The silence the eminent scholar and cultural activist G.N. Devy refers to in The Question of Silence is a malaise of modernity. One among its many dimensions is the alienation spawned paradoxically in a global conjuncture of hyper-connectivity. Devy’s ‘silence’ also refers to cultural loss, of languages extinguished, and of the disinheritance of the human race as a part of its collective past vanishes into oblivion. Language is the means through which the human species names the world and creates a sense of space and time. Human community in turn is a construct of linguistic patterns and shared meanings.
The term ‘aphasia’ refers in its strict sense, to a neurological condition, when the brain fails to generate the impulses that result in the spoken word. Among the possible causes could be damage to those parts of the brain dealing with abstraction and judgment. It is a term that Devy adapts to the situation of an individual deprived of the native language he uses to describe the world.
Often the loss of mutual intelligibility could result in the same metaphorical state of aphasia. Loss of social moorings is like the sense of self being stripped away, when an individual has to seek constant reminders of his identity through the artefact of the ‘selfie’.
Nationalist paranoia
“Languages are immortal but they are sentenced to death,” observes Devy. And the executioners are many, including the multiple insecurities of the modern nation state. An estimate by the UN’s cultural body counted 7,000 languages worldwide at the beginning of the 20th century, of which only some 300 are expected to survive to the end of the 21st.
The scenario that Devy sketches in India points to more catastrophic loss. Between the Indian census enumerations of 1961 and 1971, the number of languages listed fell from 1,652 to 109. This was a policy decision born in nationalist paranoia. As the war for the liberation of Bangladesh raged in 1971, census authorities seemingly determined that India’s safety lay in reducing linguistic multiplicity to manageable numbers.
Other measures by which states consolidate their authority could result in cultural dis-entitlement. The colonial government’s notification of social groups as ‘criminal tribes’ mischaracterised an independent streak as incurable delinquency. It effectively externed entire groups into a limbo of lawlessness, where they were deprived of basic protections. That legacy lives on in independent India, despite a republican constitution promising equality.
The corporate assault that reduces language to a commodity that can be packaged in cultural products is another threat. Modernisation proves an enemy of diversity in its quest of convenience and communicative efficiency. A variety of Indian languages emerged from Sanskrit, Dravidian and Persian roots through the 14th to the 18th centuries. Often, these were written languages that used multiple scripts. Any one script likewise, could be used for various languages.
Renaissance in language
In the 19th century, when the means for mass printing became available, the convenience of the ‘Company Sarkar’ was a key criterion. Yet, as printing technologies became widely available, there was a renaissance in language and literature. As independence approached, efforts began to rank languages in order of their importance in the anticipated life of the nation. And in what Devy describes as a tragically short-sighted decision, independent India wrote a schedule to its constitution which limited the number of recognised languages to a mere fourteen, implicitly reinstating the doctrine of administrative convenience.
Languages, and indeed particular words, are a distillate of years of collective human experience. Devy found while surveying the languages of the Himalayas, that there are no fewer than 162 words for ‘snow’, each referring to a particular aspect of the natural phenomenon. These multiple references, replaced by a single omnibus term in modern usage, once were key to fashioning a range of human responses to contingencies of the weather. The effacement of those words is also about losing the human ability to forge a safe and sustainable relationship with nature.
Devy’s highly celebrated endeavour to assemble a People’s Linguistic Survey of India is, as he puts it, the espousal of a “republic of threatened voices”. It is an effort that began from his early academic position in Kolhapur and was then carried forward as he transferred to Baroda and began seeking a way of penetrating the silences imposed on tribal communities in eastern Gujarat.
It is a struggle waged against seemingly insuperable odds, but Devy reminds sceptics about the classic play Mrichchhakatika , whose artistic impact is only enhanced by its rendition in two languages. He also reaches back in time to invoke the ‘Riti’ theory which celebrated the coexistence of different cultures.
That spirit of equality and not least, cultural generosity, may be difficult to retrieve, but Devy’s book gives hope. For those who may lack access to the larger body of his work, this volume provides a conspectus of sorts, in language that is easy and deeply intimate.
The Question of Silence – A Para-biography; G.N. Devy, Orient BlackSwan, ₹475.
The writer teaches at the school of journalism, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat.
