...policy

There is a concern with being `fair' to everyone, to not impose categories or hierarchies, or patriarchal systems, or `white culture' etc. on subaltern populations.

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...fiction.

As Das Gupta points out, policy-planners in pre-Independence India did not concern themselves with distinctions between `common language', `official language', and `national language.' ``However, when assuming the official responsibility of formulating a national language for an independent nation it was necessary to use these categories with greater caution." (Das Gupta 1969:580).

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...1920's.

Cf. for example Das Gupta 1969:579.

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...it.

On the other hand, Czarist policy varied from region to region; in Finland, for example, Swedish and Finnish were also accorded some rights, while in Poland no rights for Polish existed. The tolerance for Finnish and Swedish was covert and probably based on trying to avoid offending Sweden, from whom the Grand Duchy of Finland had been taken. The lack of tolerance for Polish was based on some notion of Pan-Slavism, according to which Polish Slavs should welcome the opportunity to allow themselves to be russified. The same subversive policy was true for Catalonia in Franco-Spain.

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...diversity,

The subject of language and culture and diversity in India is one with an extensive bibliography. I cite for starters Gumperz and Ferguson 1960 (Linguistic Diversity in South Asia) and Shapiro and Schiffman 1981 (Language and Society in South Asia).

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...records.

Again, the literature on this topic is extensive; the best modern overview is Deshpande 1979 Sociolinguistic Attitudes in India: An Historical Reconstruction.

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...India

For our purposes here, in dealing with ancient Indian culture, I will treat South Asia and India as the same thing

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...India.

Emphasis mine, HFS.

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...century.

The question of exactly when Europeans first encountered Sanskrit depends on whether one attributes to this to Sir William Jones or to predecessors of various sorts who were aware of Sanskrit but had only limited access to it. Whatever the case may be, it was Jones' encounter with Sanskrit that was published and had an impact on western scholarship and led to the development of the whole enterprise of Orientalism, or at least Indian Orientalism.

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...foolproof,

There is some question in the minds of scholars whose expertise lies in areas of inquiry not related to the subcontinent whether oral transmission can have been primary, and whether perhaps there has not always been some use of written records to reinforce the oral. Emeneau gives some examples of recourse to written texts to correct spoken errors, but in fact more often the opposite seems to be true. Salomon has reviewed this issue (Salomon n.d.) and found the attacks on orality unconvincing. Those aligning themselves against orality are primarily Goody (1986), while Staal (1986), Graham (1987), and Coulmas (1989), having first-hand contact with Indic civilization, are more aware that the oral tradition is real and deeply-rooted in the culture. Staal also points out that the question of whether the oral preservation really does the job is verified by the historical-phonological evidence--the texts contain accurate reflexes of what one would expect on the basis of historical and comparative reconstruction; were error to have been introduced, the forms would have been affected, and not useable as phonological data.

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...person

Only male members of the priestly caste may receive the long training involved in the learning, by rote, of the texts.

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...immutable

The gospel of Matthew begins with the text ``In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God"

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...show).

Even in the non-Brahman movement in Tamilnadu, the successful displacement of Brahmans from the power-elite of the State did not result in the fall of Literary Tamil from its dominant position controlling powerful linguistic domains in the society. On the contrary, Brahmans were thought to have corrupted Tamil by introducing Sanskrit loan words and sounds into it, and it needed to be restored to its former state of purity by the Non-Brahman movement.

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...concern

I consider diglossia to be one of the most fundamental facets of Indian linguistic culture; in attributing anthropomorphic characteristics to it, I am really attributing these traits to Indian linguistic culture. Such is the power of such features of a linguistic culture, I claim, that they begin to operate independently without overt agents in the culture.

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...language.

One might well characterize Indian bilingualism as `additive bilingualism', a term used to define situations where individuals (usually) add languages to their repertoires, rather than replacing existing ones with new languages (`replacive bilingualism.)

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...India.

Princely states and the Madras Presidency in the south were largely untouched by Grierson's survey.

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...divine

There were also many Germans, and miscellaneous Italian and other nationalities, all of whom would have had strong linguistic backgrounds.

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...impressive.

Many of these were produced for the convenience of missionaries and teachers, but many also translated and reshaped indigenous grammars, such as Kittel's (1903) Grammar of the Kannada Language based on Kesava's Sabdamanidarpana, a thirteenth-century work.

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...culture.

Or at least a stage of Tamil culture that showed little Aryan influence.

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...States';

British India comprised perhaps 2/3rds of the territory of present-day India and Pakistan; the rest was governed by traditional rulers, all of whom had been forced into a kind of feudal relationship with the `Empress' of India, Victoria, and her successors. The princes in the princely states governed their territories internally, and Britain did not interfere in their self-governance except in extreme cases. Language policy was not one of these.

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...India.

One Commissioner, S. K. Chatterjee, dissented and wrote a minority report.

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...model.

For a review of Soviet language policy and its evolution through various periods, see Lewis 1972:67-90.

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...policy.

This was similar to the use of vernacular languages for the spread of the Reformation under Luther, or the spread of Buddhism under Asoka.

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...imposed.

That Stalin, a non-Russian, should resort to russification as a language policy is often found curious. But russification as a covert or underlying strategy in Russian and Soviet policy was obviously recognized by Stalin as a powerful centralizing force.

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...India.)

Gandhi is one of those who seems to have been under the erroneous impression that Hindi was widely used in South India (Nayar 1969:59, quoting Gandhi's Thoughts on National Language [M. K. Gandhi 1956:3-7, 147].)

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...claim.)

Nayar (1969:63) accuses the opponents of Hindi of confusing ``the requirements of administration with literary appreciation, apart from ignoring the developments since independence." In this Nayar fails to give weight to the literary prestige factor as a prerequisite in Indian linguistic culture to other instrumental factors. The fact is that Gandhi's stricture against both Sanskritized and Persianized Hindi as a basis for Hindi was an impossible one, given the linguistic culture. Gandhi's assumptions were wrong on two counts, but his preferences were nevertheless given strong credence, and wishful thinking carried the day.

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...Hindustani

Yamuna Kachru (1991:400) refers to ``the emergence of a classical `diglossic' situation" for Hindi.

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...speakers

At least some language speakers find this more difficult; speakers of other languages, such as Malayalam, with heavy borrowing from Sanskrit, rather than later stages of Indo-Aryan (Prakrits, etc.) might find this easier to master, and in fact Malayalis seem to be among those southerners who do quite well with modern Hindi. But witness the famous complaint of Nehru, who failed to recognize his own speeches when their Sanskritized form was broadcast on All-India Radio.

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...vehicle

The question of `which Hindi?' did of course arise.

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...circumstances.

By 1947, of course, leninist policy had been stalinized, and the role of Russian expanded again, with intensified russification; India unfortunately borrowed this element of the policy as well.

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...diglossia.

Masica: ``There has always been a tendency, and not only in India, to give a serious literary medium an enhanced air of respectability by approximating it to and buttressing it with forms taken from more prestigeful classical languages. An extreme example of this is the so-called Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, a MIA language so Sanskritized as to disguise its identity ...." (Masica 1991:57.)

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...associations.

It was unfortunate that the rivalry between Hindus and Moslems had to develop into a battle between Hindi and Urdu, but it is even more unfortunate that this rivalry led to the development of a kind of Hindi, and attitudes about the appropriateness of Hindi that then made it impossible for the rest of India to stomach this policy. It is possible that some form of Hindi or Urdu might have sufficed as a link language in post-Independent India, but only without the exaggerated claims that went along with it. Hindi extremists shot themselves in the foot on this issue, charging it with all kinds of emotional baggage that was simply counterproductive to its acceptance by the rest of India. In fact most of that rhetoric is simply irrelevant for Bengalis and Tamils, for example, who care not a wit whether the vocabulary is Sanskritized or Persianized. What seems to have happened in this issue is that various factions took positions that they could (or would) not back down from, and ignored the fact that new issues have arisen since the nineteenth century that make the maintenance of a polarity between Hindi and Urdu counterproductive for the rest of India. Advocates of Hindi are blind to the effect of their purism on the rest of India; they in effect are focussed only on the rivalry with Urdu, and see all other contestants as despoilers of Hindi purity.

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...sort.

One could argue that if goals for language policy are defined somewhat differently, the Hindi-only policy has been a success in Hindi areas of north India (i.e. in Grierson's Inner Ring) and even a modified success in non-Hindi areas of north India (i.e. Grierson's Outer Ring). Khari Boli Hindi has become the language of instruction in many schools where formerly Urdu, Panjabi, or non-standard dialects of Hindi were formerly in use. Corpus planning for Hindi has been a success and much neologistic vocabulary that was thought odd a generation ago has now been accepted. But in the non-Hindi areas of the South, and in Bengal, the policy has not been a success.

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...diminished;

That is, as Tamil becomes symbolic, its purity and antiquity and immutability get emphasized, and it ceases to function as an instrument suitable for modern education, etc.

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....

Lewis (1972:195) describes schools in multilingual areas such as Daghestan, where children from up to 25 different nationalities all attend Russian-medium schools, because of the difficulty of setting up separate schools for all of them.

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...extraordinary.

The simplest way to observe this is to visit a Sanskrit college where Sanskrit is taught in the old pandit tradition; observers will see (and hear) in operation techniques devised to enhance the commitment to memory of long and complicated texts. (Staal 1986:17-18 provides a detailed description of this system.) The final product of these colleges is a novice pandit capable of repeating at will any portion of any text he has learned.

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