Summary: Antiquity, Ubiquity, Orality, Diversity

Students of language policy in India may be well motivated to ask what, if anything, is distinctive about its linguistic culture, and how it is different than what is found in other puristic traditions. It seems to me that the four unique features of Indian linguistic culture are its antiquity, its ubiquity (the pervasiveness of values about language distributed widely throughout the culture, even unto the `lowliest' tribal cultures, as we have seen with the Todas), the primacy of the oral tradition, and its linguistic diversity.

• Antiquity: There are many puristic linguistic traditions in the world, and many linguistic cultures have gone through periods of purism as a result of a perceived threat from some other language. Purism is also often related to a concern for the preservation of holy or magical texts, and can be allied with religious fundamentalism of various sorts. What seems different to me about such other traditions is that the puristic phase is usually not the most ancient stage of the language. Arabic purism is closely allied to Islam and the Qu'ran, but there exists a pre-Islamic Arabic literary tradition, and furthermore Islam seems to have arisen from a need to purify corruption in Arab society at the time, including a need to `rebut', as it were, Christianity and Judaism. What seems distinctive to me about the Indic tradition is that it is so old; it is the bedrock of the culture, and has not arisen as a response to something else, except when purism is resorted to as a way to return to a former and original purity. Thus the Sanskritization of Hindi and the Pure Tamil Movement both wish to return to a former state, a linguistic Ur-paradise, when there was no mixture of language and no strife between people. The discovery of Tamil Sangam literature allowed the Pure Tamil Movement, on its part, to give the Tamils back their antiquity, their ancient `pure' state. This must be seen as a kind of empowerment that can not be minimized.
• Ubiquity: By this I mean the pervasiveness of Indian linguistic cultural norms--the fact that not only the Sanskrit tradition has a hierarchical view of language, with different versions of the language specialized for different domains, with diglossia deeply seated and deeply rooted in all its linguistic subcultures, even the Nilgiris tribal microcosm. Values about language and its preservation and tradition are shared throughout the Indic area, and multilingualism is pervasive. The tremendous linguistic diversity of the area is not accidental or exceptional, therefore; it is a product of the culture.
• Orality: Another cornerstone of Indian linguistic culture is surely the reliance on orality and the elaboration of complicated methods of oral transmission of language. This continues to be one of the hardest facts about Indian linguistic culture for outsiders to the tradition (e.g. Goody 1986) to accept, because it contradicts their theoretical notions of what is possible and what is not possible. Were their theories grounded in empirical observation of Indian linguistic culture, they might be less skeptical, but to most observers who have studied the culture profoundly, and to most native speakers of the tradition as well, orality and all it implies in Indian linguistic culture are fundamental and revelatory. Staal's evaluation of the Goody-Watt hypothesis (according to which literacy is more reliable than orality) is worth quoting:

  We thus find in India at least two traditions of transmission that are formal and more or less reliable in their preserving function. One is written and of relatively recent date; it exhibits structures that are also found in other similar traditions. The other is oral and very ancient; it is closely related to typically Indian forms of science. This latter tradition is by far the more remarkable, not merely because it is characteristically Indian and unlike anything we find elsewhere, but also because it has led to scientific discoveries that are of enduring interest and from which the contemporary West still has much to learn. The existence of this latter tradition demonstrates in passing that the Goody-Watt thesis is not without important exceptions and therefore not generally tenable. (Staal 1986:27).

  This ability to memorize things seems to be highly valued in the culture in many ways, and can be observed in many other contexts, e.g. the recent press reports of a young Indian man who has vowed to memorize the decimal value of $\pi$ to the millionth place. It is hard to imagine another culture on earth where anyone would even want to do this; in Indic culture it seems not at all extraordinary.

• Diversity. We have presented the view that India's great linguistic diversity has been seen as a source of conflict in the post-Independence era, as India has attempted to throw off vestiges of colonialism and find a language policy that suits its own conditions. But India's linguistic diversity can be viewed as not just a problem, not just an impediment to modernization or industrialization or whatever, it can also be seen as a resource. India's linguistic diversity, I contend, is deeply rooted in its linguistic culture, and is in fact a product of the culture, an outcome of its cultural policy, rather than a vexatious hindrance. The Three-Language Formula, rather than being a stalemate, a failure of policy, is a negotiated outcome, a middle way between unfettered diversity and monolingualism. It recognizes the value of local linguistic resources and the need for a language of wider communication, indeed of international communication. It allows different interpretations of the policy, depending on local sentiments and needs. In fact, if left to their own devices, many Indians will learn more than three languages, and expect the same of their children, and their children's children.