Delegitimization of minority languages in Census impacts education in mother tongue
Throughout history, India’s linguistic and cultural diversity has been considered the subcontinent’s greatest resource. This resource, however, has presented the Indian government with obstacles that have tried and tested its democratic values and institutions. In order for the state to function cohesively, a common medium of communication or a ‘link language’ was required. As with any other issue that involves groups with vested interests, the issue of deciding upon India’s lingua franca attracted controversy ever since Independence. At the center of this controversy was the debate over whether Hindi (the Sanskritized version of Hindustani) should replace English as the official administrative language. English was a remnant leftover from the British Raj; while a substantially larger proportion of Indians understood Hindi, Dravidian-speaking southern India opposed Hindi imposition.
The appointment of a language as official implied an unfair advantage to its speakers in the well-paid, privileged, nation-wide bureaucracies. The Constitution gave the states the autonomy to choose, and thus legitimize, the official language of the state (Article 345). When the Constitution was adopted, 14 languages were recognized in the Eighth Schedule. With the linguistic reorganization of states and the formation of new states, the scheduled languages grew to 22 (Constitution of India, 2019). This left out hundreds of languages used by people within India as their mother tongue without any official recognition. Groups speaking these languages are relegated to linguistic ‘minorities’, although the population of some of these minoritized groups exceeds 3 million — larger than certain European nations (King, 1997, quoted in Groff 2017).
Implications of the politics of language can be linked causatively with national development (Weinstein & Thayer, 1990). Through specific language choices and legislation, minority languages are delegitimized and their speakers marginalized. Such language planning policies in India can be contextualised using Weinstein & Thayer’s assumptions:
- A national political regime requires an exclusive national language (with narratives such as ‘nation-building’ and ‘national unity’)
- Centralized political regimes require a centralized language policy (such as Three Language Formula)
- Modern political regimes require the use of a foreign language (English Hegemony)
First, the question of an exclusive national language for India was made relevant upon Independence, when Nehru advocated for Hindustani as the national language for the sake of national unity while ignoring the existence of minority languages despite the 1951 census listing over 700 of them (King, 1997). When the state ignores or denies linguistic diversity, it minimizes the status held by minority languages, and its action of denial reflects political motivations and ideological assumptions. Reasons for its denial of linguistic differences usually revolve around group unity (Groff, 2017). It is primarily through acknowledging the existence of a language that its status can be elevated. Through invisibilization of minority languages in the Constitution and the Census, the state delegitimizes the language’s existence and practice, which may over time lead to its extinction. Along with this two-pronged approach of the legitimization of one and delegitimization of many, centralized language policies like the Three Language Formula contribute to creating a hierarchy of languages in India, with English dominating the education system, followed by Hindi, then the regional dominant languages, and finally the minority and tribal languages that occupy the bottom rung, with very real consequences for their speakers.
The initial step towards assigning a hierarchical status to India’s eclectic mixture of languages involves acknowledging their existence through surveys. The Grierson Linguistic Survey of India (2nd Edition, 1966) listed 179 languages and 544 dialects (Sarker, 1964), while the most recent People’s Linguistic Survey of India listed 780 living languages. Articles 29, 29–2, and 30 of the Indian Constitution protect the interests of linguistic minorities and their right to establish educational institutions. A significant challenge lies in state recognition and promotion of these languages and dialects, as they undergo delegitimization starting with the Indian Census.
The inequitable manner whereby minority languages are assigned their status originates from structural problems within the census itself. The census, being the primary aggregator of all information regarding languages in India, is also tasked with classifying these languages as either languages or dialects. Most mother tongues fall under the latter category. The 1951 census reported the presence of at least 783 mother tongues; later Censuses reported a typically higher number of “rationalized mother tongues” (see Table 1).
Thousands of mother tongues were being reported in the census (see Table 1). The census decided to further classify them by subjecting the returned mother tongues through thorough linguistic scrutiny and ‘rationalization’. The 2011 Census Data on Language and Mother Tongues released recently (2018) documents 19,569 raw returns of mother tongues, which were rationalized into 1,369 mother tongues, further regrouped into 121 languages (Census Of India 2011, Paper 1 of 2018).
This process of rationalization exemplifies status planning as it narrows down and selects which dialects/mother tongues are qualified to be classified as languages. Once a spoken variety of mother tongue qualifies and is named a language, it becomes legitimate: laws and policies may subsequently promote it through officialization. Similarly, those mother tongues that are not named languages undergo subtle proscription; they lose the opportunity to be promoted through the state, including being one of the first languages within the 3-Language Formula (Groff, 2017).
The unrecognized languages cannot be used as mediums of instructions in public schools, putting linguistic minorities at a disadvantage by hampering their educational opportunities. Any decisions to be made relating to language in education are reduced to political considerations rather than purposes of facilitating education. Literacy rates tend to be significantly below average for cultural and linguistic minorities in India: nearly 25% of all primary school children face moderate to severe learning disadvantages due to their linguistic background (Jhingran, 2005). Moreover, drop-out rates tend to be higher among students of these groups. Children who are educated in a language of instruction that they do not fully understand results in them missing out on the content being taught (Mohanty, 2005). Along with the resulting dearth in learning outcomes, these language differences may also induce miscommunication between the students and their teachers (Groff, 2017).
The opportunity for a student to be taught in their mother tongue in their primary school depends on whether their dialect qualifies for the status of language as per the census. In 1956, the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) formulated the Three Language Formula (TLF) which was accepted by a conference of chief ministers in 1961 and enforced in 1968 (Kulkarni and Jolad, 2019). Many states have adopted, modified, and rejected TLF to suit their needs and political priorities. Critiques of TLF have underscored the policy’s failure to distinguish between mother tongues and umbrella regional languages, thereby ignoring the educational requirements of those minority students whose mother tongue is not the same as their regional language (Group on Minorities Education, 1991). In such scenarios, these minority students end up having to learn four languages and three to four scripts, for their first language in school is different from the language spoken at home. This bias impacts learning outcomes as well, since those children who are unfamiliar with the medium of instruction, especially in primary school, are bound to face greater learning challenges as compared to their peers (Jhingran, 2005).
Although it is known in education pedagogy that children are adept at learning multiple languages at an early age, language acquisition is primarily through exposure and communication rather than the imposition of additional languages through formal means in the classroom (Kulkarni and Jolad, 2019). The Draft of New Education Policy 2019 highlights children’s capacity to learn multiple languages between ages 2 to 8, and states that “[the] social capacity [of children] must be harnessed” and the cognitive benefits of multilingualism be reaped. It endorses medium of instruction in the mother-tongue/local language “at least until Grade 5 but preferably Grade 8”. It also stresses that “local languages, including tribal languages, are respected and those excellent textbooks are developed in local languages, when possible, and outstanding teachers are deployed to teach in these languages” (MHRD, 2019). However, such steps cannot be taken unless these languages are formally recognized and legitimized by the state.
The Census’ process of classifying languages needs to realize its potential long-term ramifications that materialize at the policy implementation stage. Decisions regarding mother tongue rationalization that award differing statuses to minority languages need to be made on an equitable basis by taking into account the social and economic consequences for minority groups. Importantly, the educational and learning functions of mother tongues and the needs of primary school children should be given higher priority than a blanket imposition of 3-Language Formula across India.
With the census of 2021 right around the corner, it is imperative that the offices of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India take cognizance of the language status planning and (de)legitimization underlying language classification by the census. The scrutinising frameworks used to classify mother tongues as ‘rationalised’ or as distinct languages need to be made transparent. An immediate step that the census can take to address the delegitimization of minority languages is to release the full list of returned and rationalized mother tongues, for it is initially through acknowledging their existence that the status of a language can be elevated.
(Aayush Agarwal and Shivakumar Jolad)
Note: A version of the above article has been published in The India Forum with title The Pedagogical Problems of the Census. Aayush Agarwal is a student of public policy and international relations at FLAME University, Pune. Shivakumar Jolad is an associate professor of public policy at FLAME.
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