15 Language politics and conflicts in South Asia

Robert D. King

Introduction
It is assumed here that South Asia consists of the seven sovereign nations of the
subcontinent belonging to the loosely grouped organization SAARC (South
Asian Association for Regional Cooperation): Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the
Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (Breton 1997: 16). Afghanistan is a
special case, sitting squarely astride the divide between the Middle East and
South Asia and drawing in about equal measure from each in culture and
history, and I have chosen to leave it out of consideration here for space reasons.
(For wide-ranging theoretical discussions of the problems involved in defining
such concepts as ‘‘South Asia’’ and ‘‘India,’’ see Emeneau 1980; Masica 1976;
Roy 1985; and Sopher 1980).
It is useful to begin this chapter by asking the question: what are the ingre-
dients that lead to language conflicts and language as a political concern?
Obviously we cannot identify precisely those specifics about countries or
regions that are necessary and sufficient conditions for language to become a
political issue, for language politics is not an exact science. However, it is not
difficult to identify recurrent factors for predicting language conflict in a country
or region.
First, there should be more than one language (or dialect) competing for
political, economic, and cultural ‘‘space.’’ The larger the number of languages,
the greater the likelihood that language will become a worrisome political issue.
This is particularly true of countries that have become independent out of a
condition of subservience (usually, since the Second World War, colonialism),
where there is frequently the question of what the national language should be.
Second, there must be social differences that correlate with language. The
term ‘‘social differences’’ is chosen intentionally for its vagueness: it includes
religion, ‘‘class’’ in general and economic class in particular, caste, and perhaps
most generally ‘‘ethnicity’’ – in contemporary usage an elastic and convenient
cover term for anything that identifies one segment of society as apart, as the
Other. When language is linked to that Otherness as a badge of iconic identi-
fication, then we have located a potential focal point of linguistic conflict.

311

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 312 Robert D. King

Third, economic prosperity often keeps bad things from getting worse, and
language is no different. While well-to-do countries like Belgium can have
major language problems (R. King 1997: x, 24), normally the generalization
holds that the better-off the country, the greater the likelihood that language will
not be a major political problem. Conversely, widespread poverty bodes ill for
language tranquility.
Fourth, history and awareness of history are peculiarly relevant to the
probability of linguistic conflict. If a culture is inclined to ‘‘remember’’ slights
from the past, those slights easily grow into language grievances. Every Quebec
automobile license plate bears the foreboding Je me souviens ‘‘I remember.’’
These generalizations about the preconditions for language conflict are, of
course, sweeping and superficial. Nevertheless, they are helpful in establishing
one point that I wish to make about South Asia: that while by every measure
South Asia should be in a condition of eternal linguistic strife, it is not. Mea-
sured against every one of the four indices enumerated above, South Asia
should not pass a day without language turmoil.
Take the first point, that ‘‘there must be more than one language (or dialect)
competing for political, economic, and cultural ‘space.’’’ The monumental
Linguistic Survey of India begun by George Grierson in the nineteenth century
and completed in the twentieth listed 179 languages and 544 dialects (Grierson
1967–1968; S. Varma 1972–1976). (When Grierson did his fieldwork ‘‘India’’
subsumed what are today Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.) The number of
major languages of South Asia is of course much smaller. The Eighth Schedule
of the Indian Constitution names eighteen languages: Assamese, Bengali,
Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi,
Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu (Mallikarjun
2001). These are the eighteen major (‘‘scheduled’’) languages of India that,
together with English, make up the nineteen languages of India having in
some sense official status (see, however, the expansion of the list of scheduled
languages discussed in Chapter 10 in this volume). The official language of
Pakistan is Urdu, but Urdu is a minority language there (just over 7 percent of
the population have it as their home language), being outnumbered by speakers
of Punjabi, Sindhi, and Pushto (Breton 1997: 198). The principal languages of
Sri Lanka are Sinhala and Tamil, with Sinhala outnumbering Tamil almost three
to one (Breton 1997: 199). Bangladesh is the one large country in South Asia
that is almost monolingual; it is Bengali-speaking overwhelmingly (Breton
1997: 191, See also Chapter 6 in this volume).
The first condition listed as favoring linguistic conflict is therefore abun-
dantly fulfilled in South Asia – it has many languages. The other three condi-
tions too are met, profusely. Social, religious, class, caste, and ethnic differences
abound on the subcontinent. And there is usually very little of a physical barrier
between the different castes (varnas, jatis), religions, classes, and ethnicities

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 Language politics and conflicts in South Asia 313

that might isolate the grievances of one language group from that of another.
And on the issue of economics, speaking generally, the subcontinent is a poor
region. If economic prosperity favors linguistic tranquility, its opposite favors
linguistic conflict.
Finally, there is what I called ‘‘history and awareness of history’’ as factors in
linguistic unrest. History’s hand lies heavy on the present in South Asia.
Conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan regularly make
newspaper headlines today. They disfigured public life in India long before the
English came on the scene (Wolpert 1993: 149–86). Caste antagonisms played
an important role in the linguistic battles that accompanied the division of India
into linguistic states following Independence (R. King 1997: 70–3). (One must
remember that caste, though Hindu, has spread into the societal structures of
every other religion on the subcontinent, even those that preach equality, see
Thapar 1966: 300-1). Awareness of history is a fact of South Asian linguistic
life: old sins cast long shadows in the hot sun of the subcontinent.
There is one other significant fact about language on the subcontinent that
enlarges its role as mischief maker in South Asia. What is alluded to here is
what one might call the spiritual importance of language in South Asia.
R. King (1997) states:

Linguistics in ancient India was the core of the intellectual and scientific tradition. It
possessed an intellectual centrality and scholarly hegemony that beggars belief today . . .
Linguistics was suffused with the light of sanctity, endowed with religious purpose. (6–7)

There is hardly any force in human society more tricky than religion. If
language is perceived in the folk consciousness to be ‘‘endowed with religious
purpose,’’ then language becomes a force that touches people in secret and
dangerous places. This quasi-religious role of language easily turns what could
be a rational, unemotional discussion about, say, whether newly independent
India should be divided into linguistic states into a bitter, protracted, and tor-
mented struggle (Annamalai 1979; Gopal 1966; R. King 1997: 52–73; Kluyev
1981; Krishna 1991; Report of the States Reorganization Commission 1955;
Schwartzberg 1985).

Language conflict from the Aryan invasion to the

classical age of Hinduism
We know there must have been language conflict and therefore, in the broadest
sense, language politics in South Asia at all periods, but most of what we know
about earlier history is inferential and derivative. The texts tell us little directly
of language conflict. (The method of ‘‘language paleology’’ is often useful here,
cf. Polomé 1982, for resurrecting evidence of language conflict.)

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 314 Robert D. King

We do not know precisely when the Aryan (Indo-European) invaders des-

cended on a largely Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic linguistic subcontinent, but
the date 1500 bce is often taken as approximately correct. Sanskrit was the
language of the Aryan conquerors (Burrow 1965; Cardona 1987) and became
the language of the Vedic and Hindu sacred texts, commentaries, rituals, and
literature. The spread of Sanskrit came at the expense of the autochthonous
languages of the subcontinent, which were, we assume, mostly of the Dravidian
family, a term that today means essentially ‘‘south Indian.’’ There was a smaller
sprinkling of Austro-Asiatic languages, never large, many of which have
become the ‘‘tribal’’ languages of today (Wolpert 1993: 8). By 400 bce or
thereabouts the Aryans were in control of most of northern India, and their
language had begun to differentiate itself regionally. These regional variants of
Sanskrit, called the Prakrits, were the foundation of the modern Indo-European
languages of Pakistan, northern India, and Bangladesh such as Hindi, Urdu,
Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Oriya (Deshpande 1993).
What we know of language conflict comes from offhand references in the
literature of the time. Thus, in northern India, where Aryan control maintained
itself longest, the process of Aryanization – the imposition of the Sanskrit
language and Aryan religious and cultural practices – was carried out through
the use of Sanskrit and Prakrit rather than the local dialect, which was referred to
contemptuously as a ‘‘goblin language’’ (Thapar 1966: 122). In Sanskrit plays
of the classical period characters of high social standing speak Sanskrit, while
the lower-class actors and all women characters speak Prakrit (Thapar 1966:
157). Such observations betoken language conflict, but we know nothing about
this directly.

Language conflict during Islamic rule

There is no evidence of major language conflict during the rule of the great
Mughal (Muslim) emperors. The everyday language of the Mughal Empire was
Urdu, a fusion of native Hindi dialects with Persian and Arabic, but its official and
administrative language was Persian. That the use of Persian for official purposes
and Urdu for oral and written purposes came at the expense of the vernacular
languages is clear. That there must have been resentments and language conflicts
is no less clear. But Mughal hegemony in northern and central India was virtually
absolute, and illiteracy was widespread. Hindus who wished to rise in the Mughal
bureaucracy learned Persian. Hindu pandits continued to use Sanskrit (Thapar
1966: 316–20), but these were elites. The common people adapted as best they
could to Mughal rule, linguistically as well as culturally. The vernacular lan-
guages continued to develop, but there was no political consciousness behind
them, and because they were not in competition with Urdu or Persian, language
use settled into a stable situation of parallel usage.

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 Language politics and conflicts in South Asia 315

Language conflict during the colonial period

The degree of interest in native languages among the more urbane and
enlightened British overlords during the early colonial period of Indian history
is astonishing by later standards. Sir William Jones, an early Western scholar of
both Persian and Sanskrit, often considered the father of comparative linguis-
tics, founded the Asiatic Society in 1784 partly in order to document his and
others’ interest in language (R. King 1997: 13).
With the influx of utilitarian liberalism during the governor-generalship of
William Bentinck (1829–1835) the notion that the British had a higher
responsibility to ‘‘improve’’ the natives gained control of public policy, and the
new Mughals, the British, made a move that was fateful for the future linguistic
dispensation of India, choosing English rather than Persian, the vernaculars, or
Sanskrit as the language of instruction in schools and in the maintenance of
official records. Today, it can scarcely be imagined that so momentous a move
could be made without provoking major unrest. At the time its impact was
confined to Indian elites, and elite opinion was divided on the issue. A large part
of the impetus for the decision in favor of English came from middle- and
upper-middle class Indians themselves, many of them guided by the desire for
‘‘jobs for the boys’’ (Frykenberg 1988; Kulke and Rothermund 1991: 251).

The freedom movement

Nationalism came late to the subcontinent. The waves of national feeling that
began with the French Revolution and gained momentum as the nineteenth
century unrolled began to lap up on the shores of the subcontinent only in the
1880s. The seeds of national feeling – and therefore the need to communicate
effectively to the masses in languages they could understand – grew in the wake
of the Sepoy Mutiny and with the formation of the Indian National Congress
(‘‘Congress’’) in 1885. ‘‘Local’’ patriotism was anciently present on the sub-
continent but had intensified with the emergence of regional identity linked to
national feeling that followed the growth of the Congress movement. Peoples,
such as the Bengalis, the Marathis, and the Tamils, for whom language had
always been closely identified with ethnic identity were powerfully fortified and
found new political awareness in political events – the Partition of Bengal in
1905, for example (R. King 1997: 57–9).
Nationalism in Europe became increasingly attached to language as the
nineteenth century came to an end. Of this development Arnold Toynbee wrote,
disapprovingly: ‘‘The growing consciousness of Nationality had attached itself
neither to traditional frontiers nor to new geographical associations but almost
exclusively to the mother-tongues’’ (Toynbee 1927: 18). The crowning triumph
of the new desideratum was the Treaty of Versailles, when the allied victors of

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 316 Robert D. King

the First World War redrew the map of Central and Eastern Europe according to
nationality (‘‘self-determination’’) as best as they could. Because language
isoglosses are easier to locate and draw than lines of self-determination, the
reorganization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was actually carried out as
much as possible along linguistic lines. Self-determination was thought of as a
matter of ‘‘nationality,’’ of what today we would be more likely to call
‘‘ethnicity’’; but language was simpler to identify than nationality or ethnicity,
so language became almost by default the supreme defining characteristic of
nationality.

Independence and its aftermath

India
This heady mixture of language and nationalism and freedom and self-
determination came to British India as the twentieth century dawned. The Indian
freedom movement was almost from its beginnings concerned about language.
(The story is told in detail in R. King 1997: Chapter 3. See also J. Das Gupta
1970; Dua 1985; Nayar 1969). One issue was the national language – what
the national language of India (meaning today’s India plus Pakistan and
Bangladesh) should be once the British were gone. English, the language of the
despised colonial ruler, obviously was unacceptable, and there emerged a
general consensus that the national language of free and independent India
would be ‘‘Hindustani,’’ meaning Hindi/Urdu, essentially digraphic variants of
the same spoken language, cf. C. King (1994) and R. King (2001). Hindi is
written in Devanagari script and Urdu in a derivative of the Persian script, itself
a derivative of Arabic. (Script conflict has also been an issue in the Punjabi
language, which is written in Devanagari, a Persian–Arabic script, and a
third script, Gurumukhi or, Gurmukhi, which was used for the religious writings
of the Sikh religion.)
The other issue, which was to arouse just as much conflict as the question of
the national language, was that of the ‘‘linguistic states’’ or ‘‘linguistic pro-
vinces.’’ The British had carved up the map of those parts of India under British
control not according to logical principles of any kind but by happenstance,
history, imperfect geographical knowledge, and administrative convenience –
by everything but language and ethnicity. For administrative convenience
British India was divided up into an assortment of units: the Bombay and
Madras Presidencies, Bengal, the United Provinces, the Punjab, the Central
Provinces, Sind, and so on. Of these only Bengal, the Punjab, and Sind had any
claim to historical organicity based on culture, language, land use, and ethno-
graphy. The hereditary princely states were no better. The textbook example
was the huge Deccan state of Hyderabad with a largely Telugu-speaking Hindu

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 Language politics and conflicts in South Asia 317

populace ruled by an Urdu-speaking Muslim Nizam and a largely Muslim

bureaucracy.
Hodgepodge as the map of India was, hardly anyone regarded it as peculiar
until the 1920s. After all, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had
existed for centuries without regard for language and ethnicity in the drawing of
their internal boundaries. As early as 1891 the Maratha nationalist B. G. Tilak,
an early leader of the Congress radical wing, had argued for redrawing the
boundaries of a free and independent India according to linguistic lines (Kluyev
1981: 120–1). In 1920, Gandhi announced his support for linguistic provinces
(overcoming earlier reservations that such divisions might weaken the freedom
movement), and so they became a stock part of the Congress agenda down to
Independence in 1947.
By 1947, the British, weakened by the Second World War, realized that
they could no longer hold on to India, and they announced their withdrawal
to take place August 15 of that year. Years of intense and bitter communal
(Muslim–Hindu) tension forced Partition: the division of British India into a
Muslim Pakistan and a secular but 80 percent Hindu India. The basis of the
division was political of course, but essentially religious. Pakistan was
formed out of two noncontiguous parts: East Pakistan, formerly East Bengal,
and West Pakistan, formerly part of the Punjab, Sind, and the North-West
Frontier Provinces.
When Independence arrived the general assumption was that Jawaharlal
Nehru, the first prime minister of India, would move as rapidly as possible to put
in place the two major language policies of a half century of the freedom
movement: linguistic provinces, and Hindi as the national language. He did
neither. He hesitated, he temporized, he pleaded for time. He argued that other
issues had far greater priority: economic stability, resolution of conflict with
Pakistan, world politics. This is often taken as weakness in the Hamlet-like
Nehru. Rather, we believe that it demonstrated unusual linguistic sophistication
on his part to recognize the potential linguistic issues had for the national polity,
and by dawdling he gained for India almost ten years’ time to unify the country
before proceeding to divide it again on language lines (This is the principal
thesis of the author’s book Nehru and the Language Politics of India, R. King
1997).
Nehru came to recognize that beneath the demand for linguistic states lay
ethnic and caste conflicts: between Tamil and Telugu, between Mayar Dalits
(‘‘untouchables’’) in Marathi-speaking regions, between Gujaratis and Marathis
for control of Bombay:

After Independence Nehru, though with few of the other leaders of India alongside
him, was quickly to become attuned to the subtleties of caste-class-communalism in the
frantic drive to put in place the linguistic provinces. It gave him pause and more than

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 318 Robert D. King

pause . . . Within three months of Independence the dark side of the linguistic states
movement quelled altogether whatever enthusiasm he may have once had to redraw the
boundaries of India. (R. King 1997: 73)

Nehru’s hand was forced by the fast to death of a revered Gandhian leader of
the movement for a Telugu-speaking state, Sri Potti Sriramulu, in 1952. With
this Nehru threw in his hand, and the division of India along linguistic-state
lines proceeded apace: Andhra Pradesh (Telugu), West Bengal (Bengali),
Orissa (Oriya), Bihar (Hindi), Kerala (Malayalam), Karnataka (Kannada),
Tamil Nadu (Tamil), Madhya Pradesh (Hindi), Rajasthan (Hindi, Rajasthani –
there are arguments whether they are separate languages or separate dialects of
Hindi), Uttar Pradesh (Hindi), Assam (Assamese), Jammu and Kashmir
(Kashmiri, also Punjabi), Maharashtra (Marathi), Gujarat (Gujarati), Haryana
(Hindi), the Punjab (Punjabi).
‘‘Perfect’’ linguistic states are never possible in the real world. Hardly any
state or province is ethnically monolithic. Modern India has done an extra-
ordinarily efficient job of drawing its state boundaries in such a way as to bring
down the percentage of speakers of minority languages in its component states
to an irreducible minimum. This is shown nicely in Schwartzberg (1985),
whose maps tell the tale of fitting state lines to language isoglosses. (The maps
in Breton 1997 are also very informative.) Even so, there will always remain
linguistic minorities, in India or anywhere, however the lines are drawn – and
therefore grounds for future linguistic grievances.
On the other great issue of language conflict, that of the national language,
what had appeared so clear and so desirable during all those years of British rule
lost its allure not long after India’s first Constitution in 1950 proclaimed Hindi
the national language of India. English was to exist until 1965 as an official
language, but then it was to be banned for official uses. The trouble was that
Hindi was a minority language in India, being spoken by some 35 percent of the
population, and it had a very strong north Indian identification. It was assumed
that nonspeakers of Hindi would have fifteen years to learn the language, that
their children would willingly learn it, that the other vernaculars would will-
ingly sacrifice themselves on the altar of national unity, and that English would
no longer be needed to run the country’s affairs.
Wishful thinking that. As 1965 approached major opposition to Hindi
developed, especially in Tamil Nadu, and there were widespread language riots
as the date for the abolition of English as an official language drew near. In
July 1960, headlines in the international press read: ‘‘LANGUAGE RIOTS!
SCORES KILLED! 40,000 FLEE!’’ Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu, had
terrible scenes of rioting against Hindi even as late as 1965.
Nehru again took the lead in contriving a constitutional formula that would
enable English to coexist alongside Hindi for the foreseeable future. In his last

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 Language politics and conflicts in South Asia 319

great parliamentary address in the Lok Sabha in 1963 he argued forcibly and
successfully for the continuation of English alongside Hindi:
With the passage of the Official Language Act, Nehru rendered his last service to the
cause of progressive language policy in India – and a very great service it was. By
delaying the execution of linguistic states and by securing the place of English in India
indefinitely into the future, Nehru guaranteed a foundation for progress that will always
remain one of his most enduring bequests. (R. King 1997: 222)

I viewed what Nehru did favorably in 1998 and I do so now. This is a

minority opinion. There are others, all of them critical of Nehru and the position
of English in India. Postmodern theorizing has made almost anything a Western
linguist says in favor of English odious, but I stand by my opinion as expressed
above. If India wishes to rid itself of English, so be it. I shall shed no tears – or
but one or two tears for the passing of a great tradition. But I also think it is
unlikely in the extreme that I will have to. English has become simply one more
Indian language, the language used by a minority, true – but a very important
and articulate Indian elite minority – and by many writers with vast international
sales and readers. That, I think, is not likely to change.
The present language situation in India is one of almost stasis. The linguistic
states are in place and there is little trouble with them. The ‘‘Down with
English’’ demands are heard now mostly at election time and then decrease in
volume thereafter. A Hindu-based party (the BJP) has ruled India for most of the
past ten years. The imposition of Hindi and the removal or lessening of the role
of English is a staple of the party platform. But decisive action so far has not
been taken. English remains the only pan-Indian language.
True, language will never not be a problem in India. That is a simple fact of
life. There were ghastly scenes of communal rioting in the north Indian town of
Badaun on September 28, 1989, sadly reminiscent of the partition death trains
of 1947, that followed the decision of the Uttar Pradesh government to make
Urdu the second official language of the state. Hindi remained the official
language of Uttar Pradesh, as it always had been, but Muslims had fought for
greater official recognition of their language, which was Urdu. There were
similar scenes in Bihar in 1967, and there the violence cost at least seventy lives
(J. Das Gupta 1970: 149).
But language conflict and its concomitant, language politics, in present-day
India are altogether different from the tinderbox situation of the 1950s
and 1960s. There are occasional language troubles, but they remain localized, or
at least have so far.

Pakistan and Bangladesh

The principal languages of West Pakistan were Punjabi (64 percent), Sindhi (12
percent), Pashtu (8 percent), and Urdu (7 percent); of the remaining 9 percent

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 320 Robert D. King

Baluchi is the largest with about 3 percent. (These are recent statistics, but they
have remained fairly constant since 1947, cf. Breton 1997: 198; Pakistan
Languages 2002.)
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the ‘‘Father of Pakistan,’’ spoke only English, having
been educated in English and having had a very successful legal career in
England and Bombay before joining the freedom movement. However, the
Urdu language had been closely identified with the Pakistan movement from
its inception in the 1930s. The great Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal had first
proposed a northwest Indian state as ‘‘the final destiny of the Muslims’’; this
proto-Pakistan did not contain the Muslim sections of Bengal (Wolpert 1993:
316–17). The Urdu language indeed had become virtually an icon of the idea of
a Muslim Pakistan sheared off from a ‘‘Hindu’’ India – and so at Independence
Jinnah resolved to make Urdu the sole national language of Pakistan, this in
spite of the fact that very few East Pakistanis spoke Urdu and that even in West
Pakistan Urdu was the native language of only about 7 percent of the population
(and many of those 7 percent were refugees from India, where Urdu had been
the major language of the Indian Muslims).
Ideology yielded to politics, and so both Urdu and Bengali were named as
‘‘state’’ languages of Pakistan while English was to remain the official language
for twenty-five years, with the situation to be reviewed at the end of that period.
Bilingual education in both Urdu and Bengali were supposed to be required in
the schools of both East and West Pakistan. In practice very little Urdu was
taught in the East, and very little Bengali was taught in the West.
The cultural, not to mention the linguistic and geographic, differences
between West and East Pakistan were immense; the two sections had only a
shared religion, and that was not enough for success. This unnatural nation
construct was bound to fail, as it did when civil war erupted in 1971. After bitter
fighting and intervention by India, the independent nation of Bangladesh was
announced. Henceforward the linguistic conflicts were lessened: Urdu for West
Pakistan, Bengali for Bangladesh. English continued in both countries as an
elite and official or quasi-official language. Bengali–English bilingualism is
common among Bangladeshi elites.
The linguistic uniformity of Bangladesh is extraordinary for a South Asian
country, with Bengali spoken by virtually 100 percent of the population (Breton
1997: 191; U. Varma 1983). It says a great deal about the iconic value of
language in the region that the name Bangladesh is composed of Bangla plus
desa ‘‘country.’’ The term bangla refers not to the Bengali people or the territory
of (East) Bengal but specifically to the Bengali language (Klaiman 1987: 492).
In Pakistan, the former West Pakistan, several factors contributed to the
selection and continuation of Urdu as the national language. One, Urdu was, as
mentioned above, implicit in the concept of a Pakistan. Even today it continues
to have something of the ‘‘founder aura’’ about it. Second, though Punjabi is

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 Language politics and conflicts in South Asia 321

spoken by a majority of the population (64 percent), the Punjabi language has a
strongly ‘‘Sikh’’ association. Very few Sikhs remained in Pakistan after Parti-
tion, and the founders of Pakistan had no wish to take as the national language a
language almost synonymous in the folk mind with another religion, Sikhism,
and a major section, the northwest, of a neighboring country, India (Chaudhry
1977; Mansoor 1993).
The imposition of a minority language, Urdu, on (West) Pakistan has not
been without its problems. Some of its ‘‘success’’ is doubtless due to the fact that
Pakistan has often been under authoritarian, often military rule, so that a frank
and open discussion of language disputes has usually been limited. There were,
however, language riots in Sind during the 1970s on behalf of the Sindhi
language as a school language. The normal state of affairs in Pakistan is
bilingualism – Punjabi-Urdu or Sindhi-Urdu – but among the educated classes
trilingualism (English fills out the triad) is the rule. Recently, with the ease of
publication made possible by the Internet (Web), one encounters frequent cri-
ticism of the domination of Urdu and of English (Geocities 2002). That English
is resented is of course understandable, but all efforts to prohibit its use have so
far come to naught. As a means of communication in a multilingual country
desiring to keep its hand in play in world and regional affairs, English, people
find, cannot be wished away (Rahman 1996b).
After Partition the Hindi of official India and the Urdu of official Pakistan
began inevitably to diverge. Freed now of the need to accommodate each other’s
sensitivities, lexically Hindi drew more and more heavily from Sanskrit and
other Indo-Aryan languages, and Urdu – especially the Urdu of Pakistan – drew
more from Arabic and Persian. In their highest forms the two can be virtually
mutually incomprehensible (C. King 1994: 51–4).

Sri Lanka
Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) became independent in 1948, a year after the partition
of India and Pakistan. Most of Sri Lanka’s approximately seventeen million
inhabitants are Sinhala-speaking Buddhists who came from north India some
2,500 years ago and settled in the south and southwest parts of the island. Tamil-
speaking Hindus came to Sri Lanka in an early and a late wave, the majority
coming in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work on the tea
plantations for which the island is famous, and settled around Jaffna in the
north. Prior to 1948 relations between the two ethnic/linguistic groups were on
the whole reasonably calm, but the situation deteriorated badly after the British
withdrawal (Wolpert 1993: 429).
At the outset Sinhala was named the official language, but soon thereafter
Tamil was decreed, grudgingly by the Sinhalese majority, a second
official language. Each ethnicity had separate school systems, and physical

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 322 Robert D. King

separation – Tamils in the north and northeast, Sinhalese in the south and
southwest – did little to foster bilingualism or much in the way of bicultural
mixing. Things went violently downhill after the governing Sinhalese majority
in 1956 decreed a ‘‘Sinhala-only’’ Official Language Act. By the 1970s the
violent conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils convulsed the country to a degree
that it requires more scholarly aloofness to the real world than I possess to speak
of ‘‘language conflict’’ in the Sri Lankan context. Suffice it to say that language
conflict in Sri Lanka is the extension of communal antagonism so deep and
profound that language is the least of it. Religion, economics, class, power
politics, a deep sense of historical injustices, and the involvement of a large and
powerful country a few miles away (India) all reduce the language conflict in Sri
Lanka to a sad iconic reification of a great war.
As in all parts of what had been British India English has continued an often
precarious position as a quasi-official language. The pressure to avoid or to
prohibit English for official purposes has perhaps been stronger in Sri Lanka
than in any of the other parts of formerly British India, but English continues to
thrive as the second language of Sri Lankan elites. (For a variety of theoretical
points of view about language in Sri Lanka, see Dharmadasa 1992; Dharmadasa
1996; Parakrama 1995; Theva Rajan 1995.)

The yawning gap

No reference is made here to the smaller countries of the SAARC – Bhutan, the
Maldives, Nepal – primarily in order to conserve space for discussing language
conflicts in the larger states of South Asia. But such an omission is made
possible only because the smaller countries have been less troubled by language
conflicts. (Some references for Nepal are Baldauf and Kaplan 2000 and Malla
1977.) There are a growing number of websites dealing with language problems
throughout the world, including the smaller countries of South Asia, and these
may be located in the usual ways.
The ‘‘yawning gap’’ of this subsection refers not to the smaller countries but
rather to a huge missing part of the discussion that has been presented here:
language conflicts and language politics in the vernacular languages of the
subcontinent. Hand in hand with the growth of English domination in the
language arena after the 1830s went a renewal and rebirth of the Indian ver-
nacular languages, long dormant under the weight of Sanskrit and Persian.
One problem all the vernaculars had to come to grips with was the degree to
which they had become Sanskritized, meaning mainly that they had borrowed
extensively from the Sanskrit lexicon. It was the written, and, therefore, more
artificial forms of these languages that were so heavily Sanskritized. The spoken
languages were quite different, as spoken languages always are, and they had
absorbed much less in the way of Sanskrit lexical items.

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 Language politics and conflicts in South Asia 323

The nineteenth century witnessed the steady evolution of the vernaculars

as literary vehicles. Journalism played a role here, as did in general the
development of prose style. India produced many masters of English prose:
Rabindranath Tagore, Arabindo Ghose, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and his his-
torian son, Sarvepalli Gopal, and Nehru. But English prose mastery carried with it
the seeds of the perfection of prose style in the vernaculars, and as printing of
newspapers and journals in these languages grew and spread in the nineteenth
century, so did the use and suppleness of the vernaculars. The vernaculars were
on the move. The twentieth century would come to belong to them.
That there is a story here of huge linguistic importance is clear. But I am not
the one to tell it. Very few scholars, South Asian or Western, know more than
one or two of the vernaculars of the subcontinent. A team effort would be
needed to write the history of language conflict and language politics in the
development of the vernaculars. For present purposes the interested reader is
refered to a handful of sources found useful and reliable: Annamalai 1979, Apte
1976, Chatterji 1973, Kishore 1987, Majumdar et al. 1961. In general the
publications of the CIIL (Central Institute of Indian Languages) in Mysore
provide useful points of entry to the vernacular issues.

Conclusion
Most of the conflicts over language that there are, South Asia has had. What
should be the national language? What to do about English? Since the principle
of linguistic states (‘‘one nation ¼ one language’’) is now so widely accepted as
to be an assumption usually not questioned, how do we draw political bound-
aries? And how do we deal with the inevitable language-minority problems that
are left behind when the boundaries have been drawn? How ‘‘authentic’’ is a
language when it has extensive borrowings from another language?
As said at the beginning, by every reasonable standard, by everything we
know about language conflict and language politics, some part of South Asia
should be in linguistic turmoil almost any given day. But that is not the case.
One wishes one could say with conviction that that is because South Asia is a
triumph of good linguistic planning. But that is not the case either. What one
can say is that by and large the countries of South Asia have done a pretty
good job of sorting things out linguistically in ways that permit them to
function. Minor problems remain, yes; problems occasionally that are worse
than minor, yes. What Plato said of war in general – that only the dead have
seen the end of it – is no less true of language ‘‘war’’ in South Asia. No one
has seen the end of language ‘‘war’’ in countries as multilingual as those of
South Asia. Language rises and falls as a source of political discontent – in
Pakistan, in India, in Sri Lanka – but it has ceased to be a threat to national
stability and national unity.

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 324 Robert D. King

Tolerance is always and everywhere a commodity in limited supply. But

South Asia has more tolerance than it is frequently given credit for today, when
‘‘conflict’’ is writ large across contemporary South Asian affairs: Pakistan
versus India, Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs, caste and religion rivalries in
India, Sinhalese versus Tamils in Sri Lanka. I would like to end by paraphrasing
something I wrote earlier (R. King 1986: 141):

The unique genius of South Asia, probably its greatest legacy from Vedic values, is the
ability to absorb conflicting ideas and create harmony out of opposing views . . . These
countries live every day with a degree of diversity unknown in the countries of the West.
Language conflicts go against the grain of this tradition of tolerance. They are, as it were,
the spiritual legacy of Aurangzeb (the most intolerant of Mughal emperors) rather than of
Akbar (a model of tolerance).

I believe, though often in the face of sad evidence to the contrary, that the
South Asian genius for reconciling dualities will prevail in language as well as
in other matters. If this is true, then I do not think we will need to spend too
much time worrying about language conflicts in the South Asia of the twenty-
first century. The linguistic ‘‘marketplace,’’ together with a little luck and a
generous measure of traditional regional tolerance, will solve most of the
problems.

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