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Tuesday, Sep 18, 2007
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Karnataka

Who owns Kannada?

Aspirates are seldom heard in spoken Kannada on the radio

The resentment over the influx of non-Kannadigas, and anxieties that the native Kannada speakers are being reduced to an irrelevant minority — as they are very nearly so in Bangalore — is now more or less a given in popular discourse.

This was not always so. Areas across the borders of present day Karnataka inhabited by Kannada speakers were once part of the Kannada country and are even now claimed for Karnataka. The reverse too is true.

Half a century ago, before the linguistic reorganisation of States, the erstwhile princely state of Mysore like some other princely states in peninsular India had attracted and even invited non-native migrants from across their borders and in due time, made these migrant communities their own.

The freemasonry of the feudal order and the subject-hood of its citizens allowed for such unusual transactions.

Language identities which at no time are cast in stone cannot become ossified.

It was not unusual for communities across the divides of caste, class, education and social status, strongly rooted in Kannada language and living not necessarily in proximity to speakers of neighbouring languages, also to have another, some times more than one, language.

This writer, for instance, very much of the lower-lower middle class from Kolar town, grew up with four languages: of the home and the classroom; the bazaar, the gold mines; and the countryside, not to speak of a patois of all these languages (Kannada, Urdu, Tamil and Telugu) spoken and understood only by the extended kin group. English came very much later.

This was by no means a unique process of growing up; other, far more distinguished, Kannada writers have written about their multilingual sensibilities, fluent in three or more languages long before the three language formula became the official norm.

It is sometimes argued that the creation of a united Karnataka has damaged this multi-lingual character of the Kannada sensibility. This is not so.

If in pre-integration days the Kannada sensibility was enriched by the cross-fertilisation with cultures of Telugu and Tamil as well as Marathi, some Urdu and the minor languages of coastal Karnataka (and vice-versa), seen at its best in the culture of folk literature the popular cinema, post 1956 the Kannada sensibility has been enriched by forces that were till recently dormant, powerless.

Consider, for instance, the disconnect that now exists between the way Kannada is spoken and written. One has only to listen to the voices and accents and the pronunciations on the radio (not the Chi-Chi Kannada of the FM stations) to understand that the shifts that are taking place. Accents and pronunciations that once used to provoke superior mirth among the Kannada caste-class elite have now become part of Received Kannada. Aspirates, for instance, are seldom heard in spoken Kannada on the radio.

It is only a matter of time before the distinction between the short and the long vowels too may cease to exist, at least in speech, as has happened in some other Indian languages. For instance, the initial vowels in the words, Punya and Poornima, are both pronounced short in spoken Assamese though the written language retains the distinction.

All this bespeaks an irreversible democratisation of the ownership of the language whose creative use (and abuse), once the monopoly of a caste-class elite, is now open to all. The fear of what this loss of control, the inescapable fallout of influx, portends lies at the root of the growing of insularity in the state.

M.S. Prabhakara

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