Discongruities between the Soviet Model and Indian circumstances

The peculiarities of pre-Soviet and Soviet language policy can be summarized as follows:

1.

Russian had been the dominant language in Czarist Russia, and in the late nineteenth Century had been in fact the only language permitted during the period of the most intense russification (with a few exceptions, e.g. in the Grand Duchy of Finland.)

2.

In 1919, Russian was also the majority language, i.e. had more speakers than all minority languages combined, and despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union, still is the majority language in the Commonwealth of Independent States (although its numerical superiority is of course being encroached upon because of the tremendous birth-rate among Turkic speakers in Central Asia) and continues to be the language used for interregional communication even among the newly independent former republics.

3.

The territory associated with the Russian language was the largest territory, and Russian had been the vehicle of expansion into the Far East, as the Russian Empire expanded to the Pacific. Russian thus had a history as a lingua franca in every territory and region of the Soviet Union, even if feelings about it were not always positive.

4.

Soviet policy was (at least at first) designed to reduce the hegemony of Russian, and to allow other languages to be used in many domains from which they had previously been barred. Depending upon the size of the linguistic group, some language groups that had previously not been allowed the use of their languages except for private or religious purposes found their domains expanded under Soviet policy. Even smaller groups gained domains, with their language used for primary literacy, for example.

5.

Soviet policy (covertly, of course) saw the non-Russian languages as a possible vehicle for Sovietization (collectivization etc.) of territories that could not be sovietized through Russian, so the policy of new domains for previously non-literate languages was a hidden agenda of the new policy.

6.

Later, under Stalin, there was a tendency to emphasize the importance of Russian as a linking language, as a source for new vocabulary, and as a kind of Big Brother, a primus inter pares that would lead the other nationalities. Groups that had at first been allowed to use Roman or Arabic script for their orthographies later (in the 1930's) found this right removed, and a Cyrillic version imposed.

7.

Rights of Russian speakers to schools and broad use of their language were never restricted; the right to Russian was a `personal' one, whereas rights to other languages were strictly territorial. Russians could go anywhere in the Soviet Union and always find Russian schools available; other language groups could not.

8.

A covert aim of Soviet policy was to encourage individuals and groups to assimilate to Russian, since incentives to do this were built in. The greatest incentive is that non-Russian minorities living in another non-Russian republic generally have no guarantees for their language; if Armenians living in Georgia do not wish to attend Georgian schools their only option is to attend Russian schools. No incentives to assimilate in other directions exist, and very little assimilation to other languages ever takes place (Breton 1991). Similarly in India, linguistic minorities in a given other-language dominant state are provided with few opportunities to learn their mother tongue; Indian government servants thus are provided with Hindi-medium schools, but others have to fend for themselves.

The biggest mistake of post-Independence language policy in India was not that planners sought a policy that would remove English and better suit Indian circumstances, but that they chose another foreign model for their language policy, one that on the surface seemed egalitarian and multilingual but was otherwise ill-equipped for Indian circumstances. In addition, they ignored the tremendous power of Indian linguistic culture and its built-in attitudes and assumptions about language, in particular the deep-rooted propensity toward diglossia.

Error number one was to assume that in the place occupied by Russian in Soviet policy, Hindi could fill the bill for India. This was problematical for the following reasons:

1.

Hindi had not been the majority language of pre-Independence India, though it was numerically superior to any other.

2.

Hindi had not been the lingua-franca in all of pre-Independence India (though it was widely used in North India.)

3.

Hindi was not a prestige language in the same way that Russian was; other languages such as Urdu, Bengali and Tamil had longer literary histories and were seen by their speakers as vastly superior in prestige. (Few languages in Czarist Russia could make this claim.)

4.

Planners mistook the numerical predominance of Hindi-speakers in the Congress party and its consensus about Hindi (or in fact Hindustani) as the link-language of post-Independence India, for a national consensus.

5.

Planners failed to reckon with the inevitability of diglossia and the tendency of Indian linguistic culture to deliberately diglossify languages that weren't diglossic to begin with. Thus the decision to make Hindustani the `national language' played into the hands of Hindi chauvinists and pandits, who inexorably Sanskritized Hindustani, making it impossible for non-Hindi speakers to master. For their part, the pandits were simply acting like predictible members of the Indian linguistic culture--to them Hindustani was an inappropriate vehicle for a national language, and it had to be gussied up to occupy the formal role. As Das Gupta points out (op. cit.: 588), a century of rivalry between Hindi and Urdu had resulted in both varieties purging themselves of the vocabulary of the other classical source, while moving toward classicization from its own source. Classicization was thus confused with standardization, and divergence from the language of common speech proceeded apace. Sanskritization of Hindi was, of course, inevitable (just as Persianization of Urdu was inevitable), given the value system of Indian linguistic culture, yet it undermined any possibility that Hindi would be accepted as the national language by many non-Hindi speakers, especially the vociferous Tamil community.

Das Gupta reviews the way the task of `developing' Hindi as a vehicle for ordinary literacy eventually passed from the Gandhian associations into the hands of the orthodox Hindi associations.

By the time Hindi was declared the official language, they [i.e. the orthodox Hindi associations] alone had the manpower, skill, and tradition to contribute to and control this level of work [i.e. language planning] for Hindi. At the same time, this control enabled them to impress their favored classicalization as the dominant style of Hindi. True to the tradition of the traditional Indian literati, they are developing Hindi in a direction that tends to make the new Hindi a compartmentalized preserve of the Hindi literary elite. Their logic of language development seems to go contrary to the logic of mass literacy, effective access of new groups to the educated communication arena, and to social mobilization of maximum human resources in general. [italics mine, hs] (Das Gupta 1969:590).