The “one nation, one language” debate has been simmering for a while now, with leaders of the ruling party, from time to time, proposing Hindi as a medium to unify the country.
What few people may know is that the roots of the idea of a national identity based on a single language can be traced back to colonial-era Europe. And it was challenged during the Indian freedom struggle by none other than Mahatma Gandhi.
The idea of “one nation, one language” or that every language group will have its own nation took shape in the late 19th and early 20th century European political theory, said Ashutosh Varshney, political scientist, academic and Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University.
“Led by Mahatma Gandhi, the freedom movement fundamentally challenged the dominant concepts of nationhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” he said, speaking at the Constitution and National Unity Convention held by the Karnataka government in Bengaluru.
An ‘impossible’ nation
“As with so many things in modern political theory, it begins with John Stuart Mill,” Varshney said.
John Stuart Mill, also known as the father of modern liberalism, was an English intellectual, philosopher and economist of the 19th century.
Ashutosh Varshney and Kham Khan Suan Hausing at the Constitution and National Unity Convention in Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
“In his great text Representative Government, 1869, John Stuart Mill wrote linguistic diversity was a ‘special, virtually insuperable hindrance to nation making’. This is about the improbability of Indian nationhood,” Varshney said.
Mills being a leading political philosopher of his times, his ideas penetrated the highest levels of decision making, both in London and the British establishment in India, he pointed out.
John Strachey, who served as the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces from 1874 to 1876, was a staunch believer in the idea.
“There is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious ... That men of the Punjab, Bengal, the Northwestern Provinces and Madras should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation is impossible. You might, with as much reason and probability, look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe,” wrote Strachey.
Cultural or political entity?
However, this was not a cheap dismissal of the possibility of nationhood in India but a profound idea, Varshney noted.
The European school of thought in the 19th century believed diverse languages within a single nation would only deepen separatism. France is a classic example of this, Varshney noted.
Despite the presence of dozens of regional languages, only French is recognised as the national language of France even today. This came about as a result of the efforts of rulers and consecutive governments since the 1700s to unify the country through a single language.
Multiple tongues of France
While only around 12% of its people spoke French around the time of the French Revolution, over the years, regional languages such as Alsatian, Basque, Breton and Catalan, among others, were stifled through various government-sponsored measures.
“Diversities of what we call France today were erased over hundreds of years. That is a classic example of how a nation was made in the 19th century,” said Varshney.
Europe comprised around 24 nations during the period. The political philosophers of the region considered India as a civilization or a cultural construct similar to Europe and not as a political entity or a nation. They believed that post the colonial era the subcontinent too will see the formation of 20-odd nations due to the diversity of languages in the region.
(Left to right) Govinda Rao, Ashutosh Varshney, Kham Khan Suan Hausing and Yamini Aiyar at the Constitution and National Unity Convention in Bengaluru. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Enter Gandhi
Gandhiji, however, challenged this idea. Instead of subscribing to the European idea in his own quintessential way, he came up with a whole new theory. Gandhi delinked the concepts of language and nationhood.
“He realised India is a civilization clearly, but India could also be made into a nation. And the making of India as a nation did not require erasure of India’s linguistic diversities in the European way,” Varshney said. And what he used for this profound idea was the concept of hyphenated identity or dual identity.
“Gandhi basically said we will — what we would call today in political theory — hyphenate the Indian identity. Indians will be Tamil Indians, Malayali Indians, Bengali Indians, Punjabi Indians, and so on and so forth. It does not require erasing the Bengaliness in you or the Kannadiga in you,” Varshney said.
Not simply stopping at proposing a theory, Gandhiji made decisive political moves in this direction. After his takeover, the Congress party stopped organising its provincial units around the British units. The Bengal Presidency Congress and the Madras Presidency Congress were thus replaced by the Bengal Congress, the Tamil Congress and so on, explained Varshney.
“The claim was that the freedom movement would create a political roof over India’s multi-linguistic head, linguistic erasure was not necessary, and we would create a new non-European nation with hyphenated identities.”
Nation-states and State-nations
Varshney also went on to speak about the dangers of trying to fit a federal union like India into the mould of countries like France. Citing the works of political scientists Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz, he drew upon the connection between federalism and nationhood.
According to Stepan and Linz, the current national entities in the world can be categorised into nation-states, state-nations and multicultural states. Nation-states include countries like France, where the political entity also represents a single dominant culture, and the remaining ones are subsumed.
State-nations, on the other hand, have strong sub-national identities and cultural diversity. For example, India.
“State-nations simultaneously safeguard diversity and promote national level loyalties. The idea that Bengaliness or Tamilness is promoted is not equal to saying that India is demoted or deemphasized. You can do both together. That is the 1919-20 Gandhi idea, which became part of the freedom movement and Congress party’s ideology of the time,” Varshney explained.
An important observation made as part of the theory was that if the nation-state policies and nation-state institutional designs are applied to state nations, it would lead to suffering and unrest.
The Sri Lankan example
“These territorially concentrated diversities cannot be hammered into uniformity by state-nation policies,” said Varshney, further talking about the India-Sri Lanka comparisons used by Stepan and Linz to establish the point.
If the Indian Tamil aspirations were absorbed into a federal setup in the neighbouring island country, that was not the case.
The most pertinent moment among the events that led up to the long-drawn civil war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalas and the Tamils was the Sinhala-only Act passed in 1956, making Sinhalese the only official language of the country.
“India, as a national entity, is not a nation-state. India is a state-nation, and if Delhi starts supplying nation-state policies, it will only lead to suffering and disaster,” Varshney said.
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