusses the construction of diverse selves in India.

It asserts that plurality is the necessary condition for conceptualizing
India. Nineteenth-century India was a period during which developed the
varied identities that were to shape Indian politics in the future. The chap-
ter presents a scrutiny of construction of plural selves from the perspective
of caste, gender, nationality, religion and class.
Keywords Swaraj • Self-construction • Caste • Women • Religion •

Subaltern • Nationalist
The variant of nationalism that emerged in nineteenth-century India was

unlike its European counterpart, where the existence of a single language was
considered essential for the rise of nationalism, eventually paving the path
towards the emergence of a nation-state. It was unthinkable for the English
to comprehend Indian nationalism, as one composite whole, could ever
develop given the absence of one religion, one culture and one language.
Formation of self in such circumstances seemed a difficult task, and to think
of a single self in India is a fallacy. What emerged, therefore, was the concept
of plural selves. This is not to say that there were no all-India nationalistic feel-
ings, but that the formation of self-identity undertook many deviant routes
depending on various cultures, religions, social and economic conditioning,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7_5
82 P. SENGUPTA
and position in society. All these varied selves had a related nationalist agenda
and intersected at some points, but this doesn’t imply that there was a single
and unified Indian self. Self-construction remained plural, true to India’s
diverse multiplicities.
Construction of the self is a necessary precursor to self-rule; without
self, one cannot define self-rule. Hence, self (i.e. swa or swayam) comes
before Swaraj (swa-self and raj-rule). Creation of self in modern India is
deeply linked to the colonial period. Colonialism not only laid an impres-
sion on the bodies of Indians but also led to what Ashis Nandy calls the
“colonization of mind” which “informs most interpretations of colonial-
ism” (Nandy 1992, p. xi). The question arises that if most interpretation
of colonialism cannot escape Western influence, then can identity forma-
tion in India, most of which has been rooted in colonial policies and
administration, be free from such an impact? It is true that, India being an
ancient civilization, there were texts and written works, in ancient lan-
guages such as Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Tamil and very few in indigenous
languages, which presented descriptive narrations of cultural, social, inter-
personal, political and economic relations prevalent during the times in
which they were written. But as individuals under colonial subjuga-
tion, was it possible to read these texts without being influenced by the
context of colonialism? Such questions demand going back to history, a
tough choice for a colonial country with limited written accounts and
more of a reliance on oral-based history, all of which is overshadowed by
two centuries of foreign administration prejudiced against Indians. Under
such circumstances indigenous history writing became one of the most
challenging task. For indigenous historians of the colonial period to write
Indian history was to choose one of the two paths—either to construct the
indigenous (history) identity in opposition to their British caricatured
construction, as was done by Nilmani Basak and others; or to glorify
India’s past before the coming of the British.
In the positioning of self, Ranajit Guha in his diligently written work
Dominance without Hegemony argued that “the nationalist attempted to
reclaim their past from colonial appropriation whereby portraying the
colonizers as the ‘other’ by defining their identity as opposed to the ‘alien
colonizers’” (Guha 1997, p. 3). Hence history became a game between
two opposing players. A critical point to keep in mind here is that to iden-
tify the native self only as nationalist is to assign a singular meaning to the
objectives of all the people of India. Indians wanted independence from
CONSTRUCTION OF PLURAL SELVES IN INDIA 83
foreign rule, but they cannot be assigned a singular identity consisting

entirely of nationalist self. India, with her diverse complexities and popu-
lace, was struggling at various levels to identify different selves, which
were often layered with caste, sociopolitical, economic, regional, cultural,
religious and linguistic conditions. Nationalism was the language of a
meta-project for the attainment of political independence, but parallel
narratives of caste, gender and class were also evolving and shaping a plu-
rality of selves in India based on differently located histories.
Caste(d) Self
Caste identity is the oldest form of categorization in Hindu society and
has remained important (Bhattacharya 1896, p. 1). Caste as a category has
been criticized by English and Indian scholars alike as derogatory, dis-
criminatory and inhuman. But Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya, an upper-
caste Brahmin writing in 1896, refuted such interpretations of caste as
atrocious and divisive as erroneous, arguing that:
Caste has its origin in the Brahmanical legislation … it is a golden chain

which the upper castes have willingly placed around their necks and which
has fixed them to only that which is noble and praiseworthy. (Bhattacharya
1896, pp. 4–8)
Caste influenced language too. Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, was
not to be uttered by the lower castes as they were considered to be engaged
in polluted works owing to the sins of their last birth. There are significant
differences in languages that are spoken by different castes i.e. the same
language has variations when spoken by different castes. Sometimes these
variants are so different that two people from different castes cannot
understand each other. Usually the upper castes speak the Sanskritized and
standardized languages, which are officially recognized, whereas the pow-
erless dialects are spoken by the lower castes. The language divide created
by powerful people belonging to the upper castes is another means of
social segregation and domination.
The boundary of the Hindu caste system was impermeable, and any
attempt to touch it attracted rigorous punishment. Though membership of
the caste system spread from upper castes to lower castes and to outcastes,
who were outside the realm of the caste system, it was equally restrictive in
84 P. SENGUPTA
its rules and regulations for all its members, including upper castes. Upper-
caste communities were debarred from any interaction with the lower
castes, and vice versa. The difference was that if a member of the upper
caste violated caste rules, he or she did not face exploitation, discrimination
and violence to the same degree as a lower-caste person would. Violation
of caste rules meant social boycott by the entire community, impacting not
only one person but his or her entire family. Hence, “caste self” is universal
among the Indian Hindu community and applies equally to high and low
castes.
Discrimination against lower castes was not limited to the social arena
but also spilled into history writings, with no space dedicated to the con-
tribution of individuals belonging to the lower castes. Lower castes
asserted that the upper castes who dominated the academic sphere and
intelligentsia did not give due importance to people belonging to lower
castes who had fought for the country’s freedom, either in 1857 or after-
wards. Writers such as Badri Narayan Tiwari, G.P. Prashant and R.K. Singh
exposed the prejudices among native historians, who negated the role of
lower-caste martyrs and heroes in the Indian national struggle. The bur-
geoning of literary works by intellectuals who were writing about lower-
caste experiences and narratives set the stage for the rise of an alternate
history from the perspective of those who belonged to the lowest rungs of
caste hierarchy. The growing literature written by lower-caste academics
has been termed Dalit literature and history.
The term Dalit means oppressed: they were those who belonged to the
lowest castes in the Hindu order. The origins of the term can be traced
back to the Adi-Hindu Movement and its leaders, such as Achhutanand,
Bhagya Reddy, Gopalbaba Walangkar, B. Shyamsunder and Mangu Ram.
They identified Dalits as original inhabitants of India (Kshirsagar 1994,
p. 410). This pre-Aryan origin was also recognized by the Nirguna bhakti
movement, based on the egalitarian concept of society (Gooptu 2001,
p. 152). Any understanding of the Dalit self in India requires an under-
standing of the history behind these caste communities. It is important to
keep in mind that the Dalits are not a single homogeneous entity and
comprise numerous caste groups, amongst some of whom there is enmity.
Dalits were those who were considered to belong to the lowest level of the
Hindu varna system, comprising Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and
Shudras. The Shudras were peasant cultivators, field-workers and artisans
as well as those engaged in gardening, shoe making, leather work, washing
clothes, making pots and so on, and then there were the untouchables
who did menial work considered as dirty or polluting, such as cleaning

toilets. There was hierachization even among the Untouchables. Some
sections belonging to what are known today as Dalits belonged to the
class of landless laborers or peasant workers. Hence, Bharat Patankar and
Gail Omvedt rightly argued that when using Dalit as a term one must be
aware that
Any definition of “dalits” must involve an understanding of two relations:

first caste and second, servitude to land. (Patankar and Omvedt 1979, p. 410)
It is also important to point out that the Dalits were not among the
scheduled castes, as used by the British government in their official records
and census data. British rule empowered landlords through the zamindari
system, leading to extreme exploitation of the lower castes, worst affected
being the adivasis and the untouchables, who were not only exploited
politically, economically and socially but did not have access to the British
courts. The Queen’s proclamation of 1858 strengthened the policy of
non-interference in religious matters more stringently after the revolt of
1857, and upheld the Hindu caste system as a religious institution which
could not be interfered with by the courts (Patankar and Omvedt 1979,
p. 411). Hence, the untouchables and the tribal population were doubly
hit by the caste system and by land regulations, which together led to their
oppressed position in society. It was extremely important for this section
of the Indian society to link the national movement with the anti-feudal
struggle, as land and forests were their only means of subsistence.
The term Dalit began to gain currency from the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, when these groups of subservient castes began to assert their identity
forcefully to gain social justice and equal opportunities. Dr. Bhimrao
Ambedkar, belonging to a lower caste himself, became their spokesman.
He was successful in turning the attention of the intelligentsia towards this
age-old exploited population. A significant point to keep in mind is that
whereas Ambedkar was against the caste system and wanted it abolished,
the new class of Dalits in post-independent India have turned their caste
identity into a “tool to power,” using their caste identity as the means to
acquire political, economic and social power, which is a “paradigmatic
shift” (Judge 2012, p 271). But scholars have argued that the political
identity of Dalits was much smaller scope because of the institutional poli-
tics of lower-caste political parties in India, whereas Dalit literary sources
depict the multilayered Dalit identity from different perspectives of
86 P. SENGUPTA
gender, class, lowest castes among lower castes and so on, bringing forth
the multifaceted and often shadowy discrimination and violence among
the Dalits themselves.
Dalit identity has been greatly shaped by Dalit literature, which began
to develop from the first quarter of the twentieth century. Sarah Beth
Hunt depicts that Dalit identity shaped by this literature, was against caste
oppression had a much broader canvas than politics, encompassing the
experiences and narrations of Dalit writers (Gupta 2014, pp. 31–32). Such
writings conceded the embeddedness of literature in the power structure
of Indian society, and used literature in order to contest the universalizing
cultural representation of Indian society by the upper caste (Hunt 2014,
p. 2). Literary resources and writings by Dalits involved the “Dalit audi-
ence in defining and redefining their cultural tastes, social behavior and
identity” (Gooptu 2001, p. 13). The use of language by Dalit writers,
poets and activists led to the development of an alternative narrative of
history from the perspective of the oppressed castes. The Dalit self has
been defined and shaped by literary scholars as well as by caste politics, and
it has now become a very powerful vote bank. This self is a heterogeneous
category, as women and lower castes within the Dalits have come up with
alternative stories and writings based on their exploitation from within as
well as outside the caste groups. But caste in India remains an important
identity marker and plays a significant role in recasting the country.
Religious Self
Language was considered to be the first step towards nation formation.
Nationality was described as a community of people bound together by
language, history, culture, religion and usually territory. History and cul-
ture are in turn pronounced and narrated through a language. This
assigned centrality to language as a defining principle of national identity
and religion, accompanied by ethnicity, shares a unique relationship with
nationalism. Some scholars have accepted that in the formation of the
modern nation-state, religiosity will become moderate and eventually
cease, with political sovereignty occurring (Down 1957). Contrary to
such predictions, however, religious differences have emerged more
strongly in India (Mitra 2013, pp. 269–285). Such a situation can be
attributed to the traditional definition of a nation-state, as people sharing
a common territory bound together by a common culture, language and
religion, which Indians borrowed from the West. Society in the colonial
areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America was diverse and, unlike the tradi-
tional nation-states of Europe, these newly formed states were often not
tied together by cultural commonality beyond that of being ruled by the
same imperial power.
Studies on links between nationalism and religious belongingness have
punctured the widespread tendency held by many Anglo-Saxon scholars
that the economic development of individuals leads to modernization,
which means they come to believe in the universally held modern princi-
ples of equality and justice and thereby shed their conservative religious
affinities.1 But whether we agree or disagree with this position, the fact
remains that religion is deeply connected to nationalism and construction
of self in old societies such as India. The presence of great religious diver-
sity along with India being the birthplace of two of the world’s oldest
religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, makes religion central to the lives of
most Indians. Studying the construction of self in India remains insepa-
rable from religion.
Religion was often used to raise nationalistic feelings among the Indian
masses by political leaders and social reformers. Nationalism, which was
germinating during the nineteenth century, also made recourse to religion
in multiple ways. Leaders such as Tilak, Aurobindo and Gandhi used reli-
gion as a tool for political unity among Hindus. For example, Tilak popu-
larized the Ganpati festival in Maharashtra, while Gandhi generated
mass-mobilization using religion and religious phrases from the Ramayana,
such as Ramrajya (rule of the Hindu god-king Rama) and Panch-
Parmeshwar (equating the village-level panchayats to divinity).
India being a religious society, the situation was fertile for the rise of
religious nationalism. The ground for this was laid by the social reform
movements which fueled the politics of identity among Hindus and
Muslims, through the establishment of Hindu associations such as Arya
Samaj, Brahmo Samaj, Hindu Mahasabha and Ramakrishna Mission and
Islamic associations such as Darool Uloom Deoband and Muslim League.
This was the culmination of the colonial state policy of “representing
Indian polity based on divided communities” (Gould 2004, p. 1). The
census counting of Indians based on religion for the first time in Indian
history enumerated the population and ascertained that Hindus were the
majority community on the sub-continent, defining people belonging to
other religions as the minorities, and thereby arousing communalism
(Bhagat 2001, p. 4352).
88 P. SENGUPTA
Religious nationalism, Christopher Jaffrelot asserted, was a symbolic

strategy,2 and required the reinterpretation of indigenous cultures, as
opposed to the Western approach to modernization wherein the sociocul-
tural background of the reinterpreters plays a critical role (Jaffrelot 1996,
p. 12). Often religion is defined in accordance to the objectives of its lead-
ers, who carefully elevate certain symbols, rituals and customs while delib-
erately neglecting other ideals. India’s religious nationalism followed this
path, with Hindu pundits and Muslim religious leaders appealing to the
populace to bring back the pure religious practices of past, leading to
antagonism between the two dominant religious communities and accen-
tuating the Hindu and Muslim variations of nationalism. The golden past
for Hindus was not the same as that for Muslims, who were held respon-
sible for the end of the Hindu rule in India and for establishing foreign
rule over the natives (Mujahid 1999, p. 91). The post-1857 rigorous
revivalism among Hindus and Muslims conflicted, owing to their distinct
historiographies.
The roots of Hindu nationalism can be traced back to the Brahminical
vision as propounded by the upper-caste Hindu association, examples
being the Arya Samaja reaction to Moplah rebellion and the developments
leading to the Khilafat movement. Arya Samaj was established by Dayanand
Saraswati in 1875. He was a Hindu religious reformer who denounced the
evils of superstitious practices, animal sacrifice, a degraded position for
women and idol worship, which he claimed had crept in Hinduism. He
appealed:
I have not come to preach any new dogmas or religion, nor to establish a
new order, nor be proclaimed a new Messiah or Pontiff. I have only brought
before my people the light of the Vedic wisdom which had been hidden dur-
ing the centuries of India’s thralldom. (Satyarth Prakash 1906)
Saraswati’s Arya Samaj advocated that evils emerged in Hinduism

owing to its contact with Islam and Christianity, which were seen as reli-
gions belonging to foreign lands that had arrived since the invasion of
ancient India by Islamic rulers. Such evils, according to him, could only be
rectified by following the Vedic practices. Religious nationalism among
Hindus had not taken deep root, but the Moplah rebellion of 1921,3 in
which Muslims of the Malabar region attacked and killed Hindu land-
lords, sparked anti-Muslim feelings among Hindus.
The Musalmans (Moplas) of that district after three weeks of preparing

weapons, rose over a definite area in revolt, believing, as they had been told,
that British Rule had ceased, and they were free; they established the Khilafat
Raj, crowned a King, murdered and plundered abundantly, and killed or
drove away all Hindus who would not apostatise. Somewhere about a lakh
(100,000) of people were driven from their homes with nothing but the
clothes they had on, stripped of everything. (Annie Besant 1922, The
Future of Indian Politic, p. 252)
The Moplah rebellion was the result of the British policy of returning
land to the Hindu jajmanis, who were returning to the region after Tipu
Sultan’s death. This East India Company policy agitated the Muslim
Moplahs, who had gained ownership over the jajmani land holdings. The
situation was tense, and reached its peak in 1921 when the Moplahs
attacked the British and Hindus (Wood 1976, p. 547).
Hindu nationalists were not only members of religious associations
such as Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj but were also active members
of the Indian National Congress, examples being Puroshottam Das
Tandon, Balkrishna Sharma and K.M. Munshi.4 Seeing the Congress
under Gandhi’s leadership rendering unequivocal support to the Khilafat
movement, Hindu loyalists revamped the Hindu Mahasabha in 1922 and
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Voluntary Organization),
started by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, in 1925 (Bhagwan 2008, p. 40).
These organizations focused on India as a Hindu nation by adopting the
twin tactics of utilizing the numerical Hindu majority, which became
starkly visible owing to census data, and declaring that going back to the
Vedic times would liberate India. “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” became the
core mantra of the Hindu self, propagated by the RSS (Guha 2005).
Nationalism among the Indian Muslims began to take shape post-
1857, with the end of Mughal rule and the capture of the last Mughal
ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar. The end of 800 years of Muslim rule resulted in
the Muslims becoming a subject race for the first time (Al Mujahid 1999,
p. 91). Those responsible for promoting the rise of nationalism among
Muslims were Syed Ahmed Khan and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. A notable
development in the field of language was the identification of the Urdu
language with Muslims and Sanskrit with Hindus (as discussed in Chap.
3). This is of consequence because Urdu had previously served as the
bridge between the two communities and was developed by Hindus as
90 P. SENGUPTA
well as Muslim scholars. But the revival of Sanskrit as the language of

Vedic culture among Hindu social reformers led to the breakdown of the
Urdu bridge (Al Mujahid 1999, p. 92). This was coupled with demands
from Hindu associations to replace Persian and Urdu with Hindi as the
official language of Bihar in 1870 and then in Darjeeling in 1872–1873
(Al Mujahid 1999, p. 93). The language divide marked the beginning of
a schism between the Hindus and Muslims of India, so much so that in
1867 Ahmed Khan for the first time addressed the Hindus and Muslims as
two nations. Both parties viewed their religious nationalism as a reaction
to the other. Ahmed Khan used the word qawm to describe both nation
and nationality, which scholars held led to confusion among Muslim sepa-
ratists and the Congress alike (Ahmed 1970, p. 130). The point to be
emphasized here is that religious nationalism became an “illocutionary
force,” which often led to the eruption of religion as the definition of self
(Gould 2002, p. 623).
Nationalists’ Self
The nationalist school did not emerge with the Indian National Congress
(INC). INC can be termed the mechanism for the political manifestation
of nationalism along with other such associations, examples being the
Muslim League, Indian National Army, Communist Party of India and
Hindustan Socialist Republican Army. Nationalism in India began nearly
half a century before the birth of the INC in 1885. The social reforms
movements aimed at reforming society also inculcated the emotion of
belonging to a nation that was defined in one’s own language and culture,
coupled with dignity and respect for cultural identity. Nationalism is not a
“linear development,” and neither is it well defined. Indeed, Indian
nationalism emerged out of “contested visions” (Rag 1995, p. 69). Hence,
the school termed here nationalists comprises various strands, from social
reformers to the soldiers of the 1857 revolt, to the initial members of the
India Association and finally the INC.
But it was ultimately the INC which became the most significant orga-
nization in the Indian national struggle. INC members were divided into
two factions and ideologies. The older generation, who were the pioneer-
ing members, came to be known as Moderates owing to their working
practices, considered mild, timid and not proactive. In contrast, the younger
Congress members launched a direct attack on the British government.
This group took to protests against discriminatory policies and introduced
the swadeshi and boycott movement that targeted the British economy.5
The pioneering members of INC practiced a participatory method that

demanded the participation of Indians in the governance of their country
by opening employment in the civil services, promoting them to higher
ranks in the army and educating the masses. The participatory approach
sought the involvement of Indian subjects in administrative and bureau-
cratic decision-making bodies. The early Congressmen did not demand
India’s political independence and sovereign rights for its people, whereas
the other faction, including members such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin
Chandra Pal, Aurobindo Ghose and Lala Lajpat Rai, were not satisfied
merely with participation but demanded complete sovereignty of India.
This group, the sovereign or Swarajist group, demanded complete inde-
pendence and the departure of British from India. They asserted that the
methods used by Congress members such as Surendranath Banerjee,
Naoroji and Gokhale were not only mendicant but that the Congress as a
whole was an elitist association of the educated middle classes, which did
not represent the poverty-ridden, weak and impoverished masses (Sarkar
2014, p. 83). They critiqued the anglicized lifestyles of the members of
Congress and their limited knowledge about the dying masses. INC was
non-representative of the Indian peasants, industrial workers, artisans and
lower castes (Rag 1995, p. 81).
Aurobindo Ghose, describing the Swaraj faction as practicing “demo-
cratic nationalism,” refuted the existence of two factions within INC,
declaring that:
There are at present not two parties in India, but three—the Loyalists, the
Moderates and the Nationalists. The Loyalists would be satisfied with good
government by British rulers and a limited share in the administration; the
Moderates desire self-government within the British Empire, but are willing
to wait for it indefinitely; the Nationalists would be satisfied with nothing
less than independence whether within the Empire, if that be possible, or
outside it; they believe that the nation cannot and ought not to wait but
must bestir itself immediately, if it is not to perish as a nation. (Ghose 2002)
Not only the methodology but their vision of India was distinct. Most
early members of the INC favored British rule in India, they saw it as
taking India on a path of development and societal reforms which had
been absent for a long time. Western enlightenment was considered
essential in allowing the Indian masses to rise up from age-old traditions
and inhuman practices. In contrast, the Swarajists had ideas about India
and an Indian nation, which did not follow the mainstream notion that
92 P. SENGUPTA
was based on the European or British approach to nation-building, a

monochromatic view that believed all political communities should be
fulfilled by becoming nation-states. Progressing towards the aim of com-
plete independence entailed atmashakti (self-reliance), which was the
slogan of the swadeshi movement. Consequently, supporters of Swaraj,
like Profulla Chandra Roy, started indigenous industries and experi-
mented with indigenous- controlled educational institutions, such as
Tagore’s Shanti Niketan and Satish Mukherji’s Dawn Society (Sarkar
2014, p. 84).
Emphasis on self-reliance metamorphosed into deploying armed resis-
tance against the colonizers. Revolutionaries such as the Hindustan
Republican Army, Naujawan Bharat Sabha and finally the Indian National
Army under Subhash Chandra Bose contributed to the nationalist self-
building process. The revolutionary spirit is noteworthy owing to the
constant humiliation of Indians as being physically weak and incapable of
any real action.
Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi, popularly known as Gandhi, entered
national life in 1914. His philosophy for making India politically indepen-
dent was unique, based on the principles of ahimsa (non-violence) and
satyagraha (search for truth). After having successfully experimenting
with satyagraha in South Africa, he was certain that India’s independence
would come not by violent means but by a continuous struggle through
non-violent means.
The nationalist self in India was defined, redefined and reinterpreted
several times owing to the variety of means followed by leaders. Be it the
mellow language of the early Congressmen, the voracious language of the
social reformers, the highly charged speeches of the young Congress lead-
ers, the revolutionary sacrifices by revolutionaries and martyrs or the lan-
guage of non-violence of Gandhi, the language of nationalism left a
permanent imprint on the edifice of self in India.
Female Self
The nationalist discourse painted a new canvas in twentieth-century India,
wherein the national independence of India was foremost. It was presumed
that the questions of women, Hindu lower castes, farmers’ and peasant’s
rights to the land, and labor and minority rights would be discussed only
when the right to self-rule had been established. The idea was that an inde-
pendent Indian government comprising Indians would be more appropriate
for tackling issues relating to different sections of the Indian populace.

Therefore, the matter of constructing a female self in India was encroached
upon and encapsulated by the idea of constructing the Indian woman. This
is not to assume that there were no women writing about rights of women
in India or against social discrimination and the atrocities committed against
them. On the contrary, female writers had to fight the twin challenges of
political as well as social subjugation, as there had been two levels of the so-
called “White Man’s Burden”—educating the unenlightened “colored”
natives and the second of emancipating native women, this was shared by
the English-educated Bengali bhadralok of the nineteenth century (Banerjee
1992, pp. 127–128). This reform became a reform of women rather than
for women, in terms of their behavior, mannerisms and interests, as these
now began to follow the imperial–nationalistic–Aryan design. It may seem
contradictory to put imperial and nationalistic together, but this is because
the nationalist design of “how woman in India should be” was similarly
marred with entrenched patriarchy. Constructing the female self in India or
elsewhere cannot escape the influence of patriarchy. The two dominant
ideas, being the nationalist movement and before that the English-educated
“cultured” Indian men posed a serious obstruction as well as providing assis-
tance for the construction of the female self. Beginning with the slow but
steady encroachment of the andarmahal or inner-compounds by the domi-
nant educated male conceptualization of bhadrota, or decency, as acceptable
female behavior. This eliminated the female poems and songs that were
mostly sung by those belonging to the lower castes who worked in rich elite
households. In his insightful essay Sumanta Banerjee unwraps how the
declining village economy in Bengal resulted in lower-caste women travel-
ling to cities and acquiring jobs in elite households, in turn becoming the
link between the outside world and the andarmahal women. These village
women brought with them their songs and folklore, which were enjoyed
by Bengali women of all classes because they presented stories and experi-
ences that were common to all women. The songs and story performances
peculiar to women became the target of attack by the bhadraloks as inde-
cent and vulgar and against the conception of bhadra-mahila, or cultured
lady (Banerjee 1992, p. 132). Where in Bengal it was bhadralok culture
acting against women-centric cultural songs and folklores, in west and
northern India, this was done through the Aryan identity of women, retrac-
ing the Vedic past, wherein women of the Vedic age symbolized the “high-
est symbol of Hindu womanhood” (Chakravarti 1992, pp. 47, 51). Women
94 P. SENGUPTA
during that time were portrayed as educated and knowledgeable, who chose
their own husbands and were familiar with martial arts, and hence historians
of nineteenth-century India depicted the Vedic age as the golden age and
the Vedic women as the ideal prototype (Chakravarti 1992, p. 51). Such a
rendition of women as brave hearts standing shoulder to shoulder with their
male counterparts was used to challenge the imperial rule of Britain and fit-
ted closely with the nationalist discourse. This provides an explanation of the
sudden exit of nineteenth-century women’s writings, such as those of Toru
Dutt, Pandita Ramabai, Sarojini Naidu and a few others, who were widely
read in England and India in their time but were seemingly lost to the over-
powering nationalist rhetoric in the twentieth century (Brinks 2013, p. 2).
Though the nationalist movement did overshadow all other selves,
especially the female self, woman authors and writers kept working
dedicatedly towards raising issues that centered on identity and on the
position of women in Indian society. It is important to analyze women’s
writings, whether poems, essays, diaries, memoirs and letters, during the
nineteenth century as they provided the infrastructure on which the female
self was constructed in India (Brinks 2013). A unique similarity between
female writers such as Toru Dutt, Ramabai, Sarojini Naidu, Krupabai
Satthianandan as well as comparatively recent writers such as Anita Desai,
Nayantara Sahgal and Shashi Deshpande is their use of the English lan-
guage as the medium through which they narrate experiences of family,
discrimination and patriarchy. The use of a foreign language to narrate
their stories can be attributed to a desire to speak and to be understood by
women of other countries in order to put across their narratives, possibly
garnering support from them in their fight to improve the position of
women in India. But there have been female writers who have written in
Indian languages, significant among them being Ashapoorna Devi,
Mahasweta Devi and Rassundari Devi writing in Bengali, Lalithambika
Antherjanam in Malayalam, Amrita Pritam in Punjabi and Muktabai in
Marathi. Female writings in English found many readers outside India,
but those who wrote in Indian languages also attracted an audience in
India—and influenced the women’s movement in the 1970s.
Toru Dutt’s letters, articles and translations in reputed magazines
and newspapers as well as her posthumously published work titled
Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882) present her as a cos-
mopolitan who frequently traveled in Europe and India. Her works
represent her longing for “home,” be that France or Bengal. Most of
Dutt’s letters highlighted her search for identity and the dilemma about
what to incorporate and reject from both the Bengali and European
cultures (Brinks 2013, p. 24). She has been termed as bi-cultural by
Meenakshi Mukherjee for writing in French and Sanskrit, which repre-
sents the twin influence of both languages and literatures on her per-
sonality. Ellen Brinks did not recognize Dutt as a nationalist, but argued
that her work participated in “the nationalist discourse by reinforcing
cultural nationalism and reconstructing the Vedic past” (Brinks 2013,
p. 25). Dutt’s work portrays the sense of alienation, so prevalent among
women who were equally strangers at home and in the world.
Weaving a story from various threads of her gendered experiences,
Krupabai Satthianandan wrote a novel Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life
(1894), which was apparently the first novel written by a woman in India.
Krupabai is significant because she was the first figure to speak about the
need for reforms in the face of the social injustices and oppressive behavior
that were met by Christians as well as high-caste Hindu women. Krupabai
talked about women’s reforms through her works, presenting the wom-
en’s perspectives. Until then, it had been men such as Raja Rammohun
Roy, Dayanand Saraswati and Bankim Chandra who had taken upon
themselves the moral duty to talk about reforms that were relevant to
women. Here a woman was talking for herself and her sisters. One striking
similarity between Toru Dutt and Krupabai was their short lives. The life
expectancy of Indians was on average twenty-five years in 1885 (Bhat
1987). Toru Dutt died aged twenty-one and Krupabai aged thirty-two.
The early deaths of these two high-class rich women speak volumes about
the medical care women received in those days. This brings us to Ramabai’s
writings concerning the impact of extreme poverty and famine on wom-
en’s health in twentieth-century India. Ramabai emphasized the need for
female medical attendants and doctors to take care of women’s health in
India, as male doctors were mostly not allowed in the inner compounds of
households where women lived. A woman going to a male doctor with her
female problems was not an acceptable social norm. Hence, Ramabai
shouldered the work of identifying the female self not merely as daughter,
wife and mother, the relative self, but as doctors, teachers and nurses, the
independent women self.
Ramabai (1858–1922) was a crusader against child marriage and for
the right of education for young women and widows. She also conjoined
the issues of women’s health and education with the language of political
economy by writing not only about the education of women but her
96 P. SENGUPTA
abominable position, trapped amid patriarchy, caste system and imperial

rule. She writes about how women of high caste could not do relief work
even at times of extreme poverty owing to their fear of losing caste status,
how she suffered doubly during famines because she was physically and
sexually abused by men and forced into prostitution and rape, and also
about the issue of food security for women who were not even fed well in
their husband’s house if they became widows. Ramabai’s writings are not
only narratives about women’s exploitation but also included concern
about children, both boys and girls, who were tortured and exploited in
the name of chastity, she thereby presented “a female perspective on
exploitation” (Brinks 2013, p. 73). In Ramabai there is the absence of a
man as protector of woman/widow, which reflects her own life, as she did
not have a male figure alongside her. Ramabai identified women and wid-
ows not as victims but as prospective teachers and nurses who would work
to emancipate Indian society from the disease of illiteracy and malnutri-
tion (ibid., p. 82).
The “feminization of famines” is a remarkable contribution to the colo-
nial gender discourse, contributing to the construction and creation of the
female self in a imperialist and patriarchal society (Brinks 2013, p. 66).
Maud Ellmann illustrates this:
For Ramabai, the spectacle of famine is capable of deranging and distinction

between self and the other. (Ellmann 1993, 54 as referred to in Brinks 2013,
p. 76)
In Ramabai, one finds a comparison between the nefarious behavior

meted out to child widows and the poverty and disgrace faced by margin-
alized social groups. This correlation between women and subjugated
social groups was to become the foundation of women’s and marginalized
sections’ movements in the years to come, when both these groups joined
to fight the upper castes and the patriarchal cleavages of Indian society.
Subaltern Self
Are only histories written in the languages of elites, the majority and
upper-class intellectuals, to be valued? What about histories narrated by
people belonging to the margins of societies and written in non-dominant
languages? Shouldn’t such narratives be given space in our understanding
of self? Structures of power and domination stand behind what makes a
language powerful, economically attractive and politically vocal. Such

enquiries find a guiding light in the writings of the subaltern school, which
emerged as a group of thinkers mainly from India in the 1970s (Pandey
1994, pp. 1475–1476), with the objective of “writing history from the
perspective of the dispossessed by rejecting neo-colonialist, neo-nationalist
and Marxist modes of historiography” (O’Hanlon 1988, p. 190). The
subaltern school rose to fill the gap in the Marxist critique of Indian
nationalism, leading the communists to “privilege national independence
to socialism,” most communist members and scholars belonged to
Congress in their early political scholarship, India therefore lacked critical
Marxist scholars as developed in Africa (Vaitheespara 2012, p. 91). The
subaltern project emerged as an attempt at alternative historiography, to
write history not based on archives but moving away to the localities para
and mohallas where one can find history impinged on memories, narra-
tives, experiences, folklore and songs of the people. Gyan Pandey called it:
using nationalist archives against their grains and focusing on silences, blind-
spots and anxieties … the aim of such studies is not to unmask dominant
discourses but to explore their fault lines in order to provide different
accounts … to describe histories revealed in the cracks of the colonial
archaeology of nationalism. (Pandey 1992, pp. 8–19)
The term “subaltern” is taken from Antonio Gramsci, who defines it as:
any “low rank” person or group of people in a particular society suffering

under hegemonic domination of a ruling elite class that denies them the
basic rights of participation in the making of local history and culture as
active individuals of the same nation”. (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks 1971)
According to Gyan Pandey, a member of the Subaltern school, the term

refers to domination in terms of class, caste, gender, race, language and
culture, and a relation of dominance, not necessarily hegemony of elites
over the subordinated, as used by Gramsci. The subaltern self can also be
called the resistant self, as it shaped and developed owing to constant resis-
tance to discrimination, misrecognition and appropriation of land and
livelihood of the people at the margins (Pandey 1994, p. 1477). The sub-
altern project started with research and publications highlighting peasant
movements and consciousness, but expanded its horizon to include stud-
ies on gender, tribes, sex workers, laborers, landless peasants and alternate
98 P. SENGUPTA
conceptions of self emerging from institutionalized long-time violence of

the state and its agents (Mukherjee 1988, p. 2109). The project involved
the “recovery of the subject” and the right of subjects to write their own
history, and not translated version by elites (O’Hanlon 1988). This is not
to say that subjects are atomic selves but that they are “located within
power relations” in society (Curie 1995, p. 220). The aim of the subaltern
school is to give subjects the right to write their own history as they expe-
rienced it and not giving a distorted view from above. In other words, it
focuses on history from below.
The subaltern school’s obsession with the history of “subject” were
based in Michael Foucault’s “writings on the constitution of subject”
(Cuire 1995, p. 220). But for subaltern scholars the people at the margins
were the subject, mostly the tribal communities of India, specifically
Bengal and its neighboring regions. Their work focused on the history of
these tribes and their rebellions against colonial dominance, which they
argued had never found any space in elite nationalist narratives.
These layered conceptions of self in India cumulatively and collabora-
tively fought against British domination, demanding the political indepen-
dence of India. For the individual self to develop fully, it requires political
freedom from colonial slavery.
In this chapter, we have analyzed the different sources of self in India
and how various schools approached it. Language is critical to self-
construction, in fact one cannot imagine self without language, signs,
symbols, speech and silences. In Indian politics as well as politics in gen-
eral, focus has been solely on the language of politics and the politics of
language, but the fundamental point to keep in mind is that language is
politics.
Notes
1. See Biswas Bidisha (2010) “Negotiating the nation: Diaspora contestations
in the USA about hindu nationalism in India”, Nations and Nationalism 16
(4), 2010, 696–714. Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century, ed.
Patrick O’Meara, Howard D. Mehlinger, and Matthew Krain (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000); Simon Ravinovitch (2012) Jews and
Diaspora Nationalism: Writings on Jewish Peoplehood in Europe and United
States, Brandeis University Press, New England, USA; Adogame, Afe (ed.)
(2014) The Public face of African New Religious Movements in Diaspora:
Imaging the religious ‘Other’, Ashgate Publishing, England; Catarina
Kinnvall and Ted Svensson (2010) “Hindu nationalism, diaspora politics

and nation-building in India”, Australian Journal of International Affairs,
Volume 64, No. 3: 274–292; Michael Vicente Perez (2014) “Between reli-
gion and nationalism in Palestinian diaspora”, Nations and Nationalism,
Volume 20(4): 801–820.
2. See Jaffrelot, Christopher (1996) The Hindu Nationalist Movement and
Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s: Strategies of identity building, implanta-
tion and mobilization, Penguin Books, Delhi.
3. For a detailed account of the Moplah Rebellion, Robert Hardgrave (1977)
“The Mappilla Rebellion, 1921: Peasant Revolt in Malabar”, Modern Asian
Studies, Volume 11(1): 57–99.
4. On Puroshottam Das Tandon, see William Gould (2002) “Congress
Radicals and Hindu Militancy: Sampurnanand and Purushottam Das
Tandon in the Politics of the United Provinces, 1930–47”, Modern Asian
Studies, 36 (3):619–655. For K.M. Munshi, see Manu Bhagavan (2008)
“The Hindutva Underground: Hindu Nationalism and the Indian National
Congress in late colonial and early post-colonial India”, Economic and
Political Weekly, Volume 43(37) 39–48.
5. Swadeshi means “produced in one’s own country.” The movement gener-
ated the nationalist feeling of buying only goods and clothes made in India
and boycott was a corollary to this; that is all British-made goods were
boycotted.
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CHAPTER 6
Language Conundrum
Abstract This chapter presents arguments that support language as p olitics,

taking its cue from the philosophy of language and probing how language as
speech and expression is a political act. The position of the Indian National
Congress and other Indian associations relevant to the language issue in India
is elucidated. Demonstrating the use of language during the partition of
Bengal in 1905, the chapter asserts the role of political leaders and spokesmen
with regard to the language controversy between Hindi–Hindustani. Further,
it notes how language was associated with the Dravidian movement.
Keywords Indian National Congress • Partition of Bengal • Gandhi •

Hindustani • Self-respect movement
The construction and development of language identities continued in the

early decades of the twentieth century, but was pushed to the background as
the call for India’s independence was assigned foremost priority. Mohandas
Karam Chand Gandhi’s entry into the Indian National Congress (INC)
marked a new phase. He was keen to utilize the Hindustani language for
rekindling Hindu–Muslim unity. His determination to work towards
developing Hindustani is remarkable, so much so that he has been rightly
called “Hindustani’s greatest protagonist” (Brock 1995, p. 68). Gandhi
believed that all Indians should learn Hindustani and he expressed his feel-
ing on this matter as early as 1916 while addressing the thirty-first INC
session at Lucknow on December 28:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7_6
104 P. SENGUPTA
I know that there is an appeal made to me by my Tamil brethren that I

should speak in English, but I want to make an appeal that during the next
year if you do not learn the lingua-franca, which I know will be the lingua-
franca when swaraj is granted to India … if you do not do so, you will do
so during the year, you will do so at your own peril…. (Gandhi 1964, p. 320)
Gandhi explained in great detail what he meant by Hindi–Hindustani.

Explaining the necessary criteria that a national language had to meet, he
asserted that it should be easy to learn for government officials; be capable
of serving as a medium for religious, economic and political intercourse
throughout India; should be the speech of the majority of the inhabitants;
be easy to learn for the whole country; and that in choosing it, consider-
ations of temporary or passing interest should not count (Gandhi 1956,
pp. 3–4). For furthering Hindustani’s development, Gandhi started the
Hindi Prachar Sabha in Madras in 1918, but soon renamed it Rashtra
Bhasha Prachar Samiti, realizing the religious connotations of using the
word “Hindi,” which was associated with Hindus. Mahatma Gandhi was
very much in favor of linguistic variety and wanted regional languages to
flourish in their respective regions, but vouched for Hindustani keeping
with the criteria of ‘national’ character, which he believed Hindustani ful-
filled. He was a keen supporter of language becoming the base for the
reorganization of Indian territories. This can be seen in his speech made
to the Home Rule League:
I have joined the Home Rule League to ensure speedy attention to the
people’s needs and development of every component part of the nation. I
will strive to bring about a linguistic division of India and try to induce the
League to take up this cause. (Brock 1995, p. 18)
Mahatma Gandhi wanted the development of all Indian languages and

not only Hindustani, he wanted Indians from northern and western
regions to learn a south Indian language. On his initiation, the Dakshin
Bharatiya Hindi Prachar Sabha made it “compulsory for a candidate tak-
ing exams in Hindi medium that they appear in one of the South Indian
languages paper also” (Saksena 1972, p. 17). This shows that Gandhi was
keen to preserve the linguistic diversity of India but believed in one
national language for all Indians. He firmly held the view that this was a
plausible solution for cohabitation of regional languages without threat-
ening the unity of the nation.
LANGUAGE CONUNDRUM 105
Not only did Gandhi propagate Hindustani as the national language,

but he also formulated plans to make it simpler to learn for all Indians.
The Hindi Sahitya Sammelan accepted Gandhi’s definition of Hindi–
Hindustani in 1935. Subsequently, it appointed a Lipi Sudhar Samiti for
the reform of Devanagari script, to make it easier to learn. This Samiti was
headed by Kaka Kalelkar, with well-known Indian linguist Suniti Kumar
Chatterji as a member. Gandhi’s passion for Hindustani was such that he
convinced C. Rajagopachari, the chief minister of Madras Presidency, to
make Hindi–Hindustani a compulsory subject in Madras.
Being fully aware of the widening gap between Hindi and Urdu,
Gandhi protested against the Sanskritization of Hindi and Persianization
of Urdu. For him, Hindi and Urdu were not two different languages but
two names given to the same tongue. Between 1916 and 1947 he empha-
sized this on many occasions. In fact, it was one of his priorities that the
Hindi–Urdu controversy should be resolved. Speaking about this contro-
versy as early as 1918, he said:
the question of national language becomes quite easy of solution once we

give up the Hindi-Urdu controversy. Hindus were to learn some Persian
words and Muslims some Sanskrit words. This exchange will be a means for
bringing Hindus and Muslims closer together. In fact, we have to work, so
hard for dispelling the present fascination for English language that we must
not raise this controversy. Nor fight over the script. (Gandhi 1956, p. 11)
Gandhi continued to pursue the recognition of Hindustani as the

national language of India, and it was thanks to his continuous endeavors
that finally the INC in its fortieth session held in Kanpur in 1925, passed
resolution VIII, amending the constitution of the INC that the proceed-
ings of the Congress shall be conducted in Hindustani.
Gandhi was in favor of one common language for India. In 1927, he
wrote in his newspaper, Young India, that “we must have an easily adapt-
able universal script for all-India and there is nothing so [sic] adaptable and
readymade as Devanagari script” (Gandhi 1931). During the forty-fifth
Congress session of Karachi in 1931, Gandhi, in moving the resolution
on fundamental rights, urged that the Swaraj government must provide
for “protection of the culture, language and scripts of the minorities”
(Gandhi 1931). He favored Hindustani as the national language as
106 P. SENGUPTA
he thought it would help to remove the distance between Hindus and

Muslims, whose relationship had been embittered because of partition.
But this dream of Gandhi remained unfulfilled, and in 1945 he eventually
resigned from the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan owing to its continuous persis-
tence in making Hindi in Devanagari script the national language.
Language and the INC

Gandhi’s linguistic views were critical. When he joined Congress, the
demands for its linguistic organization gained a forceful voice. The Congress
found in language a lesser devil than religion, especially after the partition
of Bengal in 1905. Joseph E. Schwartzberg stated that “the 1905 partition
aroused Congress sensitivity to language for the first time” (Schwartzberg
2010, p. 143). This continued with the formation of separate Congress
organizational units for Bihar in 1908 and Sindh and Andhra in 1917, and
the acceptance of the linguistic reorganization of provinces as an explicit
political objective in the Nagpur session of the Congress in 1920 (Sengupta
and Kumar 2008). Thereafter, the INC was organized on a language basis.
The question of territoriality and a constitution for the facilitation of
“responsible government” brought to the fore the basis for the territorial
reorganization of India, and was discussed in the Minto–Morley reforms
which formed the basis of the Government of India Act 1909. This was
delayed between 1914 and 1919 because of the First World War, but the
matter was flagged up again in the Government of India Act 1919. Framing
a new constitution to facilitate all the nuances of responsible government
became the most important quest of the All-Parties Conference 1928,
which in turn referred this question to a committee that the Conference
appointed. This committee was headed by Motilal Nehru, a Congressman
and a well-known lawyer from Allahabad, whose son Jawaharlal Nehru
would go on to become the first prime minister of independent India. This
committee’s report popularly known as the Nehru Report was submitted
on August 10, 1928. It also came to be called the All-Parties Conference
Report (APCR). The report maintained that the main consideration for
any territorial demarcation “must necessarily be the wishes of the people
and the linguistic unity of the area concerned” (All India Congress
Committee Report AICC 1928). The APCR strongly recommended that
Hindustani should be the common language of all India, but at the same
time acknowledged the need to develop provincial languages for rapid
development of the provinces. Laying emphasis on the linguistic principle

for the distribution of provinces, the APCR stated that “if a province has
to educate itself and do its daily work through the medium of its own
language, it must necessarily be a linguistic area” (AICC Report 1928,
p. 61). Further, stressing the importance of language, the APCR said that
“language as a rule corresponds with a special variety of culture, tradition
and literature. In a linguistic area, all these factors may come together
resulting in the general progress of the province” (AICC 1928, p. 62).
The other principle which was strongly supported by the APCR was the
“wishes of the people,” but it was nowhere suggested how this could be
collected or analyzed. The APCR stressed that:
we who talk of self-determination on a larger scale cannot in reason deny it

to a smaller area. The mere fact that the people living in a particular area feel
that they are a unit and desire to develop their culture is an important con-
sideration even though there may be no sufficient historical or cultural jus-
tification for their demand. Sentiments in such matters is often more
important than fact. (AICC 1928, pp. 28–30)
The APCR described language as the only historically justified grounds

for the territorial redrawing of India, emphasizing it as the base for reor-
ganization, thereby adding to the already prevalent justifications that
made language a viable ground on which territories could be redrawn. The
Indian Statutory Commission,1 appointed to discuss the territorial and
administrative redistribution of India, shared the view of the APCR that
provinces should be distributed on a linguistic basis. The commission
reported that:
if those who speak the same language form a compact and self-contained
area, so situated and endowed as to be able to support its existence as a sepa-
rate province, there is no doubt that the use of common speech is a strong
and natural basis for provincial individuality. But it is not the only test. Most
important of all is the largest possible measure of general agreement between
both sides i.e. the area losing as well as the area gaining territory. (Indian
Statutory Commission 1930, p. 25)
The Statutory Commission also recommended the formation of a

Boundaries Commission with a neutral chairman to expedite the delinea-
tion of boundaries of Indian states. Apart from these two reports, the
Sapru Report, Hindu Mahasabha, the Radical Democratic Party and the
108 P. SENGUPTA
Justice Party all endorsed the scheme of linguistic provinces on the eve of
the election of 1935. “Provinces based on language i.e. Tamil, Kannada,
Telugu and Malayalam”2 were separated from the Madras Presidency by a
resolution in March 1938. A similar “resolution was passed in the Bombay
Legislative Assembly for the creation of a Karnataka province” (Kodesia
1969, pp. 8–13).
Sanskrit-Tamil Encounter: The North–South Schism

The non-Brahmin leaders of south India were skeptical of the INC, which
they viewed as a mouthpiece for the Hindi-speaking upper-caste Brahmins.
Congress for them was an association bearing the flag of Aryanism. Non-
Brahmin scholars and political activists viewed the Sanskrit language
guarded by the Brahmins as responsible for the monopolization of knowl-
edge (Geetha and Rajadurai 1995, p. 1770). Language was exploited by
the Brahmins for their enterprise of cultural supremacy and political and
intellectual domination. The non-Brahmins strongly advocated the rever-
sal of such knowledge and power appropriation and disputed Sanskrit’s
claim of sacredness and divinity. Sanskrit became synonymous with
Brahmanism and the INC, with its members mostly belonging to Brahman
and other upper castes, came to be adjudged against the interest of non-
Brahmins and lower castes. Against such Aryan authority, E.V. Ramaswamy
Naicker founded the Dravidian movement in 1925 to fight for the self-
respect of the Dravidian people. This movement had its genesis in the
South Indian People’s Association, which later developed into the Justice
Party generating the cause for non-Brahmin poverty and subordination, a
result of Brahmin advancement and monopolization of government jobs
owing to their fluency in the English language (Ram 1974, p. 217). The
Justice Party’s cause for non-Brahmin equality succeeded, as its demand
for separate non-Brahmin representation in Madras was accepted by the
Montague Chelmsford Reforms on the grounds of communal representa-
tion. It also won the 1920 elections and went on to become the first
constitutional political party in India (Ram 1974, p. 219). Naicker joined
the INC but resigned owing to its Hindi–Hindu stand, more specifically
the imposition of Hindi in schools of Madras in 1937 by Rajagopalachari,
which was part of the Congress’ stand regarding Hindi as the national
language of free India. Naicker, popularly known as Periyar or the elder
one, formulated the strategy of Tamil nationhood, a separate Dravidian
state or Dravida Nadu, to challenge this cultural imposition. But this
demand for an independent homeland was solely a demand for Tamils and
did not involve the other Dravidian language speakers such as the
Kanndigas, Telugus and the Malayalis, who were eventually included in
the reformulated Dravida Nadu demand in 1945 following the split of the
Justice Party (Ram 1974, p. 221).
The Dravidian self-respect movement was a struggle for Tamil nationalism
pitched against the upper-caste Sanskrit–Hindi nationalism of the Congress.
Non-Brahmins completely disregarded Sanskrit’s sanctity and argued that
Tamil could stand on its own as it had already stood against the mighty Chola
imperial rule (Geetha and Rajadurai 1995). If Sanskrit was the signifier of
Aryanism and the Brahmin will to control others through religion and caste,
Tamil became the language of the non-Brahmin Dravidians revolting against
such exploitation. The fight against caste discriminations in Indian society
spilled over into language. In south India, leaders and scholars endorsed
Tamil so as to compete with the Sanskrit of the north Indian Aryans. The
groundwork for the resurgence of Tamil was laid by the Christian missionar-
ies and Tamil Panchama intellectuals of the nineteenth century,3 who carried
this work forward. Significant among them is Ayothidas Pandithar, who
brought in the idea of Dravidian civilization and Tamil as the medium of
expression to communicate this new vision (Geetha and Rajadurai 1993).
Language, Constitution-Making
and States Reorganization
Language continued to be significant in Indian politics. It was one of the

most debated issues in the Constituent Assembly (CA) elected to draft inde-
pendent India’s constitution. The CA could not reach at any consensus on
the issue of official language of India. There were broadly three factions in the
CA: members of the first group belonged to the northern states of India and
wanted Hindi to be declared the official language of the Union; members of
the second group mostly belonged to non-Hindi speaking states and wanted
the regional languages to become the official language alongside the continu-
ation of English; and members of the third group, mostly Gandhians sup-
ported Hindustani both in Devanagari and Persian script as the official
language. The conflict between these three groups was not to be resolved and
eventually, in the face of partition and war with Pakistan, a “half-hearted com-
promise” was reached (Austin 2014, p. 330), with Hindi in Devanagari script
recognized as the ‘official language’ of the Indian Union while English was to
continue for inter-state communication. The resolution on linguistic states
was negated in the Lok Sabha with 261 votes to seventy-seven votes on July
110 P. SENGUPTA
12, 1952 (Parliament of India 1952). The two official languages in indepen-
dent India were to be Hindi and English.
The period of internal peace was short-lived and language conflicts
marred the country in the 1950s, with violent outbreaks in south India.
The States Reorganization Commission (SRC) was appointed by Jawaharlal
Nehru in 1953 to recommend the future course of reorganization in India
(Government of India, States Reorganization Commission 1955).
Although the SRC recommended making language the basis for drawing
state boundaries in India, significant caution was expressed. The SRC rec-
ognized linguistic homogeneity as conducive to administrative conve-
nience but not an exclusively binding factor in all cases. It recommended
that the educational, cultural and communicational needs of all language
groups be considered and that composite states should be continued with,
where conditions existed along with safeguards for the enjoyment of equal
rights and opportunities. The SRC negated the concept of homeland and
one language–one state (SRC 1955, p. 46).
India was reorganized on language grounds in 1956 following the SRC
recommendations, but the reorganization of states led to fresh demands
from various sectors. The first major issue to come up was the division of
Bombay state into Marathi-speaking Maharashtra and Gujarati-speaking
Gujarat in 1960. In 1966 the division of the erstwhile Punjab state took
place, and the new state of Haryana with majority speakers of Hindi was
created. In 1962 the Konkani-speaking regions of Goa, Daman and Diu
were given the status of Union Territory. Goa finally attained statehood in
1987. Nagaland was formed in 1962, comprising different tribal groups
speaking different dialects. The 1970s saw a second round of state
reorganization. Himachal Pradesh, which was a chief commissioner’s

province, attained full statehood, as did Meghalaya, in 1971 comprising
the Garo and Khasi tribal groups’ concentrated areas of Assam state. The
same year Tripura and Manipur were made separate states. The tribal state
of Mizoram was formed in 1987 after demands were made by the Mizo
National Front.
In 2000 three new states, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh,
were carved out of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh respectively,
not solely on language grounds but because of the neglect and under-
development of these regions. In 2014 the twenty-ninth state of the
Indian Union-Telangana was created. There are still ongoing demands for
forming separate states of Gorkhaland, Bodoland, Harit Pradesh and

Vindyachal which at times take violent turns causing loss of life, propoerty
and the breakdown of the state machinery. Such violent movements for sepa-
rate states throws a challenge to the smooth-functioning of the Indian state.
The dominant languages of India were granted territorial recognition,
becoming the ‘official language’ of particular states. These languages flour-
ished and developed further as they were also incorporated in the Eighth
Schedule (language schedule) of the Indian Constitution. Presently there
are twenty-two of them, with most being recognized as official languages
of one state or another, the exception being Sindhi. Sanskrit, which until
recent times was not given any official status in any Indian state, was recog-
nized as the second official language in Uttarakhand (Correspondent 2010,
The Hindu January 21). Language continues to play a very significant part
in Indian politics, and it is clear that it wouldn’t be wrong to state that
language debates will continue to thrive in India for a long time to come.
Notes
1. Popularly known as the Simon Commission.
2. The resolution was introduced by Sri. Konda Venkatappaya and supported
by C. Rajagopalachari.
3. Panchama means the fifth: it is used for communities outside the Hindu
caste system, also called untouchables and in recent decades Dalit.
References
All India Congress Committee. 1928. All Parties Conference Report. Allahabad.
Austin, Granville. 2014. The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Brock, Peter. 1995. Mahatma Gandhi as a Linguistic Nationalist. New Delhi:
South Asia Publications.
Correspondent. 2010. Sanskrit Second Official Language of Uttarakhand. The
Hindu, Online edition 21st January. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-
paper/tp-national/tp-otherstates/Sanskrit-second-official-language-of-
Uttarakhand/article15965492.ece. Accessed 15 Feb 2015.
Gandhi, Mohandas Karam Chand. 1931. Young India, April 9.
———. 1956. Thoughts on National Language. Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing
House.
112 P. SENGUPTA
———. 1964. “Reply to Mrs. Besant” dated 17th February1916. In The Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XIII, Jan 1915 to October 1917. Publications
Division: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.
Geetha, V., and S.V. Rajadurai. 1993. Dalits and Non-Brahmin Consciousness in
Colonial Tamil Nadu. Economic and Political Weekly 28 (39): 2091–2098.
———. 1995. One Hundred Years of Brahminitude: Arrival of Annie Besant.
Economic and Political Weekly 30 (28): 1768–1773.
Government of India. 1930. Indian Statutory Commission. Calcutta: Central
Publication Branch.
———. 1955. Report of the States Reorganisation Commission. Ministry of Home
Affairs.
Kodesia, Krishna. 1969. The Problem of Linguistic States in India. New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers (P) Ltd.
Parliament of India. 1952. Parliamentary Debates of India, Vol. III, No. 7. Delhi:
Lok Sabha Secretariat.
Ram, Mohan. 1974. Ramaswami Naicker and the Dravidian Movement. Economic
and Political Weekly 9 (6/8): 217–224.
Saksena, B.R. 1972. Gandhiji’s Solution of the Language Problem of India. Bombay:
Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Research Centre, Hindustani Pracharani Sabha.
Schwartzberg, Joseph E. 2010. Factors in the Linguistic Reorganization of Indian
States. In Language and Politics in India, ed. Asha Sarangi. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Sengupta, Papia, and T. Ravi Kumar. 2008. Linguistic Diversity and Disparate
Growth. Economic and Political Weekly 43 (33): 8–1.
Epilogue
In the 1990s there was a consensus among scholars that India’s language
issue had been successfully resolved, but we cannot say the same today.
Language has always been important in conflicts and in movements
demanding separate states, though its role in these debates has differed.
The coming to power of a right-wing government in India in 2014
reopened the issue of language. This time the conservative forces, by gain-
ing power in most states of India, have come up with the zealous objective
of making India a Hindu state. In moving towards this goal, language and
religion have become central tools.
India is unique because of its diversity. This defines the country, and any
attempt to create a monopoly in terms of religion and language would be
detrimental to the very existence of India as a multilingual and multicultural
democratic polity. The narrative in this book is an attempt to prove that what
constitutes India, the nation of many nations, took shape because of its plural-
ity of languages, that is, the diverse languages spoken in the country and the
variations of ideological thoughts and philosophies. The very vision of India
as one religion and one language is a European import, and ideologies
supporting such an idea cannot be termed as “Indian.” The journey that this
work has undertaken supports the fact that even during the Vedic age there
was no unanimity regarding the best way to live, what is knowledge, or
what is the universe and its laws. The discussions of Panini, Bhartrhari,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7
114 Epilogue
Bhavaviveka, Nagarjuna and other ancient scholars show that diverse ways
and beliefs existed in ancient Indian scholarship, developed through the
methodology of debates and discussions among opposing views.
India is an ancient civilization and has faced numerous episodes of
plunder, war, natural disasters and colonialism. Yet it has reemerged every
time with more power and tolerance towards the devastating forces. On
the face of the monopolizing–conservative–nationalistic wave that has
stormed most countries of the world, we humans have a choice to make:
whether we are humans first or whether our nationalities are fundamental.
The choice is between humanity and nationalism, survival and extinction
of linguistic–cultural diversity. Are we as a community of human beings
moving forward towards building a society based on the ideals of justice
and equality or are we moving backwards to Thrasymachus’ idea of
justice as might is right. The question is whether we should become mere
spectators of the genocide of diverse languages and cultures by those in
positions of power. Or should we affirm that diversity of human culture,
language, custom, dressing-habits, cuisines and traditions are the testi-
mony of rich human creativity? The modern political concepts of liberty,
justice, equality and rights have entered the domain of political discourse
and established themselves as integral to democratic human development
after long years of struggle. Political theorists, philosophers and scholars of
human rights and democracy have continuously cautioned that any viola-
tion of space, rights, liberties and encroachment of human culture may
have grave results for the entire human race.
In the world today, there are about 65.6 million people forcibly displaced,
22.5 million refugees and 10 million stateless people, all of whom need food,
water, shelter, health care and education (United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees Report 2017). Are we to look forward to the extinction of such
large numbers of people because they do not have the status of “citizen”?
The answer to such questions should be undertaken by further research.
What I have tried to show in this work is that language makes humans human
and humans have diverse languages. Nations were created by humans, but
humans themselves are creatures of nature. The present need is to survive as
one diverse community of the same species and to unite in resisting environ-
mental degradation, encroachment on space, privacy and livelihood by the
capitalist giants and the dominance of the powerful language on diverse
cultural communities. Modern India’s emergence from colonial slumber is a
successful example of how people speaking multiple tongues can live together
amicably and Indians should not let this definitive-plurality be eclipsed by
monolingual-monistic view of nation and nationalism.
Index1
A Asiatic Society of Bengal, 19

Adam, William, 67, 68, 72 Assam, 48, 69, 110
Administrative, ix, 18, 30, 38, 39, 46, Assamese, 48
59, 63, 91, 107, 110, 111
Agitation, vii, viii, xi, 26
Ahimsa, 92 B
Ahmed Khan, Sir Syed, 75, 89, 90 Banerjee, Surendranath, 72, 76n1, 91
Ali, Syed Amer, 44 Baruah, Sanjib, xi
All Parties Conference Report Basak, Nilmani, 55, 56, 82
(APCR), 106, 107 Belongingness, viii, 48, 87
Ambedkar, Dr. Bhimrao, 76n1, 85 Benaras, 22, 24
Andarmahal, 93 Bengal, xiii, 17–33, 37–50, 59, 60,
Anglicists, 22, 27, 28, 31 64, 67, 68, 74, 93, 98, 106
Anjuman, 41 Bentham, Jeremy, 23
Antherjanam, Lalithambika, 94 Bentinck, Lord William, 26, 29, 30
APCR, see All Parties Conference Bhartrhari, 7, 113
Report (APCR) Bhojpuri, 41, 74
Arabic, 13, 24, 25, 29, 30, 42, 43, 49 Bodoland Territorial Council, viii
Archives, xviii, 97 Bombay, vii, 18, 22, 26, 32, 45–47,
Aristotle, 3, 72 59, 67, 72, 108, 110
Aryan, 69, 93, 108, 109 Bose, Subhash Chandra, 65, 92
Arya Samaj, 58, 74, 87–89 Boundaries, 6, 13, 47, 48, 83,
Ashrafs, 19 107, 110
1
Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to notes.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6844-7
116 INDEX
Brahmo Samaj, 58, 74, 87 Devi, Mahasweta, 94

Brijbhasha, 41 Dialect, 29, 39, 40, 42, 69, 70, 83,
Buddhism, 13n4, 87 110
Burke, Edmund, 25, 31 Disadvantage, viii
Discourse, 38, 48, 49, 57, 92,
94–97, 114
C Discrimination, viii, x–xii, 11, 12,
Calcutta, 18, 24, 32 54, 58, 61, 63, 84, 86, 93,
Calcutta Madarsa, 21, 27 94, 97, 109
Carey, William, 22 Diversities, ix, 67
Categorization, x, xii, xiii, 20, 40, Doctrine of lapse, 64, 73
50, 66, 83 Dogra state, 43
Chatterji, Suniti Kumar, 105 Drain theory, 61
Chattpadhyay, Bankim Chandra, 64 Dravidian, 69, 108, 109
Chauhan, Subhadra Kumari, 64 Dutch, 17, 18, 20, 67
Chhattisgarh, vii, 110 Dutt, Toru, 94, 95
Chiplunkar, Vishnushastri, 47, 50n3
Christian, 22–24, 30, 45, 67, 68,
95, 109 E
Citizenship, viii, 10, 62 East India Company (EIC), xiii, 17,
Colloquial, 19, 45, 49 18, 20, 21, 23–26, 28, 30–32,
Colonial bilingualism, 47 43, 46–48, 50, 59, 60, 64, 66,
Commonness, 13 67, 73, 75, 76, 89
Communalism, 41, 87 Economic opportunities, ix, x
Communist Party of India, 90 Economics, viii–x, 10, 28, 30, 38,
Conflict, vii, viii, xiii, 10, 27, 40, 48, 39, 45, 53, 54, 60–63, 81–83,
60, 71, 109, 110, 113 85, 87, 104
Construction, viii, xi, xii, 3, 12, 17, EIC, see East India Company (EIC)
38, 48–50, 54, 55, 81–98, 103 Elphinstone, 46
Cratylus, 2, 6, 13n1 Empowerment, 44
Curriculum, vii, 30 English, ix, xiii, 2, 3, 13n4, 18, 20,
22–33, 33n4, 38, 43–47, 56,
58–62, 65, 67–70, 72–74, 81,
D 83, 94, 104, 108–110
Dalit, 84–86 Epistemology, 2, 3, 9
Darool Uloom Deoband, 87 European, 4, 9, 12, 13, 14n7, 18, 20,
Democracy, 72, 114 21, 27, 29, 30, 38, 39, 44, 46,
Desai, Anita, 94 48, 49, 57, 60, 66, 70, 75, 76,
Devanagari, 19, 105, 106, 109 81, 92, 95, 113
Deva, Raja Radhakant, 68 Europeanization, 30
Devi, Ashapoorna, 94 Exploitative, 60, 62
INDEX
117
F Hindu Mahasabha, 87, 89, 107

Feminization, 96 Hindustani, 18, 19, 24, 40, 41, 59,
Fort Williams, 24 60, 103–106, 109
Fox Bill, 25 Hindustan Republican Army, the, 92
Fox, James, 25 Hindustan Socialist Republican
France, 11, 14n7, 94 Army, 90
Historiography, xii, 54, 88, 97
History, 6–9, 12, 22, 24, 28,
G 54–58, 60, 63, 71, 82, 84,
Gadamar, Hans-Georg, 55 86, 87, 97, 98
Gaelic, 3 Honneth, Axel, viii, 55
Gandhi, Mohandas Karam Chand, Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 1–3
76n1, 87, 89, 92, 103–106 Humiliation, x, 12, 92
Gender, 83, 86, 96, 97
Ghose, Aurobindo, 76n1, 91
Ghosh, Sisir Kumar, 72, 76n1 I
Gokhale, Gopal Krishna, 76n1, Ibn-Batuta, 55
76n3, 91 Identity, x–xiii, 1, 17, 21, 37, 38, 43,
Gorkhaland, viii, 111 49, 50, 53–76, 82, 83, 85–87,
Gramsci, Antonio, 49, 97 90, 93–95, 103
Grant, Charles, 22, 27 Imperialistic, 28
Grierson, John, 70 INC, see Indian National Congress
Guha, Ranajit, 56, 82 (INC)
Gujarat, vii, 45, 46, 110 Incommensurability, 8, 9
Gurmukhi, vii, 39, 42 India, ix, x, xii, 4, 17, 37, 53, 81,
103, 113
Indian National Army, 65, 90, 92
H Indian National Congress (INC), 58,
Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, 19, 20 64, 89–91, 103, 105–108
Hare, David, 68 Indigenous, xiii, 19, 25–27, 38, 46,
Haryana, vii, 110 54–56, 61, 63, 67, 73, 74, 82,
Hegemony, 4, 49, 71, 82, 97 88, 92
Heidegger, Martin, 3 Information, 9, 29, 53
Heraclitus, 2 Institutional, 85
Herder, Gottfried, 4, 5, 10, 49, 57 Intellectual, ix, xii, xiii, 25, 28, 29,
Hierarchization, ix, 39 31, 41, 49, 54, 55, 58, 60, 61,
Himachal Pradesh, vii, 110 72, 84, 96, 108, 109
Hindi, x, 38–43, 74, 89, 90, Irish, 3, 66
104–106, 108–110 Islam, 13, 19, 44, 88
Hinduism, 6, 13n4, 44, 66, 87, 88 Italy, 11
118 INDEX
J Maharashtra, 59, 87, 110

Jalal, Ayesha, xii, 37, 39–42 Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, xi
Jayal, Niraja G., vii Majumdar, R.C., 55, 75
Jharkhand, x, 48, 110 Malaysia, 4
Jones, Sir William, 19 Manipur, vii, 110
Justice, 30, 38, 61, 85, 87, 108, Mantras, 7
109, 114 Marshman, Dr. Joshua, 18, 20,
Justice Party, 108, 109 22–24, 27
Marx, Karl, 4
Matilal, Bimal Krishna, 5, 8
K Media, 8, 9, 38, 39, 59, 71
Kant, Immanuel, 56 Medium of instruction, x, 22, 27,
Kashmir, 42, 43 29, 30, 32, 39, 40, 43, 69
Khariboli, 41, 42 Meghalaya, 110
Khusrau, Amir, 58 Middle-class, 49, 72–76, 91
King, Christopher R., xii, 37, 39, 40 Mill, James, 23
Knowledge, x, xi, xiii, 2–4, 7–9, Mimansa, 6
20–22, 29–31, 39, 44–47, 49, Missionaries, 22–26, 29, 45, 46,
54, 66, 74, 75, 91, 108, 113 48, 67, 69, 109
Mitchell, Lisa, xii, 38
Mizoram, 110
L Moderates, 64, 86, 90, 91
Language, ix, 1–13, 17, 37, 54, 81, Modernity, xi, 4, 38, 50, 74, 76
103–111, 113 Modernization, 87, 88
Language-in-education, x, 22, 29, Montague Chelmsford Reforms, 108
45, 46 Moplah rebellion, 88, 89
Language preservation, ix Mother-tongue, ix, x, 19, 38, 41,
Legal code, ix 56, 70
Legislative, ix, 108 Mughal, 18, 26, 28, 44, 55, 63, 89
Lingua franca, 12, 17, 73, 104
Linguistic communities, xi
Logos, 2, 3, 6 N
Luteef, Nawab Abdool, 44 Nagaland, 110
Nagarjuna, 7, 114
Naoroji, Dadabhai, 55, 60–62, 76n1
M Nationalism, xi–xiv, 10–13, 31, 48,
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 26–30 49, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62,
Madhava, 5 72–74, 81, 83, 86–90, 92, 95,
Madhyamika, 7 97, 109, 114
Madras, 18, 32, 45, 59, 67, 105, 108 Nation-building, xiv, 58
Magna Carta, 25 Nations, xi, xii, 10–13, 26, 28, 49, 56,
Mahabharata, 58 57, 71, 72, 74, 75, 86, 89–91,
Mahabhasiya, 6 97, 104, 113, 114
INDEX
119
Naujawan Bharat Sabha, 92 Power, 2–4, 7, 8, 12, 21, 23, 25, 33,
Nietzsche, 4 40, 45, 49, 59, 62, 66, 85–87,
Nimbarka, 5 96, 98, 108, 113, 114
Nirguna bhakti movement, 84 Prarthana Sabha, 58
Non-scheduled, x, xi Prejudices, 9, 67, 70, 71, 84
Nyaya, 6 Prestige, viii, x, 40
Pritam, Amrita, 94
Proselytization, 21
O
Official language, viii, x, 18, 30, 40,
48, 90, 109–111 Q
Orality, 7–10 Qawm, 90
Oriental, 8–10, 24, 26, 27, 30 Qazi Nazrul Islam, 65
Orientalism, 20, 33n2 Quran, 20, 49
Orientalists, 22, 26, 27, 30, 31, 71
R
P Radical Democratic Party, 107
Pandithar, Ayothidas, 109 Ramabai, Pandita, 94
Panini, 6, 113 Ramakrishna Mission, 87
Paramhansa, Ramakrishna, 5 Ramanujan, 5
Paribhasha, 7 Ramaswamy Naicker, E.V., 108
Parmartha, 7 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, xii, 37, 44
Periyar, 108 Rashtra Bhasha Prachar Samiti, 104
Persian, 18–20, 22, 24, 25, 30, 39, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 89
40, 42–44, 46, 49, 58, 73, 90, Recognition, xi, xiii, xiv, 5, 9, 40, 48,
105, 109 70, 71, 105
Persianization, 105 Rekhta, 42
Philosophy, 2, 5, 28, 30, 42, Renan, Ernest, 11, 12
56, 92 Revivalism, 88
Philosophy of language, 5–8 Rig Veda, 5, 13n2
Plato, 2, 13n1 Risley, Herbert Hope, 70
Political, vii, ix, xi–xiv, 6, 8, 10–13, Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 9
18, 25, 26, 30, 44–46, 48, 54, Roy, Rammohun, 44, 95
56, 58, 60, 61, 71, 73, 74, 82,
83, 85–87, 90–93, 95, 97, 98,
104, 106, 108, 114 S
Politics, viii, ix, xi, xii, xiv, 4, 6, 10, Sabdatattva, 7
40–42, 50, 57, 61, 66, 70, 72, Sankara, 5
73, 85–87, 98, 99n1, 99n4, Sankhya, 6
109, 111 Sanskrit, 5, 18, 19, 22, 24, 25, 30,
Portugal, 11 42–44, 49, 59, 68, 73, 82, 83,
Portuguese, 17–19 89, 90, 95, 105, 108, 109, 111
120 INDEX
Sanskrit College, 22 Translations, xiii, 20, 21, 29, 41,

Sanskritization, 38, 83, 105 42, 46, 65, 73, 94
Satthianandan, Krupabai, 94, 95 Transmission, 2, 8, 9, 11
Satyagraha, 92
Scheduled, x, xi, 85
Scientific, xii, 10, 28, 30, 41, 66, U
67, 70 Urdu, 19, 38–43, 58, 64, 89, 90, 105
Script, 19, 38–42, 70, 105, 106, Utilitarian, 23, 29
109, 110 Uttarakhand, vii, 110, 111
Selby, Martha, xii, 38
Self, xii, 3–7, 12, 28–30, 44, 45,
49, 54–56, 58–60, 63–66, V
81–96, 109 Vaisesika, 6
Self-determination, 53, 55, 62, Vaishnava, 5
63, 107 Vallabha, 5
Separatism, xii, 41 Vansina, Jan, 9
Serampore College, 22 Vedas, 5, 6, 13n2, 83
Sign, 2, 3, 28, 40, 98 Vernacular Press Act (VPA), 59, 76n2
Social sciences, 10 Vernaculars, xii, 17, 21–25, 29, 32,
South Africa, 4, 92 33, 38, 40, 46–50, 54–59,
Spain, 11 66–69, 72–74
Staal, Frits, 6, 7 Vishwanathan, Indira, xii, 38
Statistics, 61, 62, 67, 71 Vocabulary, 40
Subaltern, xiii, 49, 96–98 VPA, see Vernacular Press Act (VPA)
Sub-nationalism, vii Vyavahara, 7
Sufism, 19
Suleiman, Sadek, 13
Surveying, xiii, 26, 39, 66–71 W
Swadeshi, 66, 90, 92, 99n5 Ward, William, 22
Swaraj, 82, 91, 92, 104, 105 Welsh, 3
Symbols, 7, 28, 40, 88, 93, 98 Western, 4, 6–8, 12, 13, 19, 24, 26,
27, 29, 31, 41, 44–47, 49, 64,
72, 74, 75, 82, 88, 91, 104
T Wilberforce, William, 23, 33n4
Tagore, Rabindranath, 64, 66 Wilkins, Charles, 20
Tamilpparru, 44, 45 Wood, Charles, 29, 32, 89
Tarkhadkar, Bhaskar Pandurang, 61
Taylor, Charles, xi, 10
Telugu talli, 45 Y
Territoriality, xiii, xiv, 13, 25, 28, 54, Yoga, 6
58, 62, 106, 107
Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 47, 76n1,
76n3, 87, 91 Z
Tirpraland, viii Zutshi, Chitralekha, xii, 38, 42, 43

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LANGUAGE

“The Indian awakening, our distinctive path to independence as Sengupta recalls,

“Multilingualism has been a long-standing characteristic of Indian society, and its

ISBN 978-981-10-6843-0 ISBN 978-981-10-6844-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958852

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

India is often held to be an ideal model of linguistic diversity management.

ultimately led to separate state formation. In 2003 the Bodoland Territorial

services and transport facilities cannot be enjoyed fully if written in a

Language in India: The Colonial Continuum

survival of many languages. The number of scheduled languages is cur-

that is inherent to the development of nationalism. However, some major

Organization of the Book

most constructive means of reaching consensus through the voicing of a

elucidates India’s linguistic journey from the perspective and understand-

New Delhi, India Papia Sengupta

My interest in language goes back to 2002, when I started my doctoral

I thank Probal Dasgupta, Anvita Abbi, Will Kymlicka and Daphne

New Delhi, India Papia Sengupta

1 Theoretical Developments: Linking Language to Identity 1

2 The Language Situation in Colonial India: Story of Bengal 17

3 Making Identity Out of Language: Beyond Bengal 37

4 Building Identity: Information, Intellect and Inspiration 53

5 Construction of Plural Selves in India 81

AICC All India Congress Committee

Theoretical Developments: Linking

Abstract This chapter gives a detailed analysis of theoretical development

Keywords Language • Identity • Nation • Philosophy of language

Humans identify themselves in multiple ways. These different and at

© The Author(s) 2018 1

We cannot imagine assigning identity without language, as imagination is

Heraclitus, coming before Plato, theorized the “notion of interpreta-

If thought is based on language, then every identification is linked to a process

Herder’s contribution to language scholarship and diversity studies was

Indian Philosophy of Language

Orality and Oriental Languages

Undoubtedly, we criticize the media as biased and market-­oriented, yet

Rousseau’s importance as a philosopher lies not just in his sympathy for

To appraise men’s actions properly, they have to be considered in all their

It is reasonable that cultures [languages] that have provided the horizon of

It is a fallacy to compare cultures, but one concept that seems to have

Language Identity: Being and Belonging to a Nation

forming identity but on the basis of a single linguistic variety as being

The Arab identity, as such, is a culturally defined identity, which means

5. For a lucid account of philosophy in early modern India, see Jonardon

Fricker, Elizabeth, and David Cooper. 1987. The Epistemology of Testimony.

The Language Situation in Colonial India:

Abstract This chapter elucidates the language situation in Bengal when

Keywords Bengal • East India Company • Christian missionaries

© The Author(s) 2018 17

Translating from Traders to Rulers

A scrutiny of translations indicates the centrality that was given to the

Promoting Vernacular Languages

and Jonathan Duncan, the Governor of Bombay, established the Sanskrit

Such allegations did not deter the EIC’s policy of non-interference in

1815 there were around two hundred missionary-­run Bengali medium

The missionaries criticized the EIC’s indifference to the development of

1813 Charter for Education in India

Market to Mind: Language as Entry Pass

This controversy needs to be probed deeply, as it was not merely a con-

significant-players. This required their understanding the rules of the

New Delhi, India Papia Sengupta

New Delhi, India Papia Sengupta

1 Theoretical Developments: Linking Language to Identity 1

2 The Language Situation in Colonial India: Story of Bengal 17

3 Making Identity Out of Language: Beyond Bengal 37

4 Building Identity: Information, Intellect and Inspiration 53

5 Construction of Plural Selves in India 81

Undoubtedly, we criticize the media as biased and market-oriented, yet

1815 there were around two hundred missionary-run Bengali medium

e conomic, social, caste and political standings. The birth of tamilpparru

societies of America, England, Scotland and Ireland, who competed to