Though constitutional guarantees and planned policies say otherwise, Urdu-speaking people in India have had a hard time trying to conserve their language and culture.
Language is a silent index of culture, and multilingualism is in no way a threat to nationhood. Language has always been an emotive bond in human societies. Languages, not religions, make nations. That’s why the two-nation theory was wrong.
No language can be termed an offshoot of any particular religion, caste, creed or faith. All languages are a product of a given society. One of the major reasons for Nathuram Godse’s hatred, prompting him to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi (as testified by Godse in court) was Gandhiji’s love for Urdu and advocacy in favour of Hindustani with Devanagari and Persian script.
The University Grants Commission has now asked universities to celebrate International Mother Language Day on February 21, 2018. In 1999, UNESCO had resolved to celebrate this day to mark the killing of four Bengali students on February 21, 1952 – the students wanted to use Bengali in what was then known as East Pakistan. The day is a national holiday in Bangladesh.
UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists 2,500 endangered languages around the world. If a language is spoken by less than 10,000 people, it is considered endangered. India tops the list with 197 endangered languages. Of these, 81 are ‘vulnerable’ languages, 63 ‘definitely endangered’, six ‘severally endangered’ and 42 ‘critically endangered’. In the last five decades, more than 220 languages have died in our country.
Reading the constitution
Though the constitution does not declare any language as the national language and Hindi is only the ‘official language’, yet of the 780 languages in India, only 22 languages are constitutionally-recognised in Schedule VIII of the constitution. One needs to appreciate that the prime minister himself talked about our rich linguistic diversity in his very first answer in a recent conversationwith school children on examination stress.
Article 29 of the Indian constitution lays down that any section of citizens with a distinct language, script and culture shall have the right to conserve the same. This is an absolute right and the visionary framers of the constitution have not subjected it to any restrictions. In Jagdev Singh Sidhanti vs Pratap Singh Daulta, the Supreme Court held that the right includes the right “to agitate for the protection of the language”.
Article 347 lays down that “on a demand being made in that behalf, the President may, if he is satisfied that a substantial proportion of the population of a State desires the use of any language spoken by them to be recognized by that State, direct that such language shall also be officially recognized throughout that State or any part thereof for such purposes as he may specify”.