GN Devy’s crusade for the political empowerment of India’s numerous neglected languages

On 3 June, the ministry of human resources development released a revised draft of the National Education Policy 2019, days after the original version of the document caused a massive uproar by making the study of Hindi mandatory in non-Hindi speaking states. The revised draft has removed the requirement, after politicians and citizens across the country accused the ministry of trying to force Hindi upon states, which threatens India's linguistic diversity. In the July 2018 issue of The Caravan, Martand Kaushik, a senior assistant editor at the publication, wrote about the scholar GN Devy's crusade for political empowerment of India's numerous neglected languages. Devy was responsible for organising the People's Linguistic Survey of India, the largest linguistic survey of Indian languages since the one by the British administrator George Abraham Grierson in the early twentieth century.

Just as British political dominance sidelined the major Indian languages, the political dispensations since have marginalised the country’s Adivasi languages. Devy explained in a video interview with Scroll.in, “The 1961 census had listed 1,652 mother tongues. The data of 1971 showed only 108 mother tongues.” Devy said he was curious about what became of those 1,500-odd languages. Plotting the missing ones on a map of India, he found that most of them were spoken in the central part of the country, the zone separating the Indo-Aryan languages from the Dravidian ones. “This zone is populated by tribal communities,” he said, “roughly running from Surat to Howrah, if you were to draw a straight line on the map of India.”

In 1995, at the height of his success as a critic, Devy decided to give up his university job and move to Tejgadh, a village in Gujarat that is home to the Rathwa tribe. He travelled from village to village with a notebook and tape recorder to document and study these languages. “I no longer felt comfortable to draw a salary teaching English literature when languages were dying around us,” he told me.

In Tejgadh, Devy founded the non-profit Bhasha Research and Publication Centre to study and document India’s cultures and languages. Activism in the form of healthcare projects, microcredit, foodgrain banks and water collectives—in Tejgadh and nearby villages—went alongside linguistic and cultural documentation. Three years after starting the foundation, in 1999, Devy launched the Adivasi Academy in Tejgadh as an “unconventional learning space.” The academy was meant to do for Adivasi culture, arts and literature what libraries, museums and national academies had been doing for mainstream culture. Around the same time, he collaborated with the writer Mahasweta Devi to form an organisation to fight for the rights of denotified and nomadic tribes, or DNT, who were listed in the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and were later labelled “habitual offenders” by the Indian government in 1952.

“I stopped reading books,” Devy told me. “I started educating myself again.” During the 2000s, he travelled widely across tribal areas. A article by Nandini Nair in Open magazine documented the various projects he undertook at this time, including putting out journals with songs, epics and folklore in several languages such as Knukna, Ahirani, Bhantu, Pawari, Rathwi, among others. These journals, copies of which are still on Devy’s bookshelves, would be sold at nominal rates to the tribal communities whose culture they documented. Devy devoted that entire decade to working in tribal studies.

His 2006 book, A Nomad Called Thief: Reflections on Adivasi Silence, is an account of this time—its title refers to the DNTs. Early on in the book Devy provides a “random list of what we have given the Adivasis” over 60 years of Independence. It reads: “Forest Acts depriving them of their livelihood; a Criminal Tribes Act and a Habitual Offenders Act; ... existence as bonded labour; forest guards and private moneylenders; mosquitoes and malaria; naxalites and ideological war-groups; ... and perpetual contempt.” At first glance this reads like a damning indictment. But Devy does not constantly reprimand, he states facts. He addresses the mainstream to convince them of the value of letting Adivasis speak.

His Adivasi Academy—with a library of roughly 50,000 books (many on tribal culture), a museum, a multilingual school and a health centre—illustrates his approach. After setting up the place and training the manpower drawn from the local community, Devy withdrew from the management of the Academy. That was always the plan, he told me.

Even as Devy quit his job to pursue activism full-time, Surekha, his wife, continued to work as a professor to support the family. Any money Devy raised went to the non-profits he had founded. He gave the entire sum of 25,000 euros he received from the Prince Claus award in 2003 to the Bhasha Centre, despite the fact that the family was in financial need. Surekha did not complain. “It takes courage to live like this, in simplicity,” Devy told me in his characteristic matter-of-fact tone. “I am glad that she has that courage.”

At about three in the afternoon, when we had been talking for over four hours, we decided to break for lunch, which was a home-cooked thali in the style of Dharwad’s famous Khanavali canteens.

In 1886, the British administrator George Abraham Grierson proposed a survey of India to document all its languages. Grierson was appointed the superintendent of the Linguistic Survey of India. His project lasted 30 years, from 1894 to 1927, and described a total of 364 languages and dialects. The survey’s findings have been criticised for their supposedly flawed methodology and for excluding large parts of contemporary India. No Indian government has undertaken such an exercise since. Though the United Progressive Alliance government announced it would carry out a similar survey, and allocated Rs 2.8 billion for it in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2007–12), the project never took off. Devy had been stressing the need for the survey for years, arguing that documentation was essential for the survival of endangered languages.

When the government abandoned the project, Devy decided to do it himself. In 2010, he began putting together the team that would conduct the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, or the PLSI. This was a group of over 3,500 volunteers, which included academics, schoolteachers and anyone willing to help. Devy utilised every single contact he had built during his travels over the years. Between mid 2010 and the end of 2011, he undertook 300 journeys, holding workshops in different states on how to conduct surveys. By 2013, Devy had created multiple coordinators for every state in the country and had put together a national editorial collective of 80 scholars.

On 5 September 2013, Devy asked three coordinators from each state to bring their work to a meeting at the Gandhi memorial on Tees January Marg in Delhi. “I asked them to place their manuscript on the ground as dedication to the nation,” he said. “Every state and every Union territory. They came. And 30 volumes in manuscript were placed there.” He had chosen 5 September because it was the birthday of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan—the second president of India who was also a scholar—now celebrated as Teacher’s Day.

The publishing house Orient BlackSwan agreed to publish the volumes. Devy estimates there will be about 92 books in the PLSI, 45 of which have been published and the rest of which will be out by 2020.

The PLSI’s findings boggle the mind. The survey found 780 languages in the country. For each language, the books provide a brief history, the geographical region where it is spoken, samples of songs and stories with translations and important terms in the language. To anyone wishing to learn about the lived experience of different segments of Indian society, these volumes are invaluable. As a BBC article on the PLSI reported, the survey found that some 16 languages in Himachal Pradesh have 200 words between them to describe snow, with specific expressions for “snowflakes on water” and “snow that falls when the moon is up.” Nomadic communities from the deserts of Rajasthan also use a large number of words to describe the barren landscape, including separate ones for how men and animals experience the “sandy nothingness.”

According to Devy’s theory of knowledge, this means that there are 780 ways of understanding this country, 780 separate repositories of knowledge that deserve equal status. And how many does the Indian state acknowledge? Twenty-two. Speakers of hundreds of Indian languages find no schools that teach in their mother tongues and no economic opportunities to use them. Documentation, as Devy says, is the first step towards that equal status.

The PLSI gives us a sense of the scale of India’s many epistemologies, and yet, most educational and professional institutions view knowledge as that which is generated in the few prominent languages that have state recognition. These are languages spoken by a handful of dominant groups. Social structure, language and knowledge are interconnected, Devy points out in his latest book, The Crisis Within.

On the social level, a hierarchical view of class, caste and tribes has narrowed down the idea of knowledge. “In India higher education has managed to lose touch with lifestyles and histories of exclusion of the communities,” Devy writes, referring to oppressed castes and tribes. “And therefore, one is not able to fully access the idiom through which life is perceived outside our campuses.”

In turn, English remains dominant because of the “continued knowledge imperialism of the West.” Globalisation and the opening up of the international labour market have made a certain kind of knowledge marketable. Since America is the most celebrated site of globalisation, American or Americanised education holds great value. Top department heads and editors—commissioning research projects and books—are often products of elite schools or foreign universities. An editor who leads a reputed media organisation recently told me that his team found it difficult to do stories about indigenous subjects, such as Hinduism and Hindutva, simply because most of the editors had had a Western liberal education and are not very familiar with the discourse.

Devy offers an interesting diagnosis. He told me that the development of print as a medium in Europe was linked closely to the rise of the middle class towards the end of the medieval period. It is not coincidence that many iconic works that have added to our knowledge were not meant for publication, he told me. “Shakespeare, Tagore, Kabir—they were all poets and dramatists,” he said, whose works could have been delivered orally. “Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste was also meant to be a speech.” Magazines, newspapers, books are the product of a knowledge industry whose job is to keep the middle class steady and secure, Devy said. “A truly great iconic production of knowledge that can change society is not possible within that range.”

The crisis within, then, is a crisis of creativity in our institutions. Our linguistic prejudice, which stems from our social location, makes us blind to the astoundingly multifarious nature of our surroundings. Like many other scholars, Devy has come to believe that developments in technologies of transmission will render traditional educational institutions obsolete. What we wish to learn will be available to download. As we enter this new phase, we must give serious thought to what kinds of knowledge we are going to carry over.

The answer, according to Devy, isn’t just diversity and creating “inclusive spaces.” Museumising “diversity” and “hybridity” would be useless without a democratisation of knowledge. The creative interchange between cultures, hailed by many scholars as a mark of great modern literature, has to take place on a level playing field if charges of appropriation are to be avoided. “In India, the ‘marginalized’ far outnumber the dominant sectors of society,” Devy writes in The Crisis Within. “The country’s ‘mainstream’ can only be an aggregate of the margins.”

Devy also said that we must not think that we are doing the marginalised any favours by recognising them. “The question of ‘inclusion of the excluded’ should no longer be seen as a question of grudgingly giving something because it’s politically correct,” he writes. “But rather as an opportunity before us for shaping new fields of knowledge, novel pedagogies and bringing back value to the oral and written wisdom generated in India over millennia, and at the same time, a meaningful future for it.”

This is an extract from “The Centre Cannot Hold,” a story from The Caravan’s July 2018 issue. It has been edited and condensed.