Exploring the ‘Idea of India’: A Multilingual Tapestry of Linguistic Diversity

There is a raging debate in the country about the ‘idea of India,’ though the phrase is rarely explained by those who use it. It may refer to the many origins of India’s diverse populations and cultures, or may even be used as a synonym for what we think was or is the Indian ‘civilisation’. However, by ‘civilisation’ one implies ‘all that was there, great and not so great’, a pervasively binding cultural thread, and in the case of South Asia, one has to invoke language as being that principle, the, the substance and essence of the idea of India. Linguists no more like to talk of Indian languages in terms of distinct linguistic families; they have moved to describing the vast multitude of Indian languages as ‘a linguistic area’ having a far greater mutual intelligibility between a language and its surrounding languages than in most other parts of the world. While nationalism was spelt out in Europe during the 19th century in terms of linguistic unity, in India, speakers of these hundreds of different languages accepted to belong to a single nation because the Constitution promised them the freedom of expression making it mandatory on the state to encourage languages ‘without harming other languages’.