You feel strongly about the differences that exist in our society, that cause conflicts.
Prepare your debate in favour/ or against the motion, "Multilingualism in our country has
divided more than united the people in our society .
Answers
India needs more inclusive and less Hindi-alienating solutions for its language divides.
The recently constructed Bangalore metro garnered sufficient controversy a while back with its decision to have Hindi signage complementing that of English and Kannada, the vernacular language of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Many people saw this as another attempt by the Modi government to “impose” Hindi on predominantly non-Hindi speaking regions. Social media, particularly Twitter, saw a number of people espouse this sentiment with the hashtag #NammaMetroHindiBeda, which translates as, “We don’t want Hindi in our Metro” from Kannada.
Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, has long been heralded as one of the most progressive and cosmopolitan cities of India, thanks to its housing of major industries that have been crucial to the growth story of India since economic liberalization started in 1991. In spite of this, if local populations have strong objections to oppose the language native to more than four out of every 10 people of India, then society as a whole needs to explore where and how the current policies on language are going wrong.
The conflict between speakers of different languages is not new to India. Linguistic diversity has been a critical aspect of the multiculturalism that has been the defining characteristic of India through the ages. As of 2013, over 700 languages are spoken in the country. The lack of a centralizing political union across South Asia throughout most of history meant that this wouldn’t really produce any social distress, until the advent of British rule. It was only when the British tried to centralize their administration beyond the ambit of the English language in the mid-19th century that they began to explore the divides in the linguistic identities of India as a means of imposing their domination.
True to the ancient policy of divide et impera, the British went about with their agenda conceitedly, starting with the Hindi-Urdu controversy in the late 19th century, an issue that is often cited as the beginning of the Hindu-Muslim divide in India. This was complemented by the now disproved, incomplete, imperialist and propagandist Indo-Aryan theory that implied an age-old socio-cultural divide between the Aryan-dominated north and the Dravidian-dominated south. Subsequent splits on the lines of caste-based precedents opened up very quickly, making way for several revanchist and radical movements to run parallel to the mainstream nationalist movements under the Indian National Congress party.
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One movement that stood out was that for a Dravidian state. Spearheaded largely by middle-class Tamil intellectuals such as Periyar and C.N. Annadurai, its agitations steadily progressed from opposing Brahmanism and unilateral imposition of Hindi across southern Indian states to secession from independent India based on disagreements with the increasingly assertive demands of the Hindi-enthusiast mainstream right wing. While demands for secession receded after being outlawed in 1963, the movement did manage to indefinitely postpone the planned phasing out of English to make way for Hindi as the sole national language in 1965.
It also managed to consolidate a three-language formula, by which certain states would get to function and support education in one primary vernacular language along with English and Hindi, the two official languages of India ever since. While many states such as Maharashtra and Odisha managed to implement this, it was disapproved of by the Tamil Nadu assembly later. Annadurai, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu at that time, had famously criticized the requirement of non-Hindi speakers to learn both Hindi and English to that of “boring a smaller hole in a wall for the kitten while there is a bigger one for the cat.” Most anti-Hindi sentiments continue to thrive