Linguistic Diversity of India : An exhibition to commemorate the International Year of Indigenous Languages ( IYIL).
An International Year - declared by the United Nations - is dedicated
to raising awareness of a particular topic or theme of global interest
or concern. NCSM has almost always joined hands in this global endeavour
to commemorate UN declared international years by curating exhibitions
on the topic, which travel across science centres. This year there are
two topics of international year, the first one is the International
Year of Periodic Table (IYPT) - to commemorate the 150th year of the
Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, about which I had posted on my FB - and the
second one is the International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL). The
Nehru Science Centre has been tasked to curate an exhibition on
Languages. In my career of 33 plus years in NCSM there has never been an
occasion that the concept for any such travelling exhibitions or for
that matter any exhibition/s, have ever been presented to the apex body
of the Council - The Governing Body - for approval of the concept.
However this was not to be for this year’s exhibition on Languages and I
was given this unique responsibility to present the curatorial concept
document and artistic plans for the (IYIL) exhibition, to the GB, NCSM
at the National Science Centre Delhi, on the 24th September afternoon.
Having done so while on my way back home I have prepared this post
through which I wish to present in brief the exhibition concept and
artistic impression of the exhibition which we are planning to develop
after it is approved by the GB. I would like to request FB friends,
which includes several distinguished scholars and museum professionals
to please offer your comments on the brief concept of the exhibition -
which has been prepared with content advise by eminent linguist Prof
Ganesh Devy the architect of People’s Linguistic Survey of India - and
the artistic impression of the exhibition, which has been prepared with
support from our passionate team who have worked with me in this
project.
Indians have been by and large multilingual in habit and
Indian cities and towns show presence of an unusually high number of
diverse languages in use. India is blessed with an extraordinary
language diversity and an estimated 788 languages (as per the People’s
Language Survey of India) are spoken in India as against an estimated
7111 languages globally (As per the 22nd edition of the Ethnologue).
India is also one of the four most linguistically diverse countries in
the world, along with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Nigeria. India
has been identified as a Language Hotspot, which constitutes a region
with a high level of language diversity and endangerment, and a low
level of documentation.
Language is one of the most intriguing
aspect of human behaviour. It not only functions as the medium of
communication for us, but also with the help of language, the reality of
the social world gets constructed. Language is a highly organised,
systematic means of representing experience, and as such, it assists us
to organise all other ways of representing. Each language has its own
uniqueness with its structural, social, cultural and political
embeddedness. and therefore the language diversity must be preserved
and it is for this express reason that UN has declared this year as the
IYIL. Every Language, which is one of the most important acquisitions
that distinguish humans from other animal species, represents a unique
worldview. It takes great human labour for a language to evolve. Humans
have spoken languages nearly for the last 70,000 years.
The
British who were known for commissioning all kinds of studies to
understand the nature of the land they were in the process of
purloining, surprisingly were late in commissioning the Linguistic
Survey for India. The Great Trigonometrical Survey —to measure the
length and breadth of the country— had been launched as early as 1802
and the Archaeological Survey of India had been extant since 1861. The
British also carried out the Census as early as in 1865. However the
first Linguistic Survey was started only in 1898. Sir George Abraham
Grierson, an Indian Civil Service Officer (ICS), who held a mathematics
graduation from the Trinity College, Dublin, is credited with the
Survey. He began his monumental work of undertaking “a deliberate
systematic survey of the languages of India", the Linguistic Survey of
India. It took Grierson 30 years to gather data on 179 languages and 544
dialects. The survey, carried out between 1903 and 1928, was published
in 19 volumes, spanning 8,000 pages. The survey contains the description
of the languages and dialects of much of British India. Only
British-governed Madras Presidency, Burma, and the princely states of
Hyderabad and Mysore were not covered by this survey. We are very
fortunate to collect digital copies of this survey including rare
recordings that he had recorded in the gramophone records. The original
recordings are still available at the British Library’s Sound Archive in
London. We feel that this and several other archival information and
data will add value to our exhibition.
It was a remarkable
foresight of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar and the makers of the Indian
Constitution that they thought of creating a dedicated Schedule of
Languages - the 8th Schedule -, which initially included 14 languages.
The list was subsequently enlarged so as to adjust the intent of the
Schedule to the linguistic realities in the country. As of 2015, the
Schedule has in it 22 languages. These languages known as the ‘Scheduled
Languages’ are: Assamiya, Bangla, Boro, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi,
Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi,
Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu.
Our Constitution has empowered individual States to identify any
language/s as official language/s even if it is not in the 8th Schedule.
The above write up on the concept is not exhaustive but only provides a
birds eye view of what the exhibition is likely to be and the
accompanying images of the artistic view of the exhibition reveal other
aspects of the linguistic diversity of India.
May India continue to treasure its linguistic diversity yet be united as one. Long live the Indigenous languages.
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