A Rejoinder :

(www. drlohiacentenary.org) has a list of

DISCUSSION

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A Rejoinder

Yogendra Yadav

should thank Sudhanva Deshpande for a serious and substantive response to my criticism. Even though I have not convinced him, it is gratifying to note that he has chosen not to press his rather colourful description of Lohia in his original article (“Bilinguism, Theater and the Fate of the Vernacular”, EPW, 5 September 2009), which had prompted my response. Just to recall, he had objected to Lohia being described as a “bilingual intellectual”, compared Lohia on language to Jinnah on religion – “cosmopolitan in personal life, parochial in public” – and had called his movement “trenchantly monolingual”. Deshpande’s energetic response has s hifted the question ever so slightly. Instead of asking whether Lohia was monolingual, now we are debating whether Lohia’s brand of multilingualism was fair to non-Hindi languages and worth accepting. This is a different but fair and signiﬁcant question.

Clariﬁcations

Before I turn to his central and serious point, let me quickly move some of the side issues out of the way. One, why do I castigate “left intellectuals”, and not just Sudhanva Deshpande, for ignoring and misrepresenting Lohia? Because I have heard comments of the kind Deshpande

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made from all kinds of left academics, including many of my teachers, who mistake me for a Lohiaite, for well over two decades.While much of this scorn is expressed orally, here is a sample of some r ecent written expressions from sources Deshpande might approve: an EPW editorial mocked “Lohia’s simplistic logic of Hindi against English” (1990: 1678). Aijaz Ahmed summarised Lohia’s programme as “extreme linguistic-cultural chauvinism” (2000: 344-5), Prabhat Patnaik regretted that Lohia’s movement had “a lot of this Hind[i]-Hindu business” (2002) and the Hindi writer Mudra Rakshas wrote in Pahal, accusing Lohia of fascist leanings.

Two, do I patronise non-Hindi intellectuals, like Ananthamurthy, who admire Lohia by assuming that they accepted the totality of Lohia’s views, including his language policy? Highly unlikely, for a large number of writers in Indian languages, other than Hindi, were attracted to Lohia not despite, but because of his stance on language. Indeed it would be odd if a creative writer were to take inspiration from someone whose language policy she rejects. Here, for example, is Ananthamurthy in his own words: “What I ﬁnd most remarkable in Lohia is that he stood by the Indian languages” (2002).

Three, why do we not get Lohia’s books in the bookshops and libraries in Delhi? Frankly, this point amazes me, coming as it does from an activist of a popular movement. Almost all of Lohia’s writings have been published and republished, in Hindi and in English from the 1960s onwards by

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the Hyderabad-based Rammanohar Lohia Samata Vidyalaya Nyas. There are more than a dozen doctoral dissertations and books on Lohia’s thought. Last year a ninevolume Hindi anthology of nearly all of Lohia’s works was published (Kapoor 2008) and the English version is in press. Volume eight of this anthology has the entire book Language. Why these books do not ﬁnd place in many libraries is, no doubt, a small comment on the Lohiaites but it may also be a bigger comment on I ndian academia. There may be a hidden story here about the placement of the Left in the Indian intellectual establishment. I sincerely hope that half a century hence, no one would pour scorn on Jana Natya Manch’s excellent work just because its performances were not available in the digital libraries of that time.

Lohia and Language

Let me turn to the substantive point about Lohia’s privileging of Hindi in ways that appear condescending to other Indian languages. Deshpande has a point there and his quotations from Lohia may be selective, but not unfair or torn out of context. The only point where Deshpande may have been unfair is about Urdu. Lohia’s Hindustani was an amalgamation of non-Sankritised Hindi and non-Persianised Urdu and it is not clear to me what is so odd about it. Generally, it is fair to say that forging and bolstering Hindustani by curing it of Sanskritic and Arabic-Persian excesses and by subsuming some of the neighbouring languages like Punjabi and

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DISCUSSION

Gujarati was indeed Lohia’s preferred path for countering the dominance of English. In fact, (to strengthen Deshpande’s case) I should also mention that Lohia believed that different Indian languages need not have different alphabets, that all of these could be written in the nagari script. This is not a solution that appeals to our sensibilities today and for good reasons. Yet this recognition does not lead to the kind of conclusions that Deshpande rushes to.

It is simply untrue to say that Lohia’s views on the relationship between Hindi and other Indian languages are ”the very core of his position” (Deshpande, emphasis in original). Even a cursory reading of any of Lohia’s numerous writings and speeches on the language question shows it beyond doubt that the core of Lohia’s position is banishment of English at any cost. For L ohia this was like Gandhi’s admonition to the British: you leave ﬁrst, we shall s ettle our affairs any which way. What a rrangement should replace English and which of the Indian languages should

o ccupy what place exactly is something Lohia reﬂected upon all the time, but it was a second order question for Lohia. In his mind it comes, logically and sequentially, after reaching an agreement on the banishment of English. While he was uncompromising on his opposition to English, Lohia was always more tentative and open to correction about the relationship among Indian languages.

Precisely because it was a second order question, there was ambivalence and subtle shifts in Lohia’s thinking on this question. Deshpande has very meticulously, if selectively, documented one side to this ambivalence where Lohia places emphasis on Hindi at the cost of other Indian langauges. If my note had put more emphasis on the other side of this ambivalence, where Lohia repeatedly defends the rights and capabilities of Indian languages against English and Hindi chauvinism, it was not to hide Lohia’s preference for H indi, which I had clearly mentioned, but to distinguish his politics of language from an obviously Hindi supremacist politics advocated by the Jan Sangh. Lohia began with the position that Hindustani should be the language of the union but moved to a two-department thesis involving a bifurcation of Hindi and non-Hindi sections in

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the government, and ﬁnally came to advocate a multi-lingual centre involving all the (then) fourteen ofﬁcial languages. “Hindi jaye jahannum me” [Let Hindi go to hell] was Lohia’s oft repeated maxim on this question (Sahay 2003).

Finally, Deshpande’s use of current sensibilities about languages and dialects to judge what was said in the 1950s involves an element of anachronism. Today we consider speakers of Haryanvi and Pahari as falling in the Hindi region, sharply distinct from Punjabi, but these boundaries may not have looked the same 50 years ago and may not be so 50 years from now. The Left Front government in West Bengal ﬂatly rejects the claims of Kamtapuri language, but the picture could look very different a few decades from now. This is not to say that I support Lohia’s suggestions in this regard: any move to subsume Punjabi or Gujarati into Hindi today would deﬁnitely be a regressive move. If anything, now we need to pay more attention to the linguistic speciﬁcities of the so-called d ialects of Hindi. At the same time, a selfassured projection of our current preferences into the past goes against the very point of studying history.

Radical Language Politics

Despite these limitations, Deshpande’s intervention is a valuable reminder that radical politics cannot simply implement Lohia’s language policy without facing a serious dilemma about the relationship between different Indian languages. Shorn of its avoidable polemics, it invites us to think about why a cosmopolitan, pluralist and egalitarian thinker like Lohia, ever sensitive to the dignity of the oppressed minorities, privileges the language of the majority over those of linguistic minorities. Once we pose the question in this frame, we come face to face with Lohia’s deep dilemma: how to counter the dominance of English, one of the principle carriers of inequality and derivative thinking in contemporary India, without creating an alternative lingua franca? It also opens a way to thinking past this dilemma. Perhaps, Lohia was wrong in assuming the need for a powerful link language. Perhaps the right direction is to look for a multi-lingual solution. Perhaps, we are past the stage when English could be banished altogether. Perhaps, an I ndianised

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English can be an ally of the I ndian languages in their struggle against English. Debating these issues is vital to the future of radical, egalitarian, politics. But we can do so only when we get over the temptation to play a my-EMS-was- better-thanyour-Lohia (or its reverse) type of game that best belongs to akharas and sects.

The real value of Lohia’s politics of language is not that it offers us easy and clear answers but that it dares to ask a big and vital question in a post-colonial society. The danger is that in quibbling with his answers we can conveniently sidestep his question. This is symptomatic of the larger tragedy of our memory of Lohia: a small and dwindling cult of Lohiaites mistakes Lohia’s questions for answers just when a vast and growing mainstream is turning its back to the questions that he raised.

In this context I should again thank Sudhanva Deshpande for providing an occasion for a serious exchange on Lohia in the pages of EPW after nearly four decades. Now that I have convinced him that one needs to read Lohia before criticising him, I do hope that he would consider the next step and read Lohia with an open mind.

Yogendra Yadav (yogendra.yadav3@gmail.com) is with the Lokniti programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

References

Ahmad, Aijaz (2000): Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia (London: Verso).

Ananthamurthy, U R (2002): Interview by Sachchidananda Mohanty, Summerhill: IIAS Review, Volume 8, Issue 1.

EPW (1990) “Minorities: Growing Pressure”, Editorial, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 25, No 31 (August 4) 1677-78.

Kapoor, Mastram ed. (2008): Rammanohar Lohia Rachanavali (New Delhi: Anamika).

Patnaik, Prabhat (2002): “Saffronisation and Imperialism in Indian Education: Prabhat Patnaik talks to Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya and Prasenjit Bose”, Student Struggle. Accessed from http:// www.indowindow.com/akhbar/article.php?artic le=97&category=7&issue=16.

Sahay, Raghuveer (2003): “Hindi Jaye Jahannum Me”, Samayik Varta, March, Vol 26 (6).