The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : India has always been bilingual, says Ananthamurthy

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jan 05, 2008
ePaper

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

India has always been bilingual, says Ananthamurthy

Staff Reporter

‘The more literate you are, the fewer languages you know’

– Photo: K. Murali Kumar

Sharing a thought: S. Shettar (from left), historian; U.R. Ananthamurthy, writer; Rajat Kanta Ray, Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal; and Sugata Bose, professor, Harvard University, at the inauguration of a seminar on ‘Identity, emotion and culture: Languages and literature of the subcontinent, A.D. 900 to 1971’, in Bangalore on Friday.

Bangalore: Three phrases coined by poet A.K. Ramanujan describe linguistic identity more accurately than “mother-tongue”: mane matu (language of the home), beedi matu (language of the street) and attada matu (language of the “upper floor”), according to Jnanpith Award winner U.R. Ananthamurthy.

He was speaking at the inauguration of a four-day seminar on “Identity, emotion and culture: Languages and literature of the Subcontinent, A.D. 900 to 1917” organised here by the Indian Council of Historical Research, Southern Regional Centre.

“India has always been bilingual or trilingual. Ramanujan, for instance, spoke Tamil with his mother, used Kannada in his literary work and had conversations in English with his father who thought the language would take him far. And R.K. Narayan wrote in English, but his stories took place in Karnataka,” Prof. Ananthamurthy said.

He said, “It appears, however, the more literate you are, the fewer languages you know. No, I am not advocating illiteracy, but several languages have been preserved by ordinary people. The world of folk art, ‘janapada loka’, is an example of how people in rural India have preserved languages and kept the wisdom of proverbs alive.”

There was no future for regional languages as the medium of discourse unless children were taught in their mother tongue until class 10, he said. Languages would have their impact on the process of democratisation, said Prof. Ananthamurthy. “The ‘attada matu’ for Europe was Latin. But Europe would not have been as rich without Dante, Shakespeare and Tolstoy who wrote in vernaculars. Likewise, India’s greatness lies not only in Kalidasa, but also in Kabir and Tukaram, Basaveshwara and Pampa.”

Nehru opposed formation of linguistic States in the belief that it would be divisive, he said. India had inherited its combined identity of linguistic pluralism and national unity from Gandhiji and Tagore who saw India as a civilisation and not only as a nation-State.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Karnataka