VI Sovereign States and Mother Tongues

WHEN INDIA achieved independence in 1947 it contained not

only the great unit known as British India, with a unified civil
administration and democratic institutions well started on their

way, but also 562 separate states linked to the British crown but
not with each other. The central government at Delhi exerted
a varying degree of influence or authority over these states, de-
5

pending on circumstance. There were also special "agencies' for

frontier districts, northwest and northeast, and for specified
tribal areas remote from the center and from the general life of
civilized India. We can say grosso modo that the country to
which Great Britain yielded total freedom in 1947 contained
about six hundred units of different sizes, shapes and characters.
This is not counting Burma and Ceylon: it refers only to the
old, undivided India, now Pakistan and India.

Leaving out the special agencies for tribes and frontiers, the
two new countries into which the superpeninsula was cut had to
come to terms with the 562 princely states. These were all tech-
nically sovereign but bound to the "paramountcy," as it was
called, of the British crown. The wealth, powers, capacities and
intentions of the individual sovereigns were as different as it is

possible to imagine. Some were great kings

with wide domin-
ions; some bore great titles
upon only a few square miles of ter-
ritory. By and large, at least in theory, they were all autocrats
with none to say them nay. Their territories, large or small,
210 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

were their personal property. They taxed at will and spent the
taxes as they pleased. Occasionally the central government at
Delhi, using the paramount sovereignty of the British Crown,
would intervene in some state or other and depose the ruler
when he abused powers too much. This did not often hap-
his

pen; had a free hand. They were

as a rule the separate sovereigns

Hindu, Muslim or Sikh by religion, and so far as the Sikhs in the

Punjab were concerned the princes and their subjects were
largely of the same faith. But through the long centuries of In-
dian history the Hindu and the Muslim had become so mixed

up that in many cases the ruling house might be of one faith and
the majority of its
subjects of another.
These inconsistencies were bad enough, and were added to by
the inconveniences of geography. But actually in their perform-
ance as governments the independent states exhibited the most
striking differences of quality and result. There were some, as
we have seen in speaking of Kashmir, in which government
consisted of the unmitigated whim of the ruler. There were
others such as Mysore where generations of enlightened and
benevolent princes had endowed the country with roads,
schools, irrigation and electricity well in advance of most dis-
tricts in British India. I know of no dynasty in any country
which has more legitimate reason for pride than that of the an-
cient house of Mysore. It should be proud (and I know the

Maharajah is, in his personally modest manner) because what it

did for the people of that country could so easily have been side-

stepped, avoided altogether or done in a desultory and half-

hearted way. The princes could have spent their money en-
tirely on diamonds and elephants, as other princes did. They did
not lack for gems or beasts, either (I saw more elephants there
than anywhere else), but they were decades ahead of their con-
temporaries in the intelligent effort to increase the welfare of
their subjects.

However, Mysore is a glowing exception. So is Baroda in one

way, because of a single enlightened and energetic prince in the
nineteenth century, and so is Travancore in another. In Travan-
core, as we have observed, accessibility to the sea brought in a
very early and continuous missionary activity which gave a
fillip to education, and the princely house had only to encour-
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 211

age and extend it. Cochin is much the same. These are very-
large countries with, relatively speaking, large incomes. But
when we come to Hyderabad, the largest of all, with the largest
income, we see the precise
opposite! The Muslim princes of that
dynasty, with a Hindu majority among their subjects, gave to
jewels and palaces the vast treasures that should have been spent
upon schools and roads and water supply and public services in
general. They embellished their capital, it is true, just as they did
their numerous palaces, but the
villages of the land were left to
toil and starve. In the recent reorganization of the states of In-

dia, certain administrative lines were redrawn and some minor

parts of Hyderabad went to Mysore, just as some parts of Bom-
bay province went to Hyderabad. In the new additions to
Mysore (the Hyderabad districts) it was found that every ma-
terial condition in the
villages was far below Mysore stand-
ards. It will take years to bring these new additions up to the
level of theirMysore neighbors in such simple matters as wa-
ter supply and communications. Such it is to be governed by
"the richest man in the world," as the Nizam of Hyderabad al-
ways used to be called.
And if there can be such differences between great states like
Mysore and Hyderabad, it is easy enough to imagine what the
whimsies and anomalies were among small, irresponsible and
vainglorious princes of lesser territories. There were many
among them who could farm out whole clusters of villages to
the nefarious middleman for years at a time so as to get one big
emerald to wear in a hat. The absurd cruelty of such arrange-
ments in the middle of the twentieth century often aroused
Nehru to bursts of wrath. It seems strange now that the British

permitted the system to endure for so long. They did so, it

seems, chiefly because they assumed for about a century that the
Indian princes were their best and most loyal friends in the
country. They always had plenty of trouble with British
India
but the princely states were stagnant backwaters; it was easier
to let them be.
The new new Pakistan could not let them be.
India and the
For Pakistan there was not much trouble; a few states only were
involved. India inherited the greater part of the problem, of
which Hyderabad was the biggest anomaly of all, claiming
its
212 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

independence right in the center of the Indian Union. Every

state was supposed to adhere to one or the other of the new
countries and most of them did during the spring and summer of
1947. In so doing they brought their headaches with them, their
unbalanced budgets and tangle of debts, their backward popula-
tions and spoiled, luxurious rulers.
There was really only one way to deal with this situation but
the astonishing thing is that it was taken. It worked and it has
been a resounding success. If you face such a hodgepodge of
disparate structure and have to take over responsibility for it
the only thing you can intelligibly do is to wipe it all out and
start over again. That was done. It was done to a very great ex-
tent within one year of the independence of India and the

process was complete by the time of the proclamation of the

Republic (1950). You might say that it was a species of slum
clearance. The ramshackle principalities were merged into big-

ger units, their rulers were pensioned off, all their public serv-
ices came under organized control and their people were ad-
mitted at last into the equal citizenship of the Indian Union, ex-

posed to the novelties of the vote and the regularized tax, the
free press and right of assembly which characterize democracies.
Credit for the first and most decisive stage of integration, that
which merged hundreds of states into large units and made them
equal parts of India, must go to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. This
old friend and adherent of Gandhi, who had come to him. as a
volunteer in early days, was an astute and successful lawyer. He
adopted the Gandhi rules and wore homespun, was a vegetarian,
recited the Gita, etc., etc., all during the great Gandhian revolu-
tion in India. Before that he had been as clever a lawyer as, for

example, Mohammed AH Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Patel

organized the Congress Party as it had never been organized be-
fore, when independence came he was a past master in the
and
manipulations of local politics. Very often he has been com-
pared to a "boss of Tammany Hall," the Democratic Party
machine in New York City, because his way of rewarding ambi-
tions, conciliating factions and soliciting votes was not dissimi-
lar. He
"paid off" or punished, as the case might be, in accord-
ance with the standards of party loyalty. But he was also a very
sincere adherent of Gandhi's, and although his notions of Gan-
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 213

dhian principles permitted him to favor capitalist development

whereas Nehru's notion of the same principles allowed for so-
cialist
development there never has been any doubt in my
mind that Patel was a sincere patriot, devoted to the national in-
terest above all
things.
I knew him a little, lunched in his house and talked with him at
length, during the period which followed Mahatma's assassina-
tion. WhenI returned to India the next
year, the first anniver-
me as an old friend. His re-
sary of the assassination, he greeted
markable intelligence was utterly different from Nehru's, was
aimed in a different direction and contained different elements
from the start, but they were united in a concern for the free-
dom of India. Together they constituted a complementary force
or combination of forces, and although they were often at log-
gerheads on specific issues, they supported each other on the
vital necessities for India.
Thus when Patel, as Minister for the States, undertook the
immense task of reorganizing the Indian princely states, he had
Nehru's support at every step. He had also the advantage of a
notably alert and vigorous chief of staff in this enterprise, Mr.
V. P. Menon, who has since published two volumes of reminis-
cence (with documentation) covering the critical period. And,
ahead of all of them, the last British Viceroy, Earl Mountbatten
of Burma, made it plain to the Indian Chamber of Princes that
the independence of India was going to be absolute, so far as
Great Britain was concerned that "paramountcy" would auto-
matically lapse, that they would then no longer have any rela-
tionship to the British Crown, that they could expect
no British
assistance in any attempt to impede these arrangements, and that

they must therefore either "go it alone" or adhere to one of

the two new countries before August 15, 1947.
Almost all of them made their choice in good rime and nego-
tiated the terms of union within a few months. These negotia-
tions, so far as India was concerned, were in the hands of Patel
and his lieutenant, V. P. Menon.
Patel combined them geographically, at first, with some

thought for communal (religious) differences.

What seemed
rather drastic in 1948 seems ordinary common sense today. In
some parts of the country there were almost innumerable small
214 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

states, forming a patchwork on the land: such were the little

in the Gujerat regions north of Bombay. They
principalities
could all be lumped together with no loss of local pride. In the
Punjab there were Sikh states like Kapurthala, Patiala and the
rest, which could most reasonably be combined into one unit.
Elsewhere a princely state could be added on to this province or
that, and of course the very largest princely states could be left,
for the time being, as units, although submitting their adminis-
tration to the central control.
This involved some complicated financial arrangements: the
princes had to be pensioned, their debts assumed, their treasuries
and tax systems absorbed by the central authority. batch of A
new, unfamiliar names sprang up to indicate some new states
thus brought into being: Rajasthan, Vindhya Pradesh, Madhya
Bharat and P.E.P.S.U. They were geographic combinations for
the most part, contiguous territory, although P.E.P.S.U. (Patiala
and East Punjab States Union), for the brjef period of its exist-
ence, was also considered under the communal aspect as a pre-
dominantly Sikh state.
That Patel brought all this about within a year without public
disorder or rebellion in the greater part of princely India was a

dazzling achievement. It had not been foreseen; indeed many

wise and great men, including Winston Churchill, had long de-
clared the problem of the sovereign princes to be an insuperable
obstacle to Indian union and freedom. Patel settled all that. With
the single exception of Hyderabad, which had to be integrated

by force, the main body of the Indian Union came into being
easily, quickly, as if by nature. Kashmir, a very special case, re-
mains special to this
day: we have seen how it differs from all

others.
Patel died in December, 1950, three years minus a month
after the assassination of Gandhi. The
he so brilliantly
states
combined out of the outworn feudalisms did not long survive
him, but not because of anything invalid in their original crea-
tion. They succumbed and were rearranged in accordance with
a new principle which grew up after independence and involved
allthe twenty-six states of free India, old and new, in a tumul-
tuous debate. The new principle, which has brought about a re-
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 215

drawing of frontiers in the general equilibration of claims, is

that of language.

The princely states were pretty artificial, after all; many were
relatively recent; some existed merely as rewards for service to
the British Crown.
They were personal, feudal and transitory.
Language, however, is a fundamental element in any society,
and many or most great nations in history have found it their

principal element of union. It is far more vital than race, an-

cestry or religion in the Western world: France is a country in-

habited by Frenchmen, who are French mainly because French
is their mother tongue. They may be of all origins, all anthro-
pological measurements and all
religions; the language makes
them French.
In India this is not so and never has been. There are hundreds
of languages in the vast peninsula, and twenty-six of them are
recognized as the chief languages of the country. Race and re-
ligion have proved to be elements of union more powerful than
language. A Hindu knows his fellow Hindu not by language
often they may have none in common; often they may have
only English, the language imported by the temporary ruler
and yet Hinduism is a tremendous bond. So is Islam. The Indian

national revolution depended for its success on such bonds as

these, in addition to the natural desire of all peoples for inde-

pendence: the nation, so to speak, felt itself to be a nation for

other reasons, and the national revolution was brought about
with English as its principal linguistic instrument.
It the language difficulty had not been fully
almost seems as if

realized during the Gandhian years from 1919 to 1947. All

thoughtful men were aware of it; much was written and spoken
on the subject; but it is
only in recent years that it has become
obsessive. Gandhi himself tried to learn something of the main
Indian languages. His own mother
tongue was Gujerati, from
which it was not difficult to pass to a simplified Hindi, or Hin-
dustani-Urdu, understood throughout most of the north. He
216 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

had considerable trouble with southern languages, however,

since they are totally different, and only made a little headway
with Tamil, the language of Madras. With this as with other
subjects (such as yoga exercises) he found that he
had not time
enough to go thoroughly into the matter and so resolutely aban-
doned the effort; he had no use for smatterings. He was content
had to be content with English as the linguistic base of his
life's work.

Rajaji, whose Ideas we have discussed earlier, was of course a

Tamil-speaker; Tamil is the mother tongue of the old province
of Madras and of the new Tamil state of Madras. This meant
that he relied upon English in his communications, written or

spoken, with his colleagues from other parts of India: his end-
less talks with Gandhi, through the three decades of utmost

significance, were in English.

As for Nehru, we have already related that he talks English in
his sleep: we have it on the
testimony of his fellow prisoners,
chiefly the late Maulana Sahib and also Mahadev Desai. His
mother tongue is Hindustani-Urdu in its purest form, as it is
spoken in Allahabad, his birthplace. It was the great language of
north India and was rapidly spreading when partition came:
now it is
diverging into two separate languages, since in Pakis-
tan they try to Persianize or Arabize it as much as possible, and
in India they endeavor to Sanskritize it, to make it "purer."
Thus, to take only the three highest examples of the national
leadership, they had three different mother tongues: Gandhi's,
Nehru's, Rajaji's. They had one lingua -franca, if you choose to
employ that rather denigratory term, which was English.
However, English was by no means a lingua -franca to that

generation. It seems to be becoming a lingua -franca nowadays

because a larger and larger number of people speak it more and
more badly. Moreover, most of the English-speaking people of
India nowadays use the language only with each other: they no

longer have to deal with English people very much, and cer-
tainly not in government, parliament, courts or civil service.
In Gandhi's generation and those just after it (such as Neh-
ru's) a perfectly free and easy, natural English, an unreflecting

English, was the rule. Gandhiji himself had no trace of any par-
ticular regional or national accent, although his way of talking
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 22 j

was own. In his deliberate, thoughtful manner, choosing

all his

each word, he talked English as his natural

tongue: not his
mother tongue but the language he had most occasion to use
throughout his life. Nehru, of course, talks like an Englishman.
Rajaji never had a moment's hesitation with syntax or vocabu-
lary, and writes singularly clear, almost classical English, but he
does possess a slight south-Indian accent in speaking.
In linguistics it is most important to differentiate between the
layers of consciousness to which the language applies and within
which it functions. The United Nations, in facing this problem
f or
example in Trieste adopted a rather useful set of distinc-
tions. In their testings of that multilingual area they classified
the results in three groups: the mother tongue, the language of
the school, the language of the market place.
For example, in certain areas of Trieste, the city and its envi-
rons, we may find that the language of the school is standard or
classical Italian (roughly speaking, the language of Dante) . We
may find that the language of the market place is a Triestino
dialect which is a cross between Italian and Croatian. may We
find that the mother tongue is the standard or current version of
Serbo-Croat. All these are very different and a person speaking
only one of them could not understand the other two. Persons in
Trieste, subjected to this pattern of linguistics, are obliged to
communicate in all three, which means that their mastery of any
one thereby limited.
is

Thepsychological effect of two-language instruction in

schools, such as obtained in India and still does, has not been
studied in any scientific manner. Gandhi found it very inhibiting
in his childhood; it vastly increased his shyness and his fear of
school. He started in Gujerati and then moved on to English.
In those days they started English very early, generally at the age
of seven, and the proportion of instruction in English increased
as the pupil advanced, until in the secondary schools it became

predominant. In colleges and universities English was, and still

is,the language of instruction in all subjects. When I went to
the Hindu University of Benares some years ago I found that
even Sanskrit language and literature, as well as Hindu phi-
losophy, were taught in English, that is,
with English as the
medium of instruction.
218 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

What all this does to the psychological aptitudes of the stu-

dent at different stages must be guessed; we do not know. But
we can say with some assurance that the United Nations classi-
fications, languages of the mother, the school and the market
in India as they weigh in even the most
place, do not weigh
mixed-up areas of Europe. In Europe the language of the
mother tends to prevail, not only in childhood but throughout
life, and is recognized as determining nationality. In India the

language of the mother, although important to the child, often

fades into disuse later on, especially if it is a strictly regional

tongue. Its place is taken by the market languages (Urdu being

the most widespread) or the school language which is, for India
at large, English.
This has been the situation for many decades, with individual
variations. There were a considerable number of eminent In-
dians during the Gandhian generation who had used English so

constantly, and had so thoroughly forgotten their particular

mother tongue or market tongue, that they really had no other
language. They were as English, linguistically, as it is possible
to be, using that language in their most intimate discourse, in the

family for instance, or in personal and private papers such as

diaries. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was an
extreme example. He knew very little Urdu and none of the
other languages of the country he had created. Once he was
compelled to pray publicly in a mosque and had no choice but
to do so in English.

Bombay, the city and the province (now state), speaks Guj-
erati or Mahratti as mother
tongues and market tongues. The
vast agglomeration of Calcutta speaks Bengali. These languages
all have their different
scripts and their distinctive syntax. It is
not at all surprising that the many leaders of India who came
from those two cities were compelled to rely on English for
their whole public careers: and
among them were Tilak and
Jinnah, on one side, and Tagore and Das on the other.
This bilingual leadership of a multilingual nation did very
well for fifty or sixty years, and although there were advo-
cates of a single national
language, there seemed no great ur-
gency in the matter until independence came. Then, with gath-
ering impetus, and particularly in the last five or six years, the
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 219

question of all these tongues became important to pride, to

prestige, and to And, as seems natural enough in retro-
politics.
spect, the neglected mother tongue asserted itself over both
market tongue and the language of the school.
It
may be seen that the movement for the independence of
the mother tongues, followed
by the demand for statehood
based on mother tongues, would follow freedom. Freedom must,
by any imply the use of one's own language in public
definition,
life. But might not have caught the Indian imagination so
it

swiftly, we think, if freedom had not been accompanied by a

well-nourished and organized movement to make Hindi the su-
preme national language. (The official
guidebooks, by the way,
issued for the use of tourists, still say that Hindi is "the" na-
tional language, whereas there are twenty-six.)
Hindi swept and garnished version of the old Hindustani-
is a
Urdu which was once the language of the whole north and
some of the central areas. Up to the time of partition and inde-
pendence it was making great headway, just by its own natural
momentum, and was spreading outside its earlier boundaries.
The moment it acquired so many eager adherents, wishing to
substitute it for it also
all
acquired a great many oppo-
others,
nents. The movement for the separate mother tongues got its
start in the south, but there were similar movements in west and

east, with Bombay and Calcutta as the centers. Indeed Bengal

had always been a linguistic unit and its distinct language was
never really threatened; but it had great influence to bring, in a
sympathetic manner, on the demands of other linguistic areas
for unity.
Thus the 1950*8 saw a rising demand for new states based on
language the language, mind you, of the mother: the tradi-
tional, historic language of an area as taught by mother to child.
If the great regions had been impervious to the movements of

population for the past century this might have seemed simple
enough, but actually no linguistic area today is without large
which came from elsewhere and use (from mother to
minorities
child) a different tongue from that traditional in the region.
Even you granted language as the basis for statehood you had
if

to consider where it began and where it ended. Where does

Tamil begin and where does it end, for instance? There are
220 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

Tamils all over India, with large concentrations in industrial

And
areas. Bombay well, what a mixture!
The practical difficulties of drawing state lines on linguistic
considerations are obvious enough, but the theoretical ones are
worse. In Gandhi's generation anything which tended to di-
vide India was regarded as retrogressive and undesirable. Now
certainly language, considered as the basis for a political state
of semisovereign powers, is a "fissiparous" force in the earlier
Gandhian sense. It tends to emphasize division and difference.
As such it was
theoretically undesirable, but it has come to pass
just the same because in recent years it has been shown that the

people of south, east and west want it. Nehru himself, who has
no wish to encourage "fissiparous" tendencies, yielded to it as
being the will of the democracy.

So the States Reorganization Commission made its final report

to Nehru in 1955 and he submitted it to the people of the vari-
ous states for debate. It set off a
period of the liveliest
dispute
on languages and state frontiers. In some areas, as may be re-
membered, there were actual riots on the language question
(riots in which the Communists delighted to aid the disorder, al-

though what they care about language one cannot imagine). In

the end, the frontiers were redrawn and the new India consists
of only fourteen states and seven special territories administered
from the center at Delhi. The centrally administered territories
are frontier and tribal regions not yet equipped to govern them-
selves; the fourteen states have been created out of all the old

provinces and regions, with geography and economics in mind

but, on the whole, with language as the primary determinant.
These states are Andhra, Assam, Bihar, Bombay, Jammu-Kash-
mir, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Madras, Mysore, Orissa, Punjab,
Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal Each of them has a
constitutional governor that is, a sort of viceroy, above the

political battle although often an old member of the Congress

Party and a working chief minister and cabinet responsible to
the legislature. That is, each state reproduces the constitutional
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 221

apparatus of the center at Delhi, which in turn reproduces that

of the sovereign and prime minister in London: it is the
system
inherited from England. In all of these states the
only prince
who acts as constitutional governor is the Maharajah of Mysore
(Sir Jaya Chamaraja Wadiyar), whose personal popularity in his
large kingdom is an element of stability. His family, the house
of Wadiyar, originated in remote
antiquity; in modern times it
has been distinguished for benevolence and
public spirit; thus
the Maharajah, himself a very
exceptional person, has proved to
be the only sovereign left in India who fits into the new scheme
of things.
There was considerable turmoil over this reorganization of
states both before and after it went into effect on November i,

1956. The redrawn frontiers transferred some areas from one

old province to another new state, chiefly on the basis of lan-
guage, and some jealousies ensued. There were more serious
troubles in the State of Bombay, with its rival languages (Guj-
erati in the north and Mahratti in the south). Some historic
units vanished into larger classifications with new and unfamiliar
names. There was considerable administrative readjustment, al-
though not so much as you might expect because English was,
and remains, the chief administrative language for all the states.
And, of course, there were some who declared themselves dis-
satisfied with the settlement.
Now, to me the odd thing is that none of
seems to have
this
made much difference. That language may
is, be "fissiparous"
but at this present moment it does not seem to have created any
fissures. India is more united today than it was when I did my
first fairly extensive traveling there in 1948-1950. The disturb-
ances over language were chiefly in Bombay, which, as we
know, is bilingual at the base and trilingual at the top. Even in
Bombay the excitement has all died down. In the other states
an easy accommodation has been made between the mother
tongues and English. The only loser has been Hindi, which, un-
der the present arrangements, is not likely to become the na-^
tional language for many decades, if ever.
What I found in the southern states, the focus of the lan-
guage agitation, was that English
continued to be very much
the language of government. In the legislatures English is com-
222 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

monly used, and in most state capitals I was told that the pro-
for ordinary debating purposes
portion of legislators using it

was about two-thirds. The other third employs the state lan-
be. Kerala reverses
guage, whatever it
may the proportion;

Malayalam, its and regional language, predominates. Ma-

state
dras uses more Tamil than English but both are current. In
other words, once the linguistic state or linguistic unit is ac-
cepted, things go on just about as before.
The four main southern languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kana-
rese and Malayalam. There are others, but these are the old
mother tongues sanctioned by many centuries of usage. They
are, as we have often remarked, quite diif erent from the north-
ern languages based on Sanskrit. Their script is totally different
and so is their sound; a foreigner can perceive little more than
that; he must take the scholars' word for the rest. The scholars
say that these non-Sanskrit languages, "Dravidian" in origin
(that is, native to India before the Aryans brought Sanskrit with
them from Central Asia), are as alien to the northern tongues
asthey are to English or French.
I have pondered over their scripts in an ignorant way, travel-

ing through the whole south last year. It so happened that a Ma-
dras publisher (on a grant from the Ford Foundation) was put-

ting out a number of foreign books in these languages just as I

was there. A book of mine, a small life of Gandhi in a biographi-
cal series originating in New
York, came out in all four of the
chief southern languages at that time. I was given copies and
tried to compare the characteristics of their identical text. It
seemed to me that the four scripts, Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese
and Malayalam, were quite distinct. A main difference visible to
any eye was the degree of circularity or angularity in the let-
ters: one of them
(Malayalam) looks like scroll writing. Ob-
viously the demand for independence in language on the part of
these states is based on script as much as sound: if a schoolboy
must learn one of these scripts, as well as English, he does not
want to be saddled with another as well. And yet some of the
scripts come rather close to each other even in appearance, so
that the suggestion given by an examination of them is that
someday they might cohere into one. In actual sound the gulf
between three of the languages (Tamil, Telugu and Kanarese)
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 223

not so great. Beyond mere sound, a

foreigner must rely upon
is

what he is told, which depends, very often, upon who does the
telling. Language enthusiasts tend to emphasize the differences,
but some judicious informants have told me that these
may be
diminished with time and the of
intermingling populations.
Certainly English comes out the winner in all this conflict of
language. There are supposed to be something like four million
English-speaking persons in India. Myimpulse, on hearing this
figure for the first time, was rather like Mark Twain's when he
was told that there were fifteen million Jews in the world.
"Nonsense!" said Mark Twain, "I personally know more than
that." Of
course the various levels of English spoken in India
must be taken into account, and no reasonable person would ex-
pect the same kind of English from a roomboy in Kashmir as
from an editor or teacher in Bombay. But the fact remains that
a vast number of persons do speak, read and write English; an
even vaster number speak it to some extent, and even under-
stand it, without reading or writing. The principal newspapers
in all the great states are in English; the central government,

perforce, is operated almost entirely in English; the courts and

universities cannot do without English. In local government, as
I discovered this past year, many persons prefer to use English
rather than the local language, the mother tongue, and this in
spite of the fact that both are known.
In other words, the central government at Delhi is compelled
to use English because it is the only language common to repre-
sentatives from all parts of India, the only one that has a
chance of general comprehension. This is obvious.
What was not obvious until it happened was that even in gov-
ernment at the state level, where as the result of a great debate
the mother tongues have been made not only official (which
they always were) but the actual basis of the state, English still
wins. In other words, if you are a representative in the state leg-
islature of Mysore you can talk Kanarese, which is the language
of the state; you can talk English, or you can talk any other rec-
In
ognized Indian language at the risk of not being understood.
fact most representatives talk English.
Put it another way: English wins at the center (Delhi) be-
cause there are too many Indian languages, too many representa-
224 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

tives who understand only their own mother tongue and Eng-
lish, but no other Indian tongue.

English wins at the state level for quite a different reason:

here there are really only two languages to choose from, the
localmother tongue and English, both of which are understood,
and yet English is chosen as being more suited to public aif airs
and parliamentary procedure.
What it comes to, I think, is that English is no longer really a
"foreign language" in India. For many generations the entire
educated class has depended upon the English language for its
commerce with the world at large. It was a foreign language a
century ago, and was learned originally as a means of entering
government service or dealing with the British government. It
has gone far beyond that now. There has evolved a rather dis-
tinct Indian version of English, as distinct in accent and termi-

nology as the languages of Australia, New

Zealand and the
United States, but still English. This is the language spoken
in innumerable government offices, schools and law courts

throughout the land. The actual files for generations back are
all in English. The millions who use this language, which we
may Indo-English, have never been in England and many of
call
them may never have spoken to an Englishman, but their daily
linguistic instrument English just the same.
is

Among well-to-do people, who send their children to expen-

sive English schools either in India or in England, a much more

European accent and vocabulary may be heard; often the lan-

guage they speak is indistinguishable from that spoken in Eng-
land. I know a considerable number of cases in which English

actually becomes the mother tongue. My own acquaintance is

not enormous but affords many examples of husband and wife
who speak to each other always in English and whose children
are brought up with English as the mother tongue. This occurs

especially when husband and wife have different Indian mother

tongues: when the girl from Madras marries the boy from
Delhi, for instance.
In the existing situation I do not see that English will be su-
perseded; it is more likely to be extended. We
may look in vain
forany parallel to this obstinacy of fact over theory, of practice
over desire. Sometimes the linguistic situation of China is
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 225

brought into comparison, but quite falsely: the many dialects of

China, sometimes mutually incomprehensible, were always
united by the common ideograph or
picture script. All have the
same roots and all are susceptible of amalgamation to the offi-
cial Mandarin
language (itself a dialect of classical Chinese).
English was used in China, too, for practical communication be-
tween people with no other language in common; I have no
doubt that it still is; but Chinese can be welded into one lan-
guage in time because it possesses a common origin and a simi-
larity of structure in all its variants. This is not true in India.
In other cases, Ireland and Israel being two, a determined
effort has revived ancient, ancestral
languages as the alternative
to English. In still others, particularly in Africa, English has re-
mained in government after independence, but only for the sake
of official convenience: it is
likely to diminish or even disappear
in time, except as a diplomatic accomplishment. Wherever there
is one established mother tongue, a natural national language,
English must have that fate,it would seem in common sense.

Itmust become what French is to us, a second language, one we

enjoy and appreciate to the utmost, but in which we do not
conduct our ordinary daily affairs of commerce, industry or
state.
One more false parallel must be cited to show how unique the
Indian case really is. In history we are familiar with a number of
stateswhere the ruling classes habitually spoke a language dif-
ferent from that of the people. Such was Russia under the Czars
for a good many decades, before the Slavophile movement
made the Russian language popular even among aristocrats. The

language of the court and aristocracy was French. Many of

these people spoke only French to their children and to each
other; they wrote letters and diaries in French. But never, at any
moment, was French the language of the schools or the law
courts. It was a class language but a private one, not public. We
know from Tolstoy that a good many Russian aristocrats could

hardly speak Russian at all, and yet if they were haled before
a
court of law they had to do the best they could at it.

A
class language is hardly more than a "fashionable" lan-

guage.When I went to Warsaw years ago I discovered that

French was the language of the "fashionable" people there,
226 NEHRU: THE YEARS OF POWER

even with each other. Before the unification of Italy French

was the language of the aristocracy, as it was also in Germany.
Not so long ago French was the usual language of the upper
class throughout the Middle East. But never, in any of these
cases, did it become the language of the state. In India it may
be said that English is the language of the state.
No other country is in this situation. Switzerland is trilin-
gual, of course,
but no one of the three languages is supreme,
and a larger nation would find it very difficult to conduct all
its business in so
many tongues. Ireland uses both Gaelic and
English, the Philippines use English and Tagalog. But India is
a multilingual nation employing English as the medium of pub-
lic aifairs, and as such is
unique.

To hear some Indians talk you would think that this special
condition was a grave danger to all and sundry, a peril to unity,
a cloud across the future. good A
many heated speeches have
been made in parliament on the subject as well as in the provin-
cial legislatures. Those who get so excited in the matter are for-

getting that in fact India has existed on a multilingual basis for

some dozens of centuries already, and still possesses one of the
most distinct national characters to be seen on earth. Evidently
the Indian nation does not depend on language and probably
never will.
It is a relief to find that Nehru is quite philosophical about
this. He would prefer a single national language, of course, and
Hindi is the candidate because it is spoken by more people than

any other; but he knows a fact when he sees one, and he be-
lieves that the people's will should be carried out whenever it
can be ascertained.
"We at the center," he says
equably, "were perfectly willing
to let the states have their own way in this matter, but we
wanted to be quite sure what it was that they wanted."
This is his way of referring to the procedure after 1955,
when he submitted the States Reorganization program to pub-
lic debate and vote. It was a
glowing example of his deference
 Sovereign States and Mother Tongues 227

to the popular will, even though at the time he was under

criticism for not carrying out his own.
And in general it is plain that since the Constitution of India
came into effect in 1950 Nehru has been scrupulous in sustaining
it. There have been a fair number of amendments to the Con-

stitution (six in five years) to

get the land reform enacted, for
;

instance, required an amendment. But so far as the separate

states are concerned Nehru and his central have
government
been anxious not to infringe upon their rights or privileges.
This was out of a natural concern for the establishment: if a na-
tion has a new constitution of a federal nature, that nation wants
to give it time to grow, to become solidified, to become a part
of the consciousness of the citizen. Interference with the states
would not serve these purposes.
The went through the two great phases we
state structure
have indicated: first, the amalgamation and integration of all
the princely states into the Indian Republic, and second, the re-
drawing of frontiers in the States Reorganization plan, largely
on the linguistics basis. Once the result was achieved Nehru did
his best to see it maintained without interference.
Sometimes it I have
has not been easy. In previous chapters
tried to show how Kashmir, anomalous position, with In-
in its

dian troops occupying most of the state, has been given some-
thing approaching autonomy. This may be a case of leaning
over backward. Kerala in recent years, with its Commu-
nist administration, invited special attention from the central

government as well as from foreigners; its state rights were

not infringed upon, and its only genuine clash with Delhi has
been with the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the
education bills. By and large every state has made its own way
under the law, dependent on the center for a great deal of as-
sistance in public works and food supplies, but locally self-gov-

erning, speaking the language of choice and maintaining

all the

or inherited distinctions. It makes a pattern the world

regional
has not seen before but it is nonetheless valid for that.