When I was twelve, I was one of the winners of a children’s painting competition sponsored by Soviet Land magazine, the former USSR’s PR organ in India. I was one of the five winners and the only boy in the winning group. Two of the girls were Gujarati, one from Baroda and one from Rajkot; the other two were probashi Bengalis from Delhi. Our prize was a month’s holiday at the famous Artek children’s camp on the coast of the Black Sea in Crimea, and we were sent off with fanfare from Palam Airport in New Delhi. At Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, we were welcomed by a
tall woman, possibly in her late twenties, with the classic Russian name of
Tamara Petrovna. She explained in perfect English that she would be our guardian, accompanying us throughout our holiday.

We escaped freezing Moscow the next day, flying to the sunnier climes of the Crimean peninsula. Across the next month, we lived by the Black Sea in orderly dormitories among high-achieving children from the Soviet Union and some other parts of the world. We engaged with the kids and the teenagers around us and spent the days in healthy and edifying activities, sunning on the beach, playing sports, watching movies and cultural performances and so on. Inevitably, we, the Indian Delegation, had things we were unhappy about, things we were snide about, things we only wanted to say among one another. For this we generally used Hindi, but after a while we noticed that Tamaradi seemed to more or less understand what we were saying. Me being in a somewhat useful position — a Gujju who also spoke Bangla — we decided to try an experiment: around T. Petrovna, I would speak in Gujarati with the Gujju girls, Bangla with the Bong girls, and translate between the two when necessary. Our probing mission met with almost immediate success — whenever we deployed Gujarati or Bangla, TP became irritated, almost snapping at us, occasionally even chiding us for not sticking to English which some of the other kids could understand. In confirmation of our suspicions, she never behaved like this when we spoke in Hindi. Having already read a few Cold War thrillers, I triumphantly explained to my fellow delegates that TP was probably a KGB agent. Later in life, when I mentioned this to a historian friend whose specialisation was Russia and the Soviet Union, he told me I probably hadn’t been too far from the truth — Tamara P would have attended a Soviet language school and specialised in English and perhaps Hindi-Hindustani; she might not have been a full-blown secret agent but she would definitely have reported to some lowly branch of the Russian security services.

All this came back to me as I sat on a London bus reading news of the latest language wars sparking off back home. I was back in London after a gap of two years and one of the pleasures of being here is that you not only get to hear a huge variety of English accents but also many different languages from all over the world. This is especially true on a bus where you can hear people talking to each other or speaking on their cellphones as if there’s no one around. London as a city has many problems; in many ways, it can be a very cruel place where it doesn’t take much for someone to fall into the many societal crevices that exist. And, yet, this is possibly the most cosmopolitan city in the world. A sign of this is the variety of languages you hear on the buses, streets and shops; and in that sense, culturally, London is a truly wealthy city, this wealth made up not of oil, oligarchic or corporate lucre but formed by the mix of people who are constantly learning to live with one another and managing to do so mostly in peaceful ways.

In contrast, when we see what’s going on in India, with the increasing political weaponisation of language, we realise that we are witnessing a deliberate impoverishment of our culture, a very intentional denuding of our potential as a society. All this is part of a piece — the same people who claim to desire a cleansed Mother Ganga hack away at all environmental protections for rivers and rural areas; the very people who came to power on anti-corruption planks turn out to be massively more corrupt than the governments they ousted; the same people who claim to be upholders of sanskar push the political discourse into filthier and filthier zones; the same people who say they want our cities to compete with Singapore and New York as urban centres relentlessly keep pushing towards the narrow provincialisation of whichever metropolis they happen to control.

More and more of us now need to be asking some direct questions. Why should any Indian feel ashamed to speak in English? Why should every citizen of Bombay need to speak Marathi? Why should all of India have Hindi imposed upon it? If you care so much about our dying bhashas and ‘bhasha literatures’, when are you going to bring in the massive increase in the education budget that’s required? Where are the future readers of our great literatures if you don’t properly educate millions more of our young population? And, once you do educate them, are you going to make sure they are exposed to the variety of works that make up our great languages or are you going to keep the youngsters trapped in the dire propaganda loop of your fascist political ideologies?

More and more of us need to be saying some uncomfortable things clearly. For instance, English is now as much an Indian language as Hindi, Tamil or Khasi. Like cricket, it may have been invented by the British, but they (and the old Anglosphere) lost proprietary rights on the language a long time ago; like the once-British railway connects our land, this once-foreign language is the best glue for our diverse country; the time has come to de-elitify English and allow more and more students to learn it with joy. Bombay (yes, we can call it Bombay and not Mumbai if we want) was built not only by Marathis, it is also a melting pot of a city that belongs to the Republic and in it all of the country’s languages should be given equal respect in terms of daily speech and exchange.

Of course, it’s a complex issue, this knot of language, and, as when undoing a knot, we sometimes need to be pulling in opposite directions in concert. We need to strengthen our bhasha education while also strengthening the wider teaching of English. We need to rescue our dying languages and preserve and expand the ones that are shrinking while, at the same time, encourage our younger citizens to engage with the world and the planet’s many diverse tongues. We need to deepen our critical engagement with our traditions and our cultural histories while getting rid of the toxicity that has been spread under faux religious piety, crass ethnic regionalism, and pseudo-patriotism.

The five kids visiting Artek in 1972 were not from any wealthy background; then, as now, India was a far poorer country than the Soviet Union/Russia. But what those kids instinctively realised among hundreds of youngsters from the different Soviet Republics, who were all being shoehorned into speaking Russian, was the power and the wealth of our cultural and linguistic diversity.