Power and Language Policies in India

This chapter shows the fragility of macro-level power in India with respect to language policies. In common with states that became independent after the end of colonialism, India had initially planned to follow a ‘one nation – one language’ policy and devised a policy that would make Hindi the only official language of India. However, this policy had to be abandoned because of opposition from non-Hindi-speaking states, and India had to adopt a policy of de facto official multilingualism. This chapter investigates the extent to which the official multilingualism policy is practised in India, and the place of minority languages in India’s legislation on language use. The key finding is that, except in the domain of law, the needs of minority languages are considered in all policy domains examined in this book. Moreover, the section on textual analysis shows that the use of languages other than Hindi and English is made mandatory in certain statutes through the usage of shall instead of may.

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Notes

See Sharma (2020a) for a detailed analysis of this debate.

The main categories for differentiating between languages in India are ‘Eighth Schedule’ (ES) and ‘Classical Languages’ (Sects. 5.2.3.5 and 5.2.3.6).

A sixth language family has been proposed by Anvita Abbi based on the lexical and morphosyntactic differences between Great Andamanese and Onge and Jarawa (Abbi, 2008).

The provinces of Madras and Burma, and the States of Hyderabad and Mysore were not included in the Survey conducted by Grierson.

It is difficult to give an exact date of when Persian became the official language of administration in India. Muslim rule in India started around 1000 AD. Alam (1998: 325) notes that Akbar (1542–1605), the third Emperor of the Mughal Empire, was the first among the Indo-Islamic kings of northern India to formally make Persian the language of administration at all levels. However, Persian was in use as an official language before the advent of Mughal Empire in 1526, and lasted until its end in 1857 (Chavan, 2013). The Mughal Empire was succeeded by the British Raj, which lasted from 1858 to 1947. Prior to the British Raj, the main British actor in India was the East India Company from 1757 until 1857.

King (2001: 52) suggests that standard Hindi and standard Urdu diverged even more ‘startlingly’ after the partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947, and this process was accelerated with the spread of radio and television. According to Rahman (2011: 2), the spoken form, which is popularized by Bollywood and Indian and Pakistani TV plays and songs, is understood alike in Delhi, Karachi, and Lahore.

In 2020, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) was renamed as the ‘Ministry of Education’. In this book, I am still using ‘MHRD’ for referring to all the resources that were produced under the Ministry of Human Resource Development.

For a detailed and critical analysis of the nationalisation of Sanskrit, see Ramaswamy (2009). See also Meena (2010, 2016).

My argument was based on the benefits of English-language skills and English-medium schooling for individual economic mobility which have been emphasised in a number of studies. For example, according to Munshi and Rosenzweig (2006: 1226), attending English-medium schools increases both women’s and men’s incomes by about 25% in 2000. Moreover, Azam et al. (2011: 17) note that compared to men who have no English ability, men who are fluent in English earn 34% higher hourly wages, while men who speak a little English earn 13% more.

The leading proponent of the first view was Seth Govind Das, a Congress representative of the Central Provinces and Berar, while the other view was heralded by Shankarrao Deo from Bombay Province (Austin, 2009; Lerner, 2016).

It should be noted that these initiatives are not based upon any statutes.

The term ‘disadvantaged group’ in the 2009 Act refers to the children belonging to the Scheduled Castes (SCs), the Scheduled Tribes (STs), and other groups being disadvantaged because of social, cultural, linguistic or other factors. The terms ‘Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’ refer to the marginalised and disadvantaged castes and tribes. It should be noted that the term ‘tribe’ has not been defined anywhere in the Constitution of India. The term commonly used in the Indian Constitution is ‘Scheduled Tribe(s)’ (STs). Article 46 of the Constitution states that ‘the State shall promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people, and, in particular, of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes’. See also the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Orders (Amendment) Act 1956.

Table 21 does not indicate the updated list of states and union territories in India. See Footnote 36 (Chap. 1) and Sect. 5.2.2 for details.

Amongst other kinds of schools are National Open Schools (for children whose schooling has been interrupted and have been unable to complete formal education), Special-Needs Schools, International Schools, Ashram Schools, etc.

The decision to telecast regional language movies might have been influenced by the Report of the Working Group on National Film Policy (1979) which recommended that Doordarshan, the national television channel, should purchase subtitled prints of regional language films and telecast them (Karanth et al., 1979: 314).

Directive 2001/83/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 November 2001 on the Community code relating to medicinal products for human use.

References

Primary Texts

Court Cases

Statutes

Secondary Texts

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India Abhimanyu Sharma
  1. Abhimanyu Sharma