The Kerala government’s move to have an ‘official language oath’ in Malayalam does not seem to have gone down well with the Kannada and Tamil linguistic minorities in the State. The pledge will come into effect on International Mother Language Day on February 21 (Wednesday) and students in government and aided schools have been asked to take it mandatorily.
In a statement to The Hindu, B. Purushothama, president of the Kasaragod-based Kannada Samanvaya Samiti, said on Tuesday that it was not proper to ask children whose mother tongue was not Malayalam to take the oath in that language. It would defeat the concept of observing Mother Languages Day, which was to “promote peace and multilingualism and protect mother languages”.
Mr. Purushothama said that the five lakh Kannada-speaking people in Kasaragod were not migrants but an indigenous population who had been living there for centuries. It was unfortunate that the Kannadigas had to remind the government about their Constitutional rights as linguistic minorities. If the government was serious about the relevance of the day, it should have allowed the linguistic minorities to take the oath in their mother tongue, he added.
The language oath in Malayalam, originally authored by writer M.T. Vasudevan Nair, was intended to be a pledge for the students of the Malayalam Pallikkoodam in Thiruvananthapuram. It was poet V. Madhusoodanan Nair who urged the government to make it the official language oath. The original pledge starting with “Malayalamanu ente bhasha...” was later modified by MT.
Representatives of the Tamil population, however, were mild in their response. Saravana Kumar K., Tamil journalist from Chittur in Palakkad district, which has a population of around 3 lakh ethnic Tamils, said this could be another instance of discrimination against the community. When inter-State water disputes between Kerala and Tamil Nadu escalate, political leaders were often seen initiating campaigns against Tamils. There has been discrimination in education too as schools with a high number of Tamil students in the district still do not have teachers who are proficient in Tamil. “We don't mind the government promoting Malayalam, which is appreciable. But this oath taking seems to be like a hollow ritual shorn of any integrity,” he said.
L. Sappanimuthu, president of the Kochi-based Tamil Aikya Sangam, said they were not opposed to the idea as Malayalam had its origins in Tamil. “We treat Tamil and Malayalam similarly,” he added.
