Out of Babel

For three days, in the round-domed chamber of New Delhi's Constituent Assembly, the men who are framing India's new constitution grappled with a question which could wreck any national structure. What should be the language of free India?

The question was as complex as India's linguistic makeup. Its solution was basic to the building of a modern cohesive state out of disparate parts. The nation of Gandhi and Nehru has no majority tongue. Some 41% of its people speak Hindi. Another 14% speak Marathi, Gujarati, Kashmiri and Punjabi--all closely related to Hindi. Some 32% speak Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada and Assamese. The remaining 13% speak miscellaneous dialects.*

Tottering on the pinnacle of this tower of Babel stands English, the language of the modern intelligentsia, business community and bureaucracy. More than a century ago there had been a nip & tuck d'ebate among India's British masters over a practical official language for their vast colony.

Lord Macaulay's lordly eloquence had carried the day for English against Oriental rivals. He had heaped scorn on India's backward tongues--they taught "medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings 30 feet high and reigns 30,000 years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter . . ." He had acclaimed English as the key "to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the world have created and hoarded in the course of 90 generations."

Tongue for Revolution. The Assembly's seats were full and its galleries packed as the government proposed that Hindi replace English as India's official language. To appease the non-Hindi-speaking majority it would be done through a is-year transition period in which Hindi would be spread everywhere (especially in the south). Further, 13 of the lesser languages would be recognized for local and provincial use. Prime Minister Nehru himself defended the government's proposal. He turned his oratory particularly against those who favored a revival of ancient Sanskrit.

"We are on the threshold of a linguistic revolution," he said. "There is such a thing as having roots in the past and growing up into the sky above and not looking down on the soil ... A handful of British dominated us for so long. Why? Because they represented a higher culture of the day . . . Are we going to go back in mind and thought to that type of culture which once brought us to slavery?"

Tongue for Imperialism? Nehru's views were not shared by many of the 36 legislators who took part in the argument. Most of them spoke in English. They offered more than 300 amendments. Southerners were most vehement. They hooted and jeered at pro-Hindi spokesmen, denounced "Hindu imperialism." Madras Representative Ramalingam Chettiar complained: "The way north Indians are trying to dominate us and dictate to us is galling ... I have been in Delhi for two years, and no north Indian has so far invited me even once for social functions, just because I don't know Hindi."

Some wanted Hindi written with Roman letters instead of the traditional Devanagari. Hindi purists demanded not only Devanagari letters but also Devanagari numbers. Government speakers wanted India's numbers to remain Western, lest the country's business and finance be disrupted. They reminded the Assembly that Western numbers were, after all, Indian in origin.

Tongue for Compromise. At one tense moment, a group of southerners even threatened to secede. As a sop to Hindi men, it was agreed that after a 15-year period Western numbers would continue to be used, but the national legislature could decide also to use Devanagari script for numerals without a constitutional amendment. As a sop to southerners, it was agreed that English could be kept on after the 15-year period if the national legislature wanted. The compromise passed with only one dissent, that of Maulana Hasrat Mohani, who explained: "I simply oppose the whole thing."

* Invented in 1871 by the Rev. Jonathan Goble, a U.S. Baptist missionary in Yokohama, to give his ailing wife some fresh air.

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