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upon it” (“The Madras Happenings” ,1960, p 53).

Four, propagation of Hindi must be temporarily suspended, but this is only a tactical retreat to achieve strategic victory:

The effort to persuade the coast-lands to accept Hindi must be given up, for it only leads to further irritation and embitterment. Once these coast-lands have abandoned English at the provincial level, including the high court, the university, the secretariat and all such public institutions, it would be only a matter of time when they apply for admission into the Hindi department in Delhi. (“Feudal Languages”, pp 73-74).

This is repeated in “Coastal Areas” (p 66).

Call me “narrow-minded”, but it does seem to me that Lohia is asking his opponents to bat with six stumps on a wet pitch with the boundary pushed back 50 yards!

After assuring us that Lohia “went out of his way to address the sensibilities of non-Hindi speakers”, Yadav admits, three sentences later, that “One could argue that (Lohia’s proposals) did not meet the sensibilities of the non-Hindi speakers. Indeed, Lohia’s politics of language demands a s erious review of the kind his followers have never attempted.” However, “to see [ Lohia’s stand] as simple-minded parochialism is to misunderstand what needs to be criticised in the first place”.

Instead of telling us what this “serious review” might consist of, Yadav jumps to listing Kannada writers who admire L ohia. (The one name he misses, by the way, is that of K V Subanna, the founder of Ninasam, the institution I greatly admire and wrote about in my response to Ram Guha.) Yadav finds it “hard to imagine” that Subanna or Ananthamurthy can admire a thinker without endorsing the totality of his programme. Frankly, this assumption patronises these fine minds. Since Lohia had demanded that India acquire nuclear weapons, and since the Pokhran tests took place under a Lohiaite defence minister, do present-day admirers of Lohia like Yadav endorse India’s nuclear weapons programme?

Lohia advocated a “sisterly relationship” between the languages of India. But lest we understand this to mean that they must co-exist as equals, he was quick to clarify:

If younger sisters are sometimes uppish (sic), as happens always, it does not matter. Tamil, Telugu and Gurumukhi, etc, are the younger sisters, and many of them are very beautiful.

Economic & Political Weekly

It is often said that Hindi is the language of the uneducated, and Bengali is a sweet tongue, or that Tamil is a literary one. When such things are said I ask the Hindi people not to go (sic) into arguments. After all, younger sisters are naturally more beautiful. The elder sister cannot be so glamorous, she will be a little plump” (‘English and the People’s Languages in India’, 1959: 39).

Even if we ignore the sexism of Lohia’s analogy, “older” and “younger” here are hierarchical concepts, not factual.

Yadav makes much of the fact that Lohia was not enamoured of the kind of highly Sanskritised Hindi favoured by the Sangh parivar. Which is why it comes as a shock when Lohia says: “I am also frightened of the recent move to introduce into Hindi or Hindustani a larger influx of words of Arabic origin” (“Coastal Areas”, p 65). “This may well be with a view to make Hindustani more dissimilar from Bengali or Marathi or Telugu” which would stand in the way of “tempt[ing] the other coastal states into wanting to join the Hindustani department” (p 66).

And what about Urdu? From a 1958 resolution of the Socialist Party: “Urdu language should be made more easy so that a common man can understand it. Use of difficult words from Arabic (sic) and Farsi should be given up in this language” (“Urdu”, p 84). Is this a plea for democratisation of Urdu, or an effort to gradually obliterate, in practice, the specificity of Urdu? The truly socialist position surely would be that the people be given real access to the best education, so they can participate in the most complex discourse in their own language. Note that they are not asking Urdu writers to write simply, their demand is for the language i tself to be simplified!

Let us return to the idea of the Hindispeaking “mid-lands” and the non-Hindi speaking “coastal lands”. The most obvious case that defies this thesis is Punjabi – spoken in the heart of the “mid-land” by a very significant number of people. Lohia’s response is simple: he denies that Punjabi is an independent language at all:

I consider the Punjabi language as a style of Hindustani language. The language of the first Guru Nanak, and the last Guru, Teg Bahadur, was nearer the Avadhi and Braj styles of Hindi than the current Punjabi style…We must now consider this question unburdened by past prejudices and correct the mistake

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of our Constitution makers. Punjabi should be removed from the schedule of languages mentioned in the Constitution (“To Akalis and Punjabi Suba”, 1961: 63).

In the same year, the Socialist Party urged Master Tara Singh and the Akali Dal to “involve their own interests with the larger national interests and consider the language issue from a large point of view is adopted (sic). Punjabi is not different from the national language Hindi and is like Rajasthani, Magadhi, Avadhi, Brija, Bhojpuri etc” (p 112).

Ignore that Lohia got the name of the last Sikh guru wrong. Ignore also that in privileging khadi boli Hindi, this view is perilously close to the same official d iscourse around Hindi that it claims to challenge. But do note his complete disregard of the role that the Bhakti and Sufi movements played in the development of Indian languages.

Contrast this with the understanding put forward by Marxists, in particular E M S Namboodiripad (especially in The N ational Question in Kerala), whose centenary too falls this year. EMS saw the Bhakti movement as marking the formation of linguistic nationalities. Unlike in E urope, this was not the result of the emergence of a manufacturing bourgeoisie to a position of ascendancy, but rather of a mercantile and usurious bourgeoisie that had developed under the precapitalist system. Therefore, the Marxist support for linguistic states was not motivated by identity politics, nor was it opportunistic. It came out of the understanding that linguistic states were a vital part of the bourgeois revolution that the bourgeoisie itself was too scared to carry through to its logical end. (Let me also say that I am fully aware that EMS’ is not the only Marxist position on this question, and that there has been a vibrant debate on this question among Marxists.)

One final postscript: Yadav advised me to read Lohia’s book, and thereby hangs a tale quite worth telling.

I checked with several book distributors on Ansari Road, the heart of Delhi’s book business. All returned a blank. The Delhi Public Library, one of the four repository libraries in India, has Lohia’s Hindi Rachnavali, but not this book. I went

o nline. The site Dr Lohia Centenary

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( www.drlohiacentenary.org) has a list of “Dr Lohia’s Works”, but no electronic copies and no link to sellers. The Jawaharlal Nehru University library does not have the book. Neither do 13 central libraries of the University of Delhi, including the Ratan Tata Library of the Delhi School of Economics, the Central Reference Library and the Arts Library. I went to the house of Janeshwar Mishra, the senior socialist Member of Parliament, where Lohia’s literature is sold. No copy of Language. Could they procure it for me? No. Lohia’s little book was rapidly turning into a Pentagon memo – everyone knows it exists, no one knows where.

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This should cause admirers of Lohia some concern. That the political inheritors of Lohia care two hoots for his books is scarcely surprising. Gandhi’s writings have suffered a similar fate. But there e xists a band of dedicated, selfless scholaractivists who, away from the glare of the media, have made it their life’s mission to keep Gandhi’s ideas in circulation. The left intellectuals that Yadav castigates expend more than a little time, effort, energy and passion on making available the ideas that they uphold, by running cultural groups, bringing out theoretical and literary journals, or keeping afloat publishing houses. It seems a bit rich, then, that Yadav regrets

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-the “narrow-mindedness” of the left that “shrinks the intellectual resources available to radical cultural politics”. Hardly! Cultural resources shrink when those who lecture leftists do not put their money where their mouth is.

Note

1 All cited essays are from Lohia’s Language (1986).

References

Lohia, Rammanohar (1986): Language (Hyderabad: Rammanohar Lohia Samata Vidyalaya Nyasa).

Namboodiripad, E M S (1952): The National Question in Kerala (Bombay: People’s Publishing House).

Yadav, Yogendra (2009): “Was Lohia Parochial and Monolingual?”, Economic and Political Weekly, 44(43): 70-71.

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