#167 Sare Jahan Se Achha..

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• There’s that oft-quoted line of sociolinguist Max Weinreich that goes ‘a language is a dialect with an army and navy’. Like many facetious remarks, it isn’t scientific, but it sounds great. Also, there’s a kernel of truth in it. The only reason a particular dialect races ahead of others and transcends a threshold to turn into a language is when it is backed by political patronage and the power of the state.

• The version of Hindi that’s official in India today, for instance, wasn’t the kind that was spoken by anyone even two hundred years ago.

• The great texts of 16th century India will help you with this. Ramacharitmanas by Tulsidas was written in Awadhi, Surdas used Brij bhasha and Guru Granth Sahib is an eclectic mix of languages ranging from Sindhi, Lahnda, Persian and Brij bhasha.

• The decimation of the Mughal empire was complete and with it went the state patronage of Farsi and Urdu. There was desire then to find a purified version of the Hindustani language that preceded the Delhi Sultanate. Bharatendu filled this gap and his efforts were ably supported by the Raja of Benaras and the Kashi Dharma Sabha. Post-independence, this version of Hindi got its ‘army and navy’ with the might of the state behind it. And it turned into a language.

• There are better ways of fostering unity than asking people to privilege a specific language in a country that has as many languages with long histories as India.

• A language can have its army and navy but those won’t make it the ‘link’ language. Because the adoption of a language and its usage in a society is the best example of spontaneous order at play.

• Every participant acts in their individual best interest for their own objectives. However, these individual actions aggregate into a pattern of their own. It is the ‘unintended order of intentional action’ that emerges on its own and it adapts to the ongoing changes. Language is a classic example of this. No one individual could have designed it. There’s no central design of associating a sound with an object or an emotion. It evolves by the attempt of separate individuals trying to solve the problem of communicating with one another. The sounds that are easy to use and adopted by most individuals evolve into the lingua franca of the community. Language is ‘the result of human action, but not of human design’. As the language becomes more widely adopted, there are attempts to formalise its structure and syntax. As these structures become more rigid and people are forced to use a language in only a certain way, it begins losing its flexibility and its utility. People find a more flexible mode of communication and a new order emerges.

• If the people feel the need for a link language, they will find one through the millions of everyday transactions that they undertake.

• That’s the direction we will head into as we find more reasons for domestic mobility and interactions. Any attempt to centrally plan for greater usage of an official language is therefore futile.

• World history is rife with examples of civil unrest and strife because of such impositions. These are unnecessary distractions that we can live without. Or maybe that’s the point of all this.

• Iqbal and Nehru were temperamentally similar with both having studied at Cambridge and trained as barristers. They were steeped in enlightenment philosophy, had a taste for western literature and were socialists by instinct. Where they differed sharply was in their confidence in the transplanting of such values into Indian soil. They came at the idea of nationalism in a subcontinent as diverse as India with widely divergent first principles.

• Nehru believed in a kind of inclusive nationalism where people would voluntarily shed those parts of their identity that separated them from others while retaining the core somehow.

• Iqbal thought this was an impossible task. This utopian ideal of fusing the different communities into a single nation was fraught with disappointing everyone equally.

• There was a need to think of nationalism while protecting the identities of communities and giving them their space to breathe. Trying to hoist a unitary, majoritarian version of democracy without thinking about proportional or specific representation would lead to a situation where ‘the country will have to be redistributed on the basis of religious, historical and cultural affinities.’

• Iqbal thought Nehru wasn’t thinking of the long term where those holding the power of the state would be different from them.

• It is a debate between an idealist who wants to ‘will’ a perfect society. Against whom is pitted a realist who knows this is futile and the best course is to set up a system that’s in sync with how the society works.

• On International Women’s Day last month, I went back to a question that has perplexed me for a long time: what explains the electoral insignificance of political parties by women and for women?

• The proliferation of political parties backed by a small and reliable electoral base is quite common in India. And yet, we don’t see political parties created on the basis of gender.

• However, India is not an exception in this case. Women’s political parties have been electorally insignificant even in Western Europe and Scandinavia.

• The Quillette asked this question in the UK context. Louise Perry’s article has interesting insights. For instance, she writes that political tribes form when there is little interaction across tribes, which is not possible with gender as an identity variable.

• Women are not an isolated group—they not only live among men, but also often love them as spouses, sons, fathers, and brothers. And that’s as it should be. But one effect of this is that true female solidarity is vanishingly rare. When asked to choose between identifying with other women, or identifying with “their” men, most women will choose the latter option. This means that women’s political parties will always struggle to gain a significant share of the vote.

• We have witnessed within the last century the most remarkable progress in women’s political representation in the West. Decriminalized abortion, funding for rape crisis centres, reforms to the criminal justice system, anti-discrimination legislation, and many more landmark achievements—all this has taken place within a democratic system and without the existence of women’s political parties.

• Gender has a small impact on voting behaviour, in that women tend to lean left and are also less politically engaged on average. But, on the whole, knowing a person’s sex gives you very little insight into how they are likely to vote.

• In another article, Corwell-Meyers et al make an important distinction: not all women’s political parties are feminist parties.

• In fact, surveying the platforms and manifestos of women’s parties reveals three types of parties: depending on the degree of transformation the party seeks, women’s parties can be feminist (challenging patriarchy), proactive (advancing women’s inclusion) or reactive (espousing conservative or traditional roles for women).