Should a Country Speak a Single Language?

In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli. It, too, refers to language, but its more accurate meaning is “that which is spoken.” In its sense of the oral, it hints at colloquialisms, hybridity, and a demotic that belongs to the streets. The insinuation is that a bhasha is grander and more sophisticated than a boli. The language of language infects how we think about language.

For more than forty years, the distance between these two words has preoccupied the literary scholar Ganesh Devy. He knows precisely when it all began. In 1979, as he was completing his Ph.D. in English literature at Shivaji University, in the Indian city of Kolhapur, he found in the library a commentary on India’s censuses. The 1961 census had identified sixteen hundred and fifty-two “mother tongues”—many of them, like Betuli or Khawathlang, with speakers numbering in the single digits. But the 1971 census listed only a hundred and eight; the hundred-and-ninth entry was “all others.” That made Devy wonder: What had happened to the other fifteen-hundred-odd languages, the various boli deemed too unimportant to name? “The ‘all others’ intrigued me, then it bothered me, and then I got obsessed with it,” Devy said. “Literature is a product of language, so at some point I thought, When I know that so many other languages have been masked, do I not have any responsibility toward them?”

Too often, India’s riotous profusion of languages is conveyed through metaphor, adage, or anecdote. You may compare India to Babel, or quote the Hindi aphorism that roughly runs, “Every two miles, the taste of water changes / And every eight miles, the language.” (My own anecdotal offering: My grandmother, who never finished high school, spoke five languages fluently.) Five of the world’s major language families are present here—but beyond that quantification has proved elusive. After 1961, the Indian census did not count languages with any rigor; it mainly published the names of all the languages that people said they spoke. The last one, from 2011, registered around nineteen thousand “mother tongues”—a plain absurdity. In the world’s most populous country, no one knows how many languages are living, or how many have died.

Devy, who is seventy-four, is a mild-mannered man—his voice low and his shoulders rounded, as if from a lifetime spent hunched over books in sepulchral libraries. One of his oldest friends, the political theorist Jyotirmaya Sharma, affectionately described Devy’s accent as ghaati—a Hindi word meaning “rustic.” Which is to say, Sharma told me, that, while Devy’s former English-department colleagues at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, in the western-India city of Vadodara, spoke “as if they were eating sandwiches in Manchester,” Devy discussed Milton and Coleridge in the same homegrown tones that he used for the Mahabharata and the Bengali philosopher Aurobindo Ghose. Like many of Devy’s acquaintances, Sharma mentioned his wicked sense of humor. Once, as the two men were returning on Devy’s scooter from a printing press where they’d just put a journal to bed, they saw a truck bearing down on them. “The scooter only occasionally had brakes,” Sharma told me. He feared the worst. Then, in his recollection, Devy said dryly, “Jyotirmaya, put down your legs with all your might to create some friction, and I will change gears. Then perhaps the future of good literature might be saved.”

Over the years, Devy has taught literature, won the Sahitya Akademi award—perhaps India’s highest literary honor—for a work of literary criticism, crusaded for the rights of India’s Indigenous communities, and founded a tribal academy in a forest two hours outside Vadodara. But the capstone of his career is the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (P.L.S.I.), which has enlisted more than three thousand volunteers to map India’s motley splurge of languages for the first time in a century. The exercise began in 2010, and the results have been published in state-specific volumes bearing olive-green dust jackets, with names like “The Languages of Tripura Part 1” and “The Languages of Kerala and Lakshadweep.” In April, Devy, the chief editor of the project, will submit the manuscripts for five additional volumes before beginning the last book of the series: his diagnosis of the health of India’s languages.

Sometimes a language withers because of customs we consider normal, and even desirable: intermarriage, migration, participation in the global economy. But Devy believes that any progress incapable of giving people the means to keep their language is no progress at all. Everywhere, the effacement of some languages by others—Nahuatl by Spanish, Aleut by Russian, Uyghur by Mandarin Chinese—is really a result of how power and wealth behave. English is so widely known, for instance, not thanks to any inherent syntactic or grammatical felicity but because it is an artifact of the British Empire and the American twentieth century. In India, the politics of language have always been especially overt: in the constitution’s aversion to designating a national language; in the north’s leverage over the south; in the demarcation of states along linguistic lines. Invariably, Devy said, the people who speak many of the languages grouped under “all others” in the 1971 census also live on India’s economic margins. In 2010, the death of Boa Sr, a woman in her eighties who was the last known speaker of Bo, a language of the Andaman Islands, marked the extinction of a tribe that had been forcibly resettled around the archipelago and subjugated by the mainland. Bo might have been outlived by another Great Andamanese language, which in turn may feel menaced by Bengali, which itself feels the encroachment of Hindi—languages turning turtle all the way down.

Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) came to power, it has made the future of Indian languages even more uncertain. In addition to its well-known Hindu fanaticism, the B.J.P. wishes to foist Hindi on the nation, a synthetic marriage that would clothe India in a monolingual monoculture. Across northern and central India, roughly three hundred million people speak, as their first language, the standardized Hindi that the B.J.P. holds dear—but, this being India, that leaves more than a billion who don’t. Even so, the government tried to make Hindi a mandatory language in schools until fierce opposition forced a rollback. The country’s Department of Official Language, which promotes the use of Hindi, has had its budget nearly tripled in the past decade, to about fifteen million dollars. A parliamentary committee recently urged that Hindi be a prerequisite for government employment, raising the possibility that such jobs might become the preserve of people from the B.J.P.’s Hindi-speaking heartland. Three years ago, India’s Home Minister called Hindi the “foundation of our cultural consciousness and national unity”—a message that he put out in a tweet written only in Hindi.

In India, where language scaffolds culture and identity, this pressure affects daily life. On social media, people routinely bristle at encountering Hindi in their non-Hindi-speaking states—on bank documents, income-tax forms, railway signboards, cooking-gas cylinders, or the milestones on national highways. Two years ago, a man set himself on fire in Tamil Nadu to protest the imposition of Hindi. In Karnataka, the state where he lives, Devy sees a simmering resentment of Hindi-speaking arrivals from the north.

The B.J.P. believes that India can cohere only if its identity is fashioned around a single language. For Devy, India’s identity is, in fact, its polyglot nature. In ancient and medieval sources, he finds earnest embraces of this abundance: the Mahabharata as a treasury of tales from many languages; the Buddhist king Ashoka’s edicts etched in stone across the land in four scripts; the lingua francas of the Deccan sultanates. The coexistence of languages, he thinks, has long allowed Indians to “accept many gods, many worlds”—an indispensable trait for a country so sprawling and kaleidoscopic. Preserving languages, protecting them from being bullied out of existence, is thus a matter of national importance, Devy said. He designed the P.L.S.I. to insure “that the languages that were off the record are now on the record.”

Devy and his wife, Surekha, a retired chemistry professor, live in the town of Dharwad, in a small, neat house surrounded by guava and coconut trees. Their shelves are lined with books that have survived repeated cullings of their library. Devy now holds an academic post at a Mumbai university, and he lectures constantly around India; when he’s home, his living room hosts impromptu symposia. One afternoon, some friends dropped in for a chat: an archeologist, a lawyer, a literary scholar, an activist, a college principal. Each took or declined a cup of tea, then waited for the talk to ebb before speaking up, like a pedestrian dashing through a break in traffic. I counted four languages: Hindi, Kannada, English, and Marathi. Devy is in his element in these conversations—so immersed that, on occasion, he will talk over others saying their piece. “I still work four or five hours a day on the P.L.S.I.,” Devy told me. “The rest of the day, I philander in this way.”

Among the books on Devy’s shelves are the maroon volumes of the original Linguistic Survey of India, conducted by an Irishman named George Grierson between 1896 and 1928. Grierson held a string of roles in the British Raj, but he’d long been an ardent linguist, so coming to India must have felt like being a botanist who was dropped into the Amazon. With the help of district officials and schoolteachers, Grierson collected “specimens” of each language: a standard list of two hundred and forty-one words and test sentences, a passage of text, and a translation of the Biblical passage about the prodigal son. In all, Grierson identified a hundred and seventy-nine languages and five hundred and forty-four dialects—the distinction between language and dialect being entirely his own. The experience moved him. At journey’s end, he wrote breathlessly, “I have been granted a vision of a magnificent literature enshrining the thoughts of great men from generation to generation through three thousand years.”

The survey was an imperfect enterprise. Grierson gathered plenty of material in northern India, where people speak languages from the Indo-European family, and from the east’s Sino-Tibetan tongues. But he got almost nothing in the south, so Dravidian languages barely figure in the survey. For several languages, he never received a complete set of specimens. Nevertheless, Ayesha Kidwai, a linguist at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, admires Grierson’s work for its openness to linguistic variations (or “shades,” as he calls them), its grammatical scrutiny, and its care in laying a base for further scholarship—on how Indian languages ought to be grouped into families, or how linguistic traits have diffused and converged across these families. (Indians, for example, share a fondness for “echo words,” such as puli-gili, in Tamil, where puli refers to tigers and gili is a rhyming nonsense term meaning “and the like.” This quirk occurs in South Asian languages from at least three families but perhaps in no other language anywhere in the world—a discovery that Grierson’s specimens helped make possible.) Since Grierson, though, there has been no similar linguistic survey in India—or indeed, Kidwai says, in comparably polyglot countries like Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia. Around 2005, the Indian government briefly proposed an update to Grierson, but then lost interest. At which point Devy thought, Why wait for the government to initiate the survey? Why should ordinary Indians not step in instead?

In 2010, Devy began holding workshops in every state, inviting professors, writers, folklorists, activists, and anyone else who might assist with the project. They would put together a rough list of a state’s languages; then a native speaker, ideally, would furnish an entry for each one. Devy tried to compensate writers and translators, paying between forty and sixty dollars apiece—“a pittance,” he acknowledges. Many refused their fee. He’d raised roughly a hundred thousand dollars from a corporate philanthropy to fund the project, but he also paid for some of it himself.

Very few of Devy’s contributors were trained linguists. In the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, a sculptor took on Runglo, a Sino-Tibetan language; in Sikkim, in the northeast, a woman who ran a typesetting shop helped assemble the entry on Thangmi, a language also spoken over the border in Nepal. So there were more workshops still, in which Devy explained what the survey aspired to collect, and how to collect it. He didn’t want to discriminate between language and dialect, and he particularly didn’t want any language to be excluded because it had no script of its own. If seventy per cent of a language’s word stock was unique, it was fit to be in the survey. Devy asked his writers to set down whatever they knew of their language’s history, in addition to a few songs, poems, and stories. He asked for linguistic features—how tenses operated, or whether nouns were gendered. He’d read that, in near-extinct languages, words for colors are the final embers to die out, so he suggested contributors collect those as well. He asked for kinship terms, which he described to me as “the sauciest material for any anthropologist. Society is a structure of kinship, after all, as Claude Lévi-Strauss said.” And he wanted lists of words for the most common aspects of life: farming implements in an agrarian community, say, or words for the desert in Rajasthan. In the state of Himachal Pradesh, up in the Himalayas, the P.L.S.I.’s writers compiled an Indian twist on Franz Boas’s old cliché about Inuit languages: scores of terms for snow, across several languages, including those which describe “flakes falling on water” or “snow falling when the moon is up.”

Devy’s project has its critics, both mild and severe. Since neither he nor many of his surveyors are professional linguists, the entries aren’t academically rigorous, as those in Grierson’s survey were. “I wouldn’t necessarily make this criticism,” Peter Austin, the former director of the endangered-languages program at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told me. “But some people might say, ‘This is just a bunch of waffle about this language, and that’s a bunch of waffle about that. We can’t compare the two.’ ” Kidwai finds the collections of lore and songs, and also the grammars, inconsistent, and sometimes entirely absent. But she also thinks that the very idea of the classic linguistics survey is defunct. In India and other developing countries, she said, there are few monolingual speakers: “No language lives alone in a person.” Equally, she added, every language exists on a spectrum; Hindi comes in several flavors, a variation the P.L.S.I. fails to capture.