LANGUAGE IN INDIA

DEMANDS FOR A SEPARATE LINGUISTIC STATE:
THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY AND TERRITORIALIZING BUNDELKHAND IN INDIA

Sibansu Mukhopadhyay

Abstract

This paper tries to set the questions on 'national' identity in the Indian context. Especially when the postcolonial management of Indian nation states fails to resolve the problems or the crisis with the marginal identities in India, this paper reconsiders the issue. There are several groups or communities in India desire to get their 'own' political identity or the national status like Bundelkhand. They are fighting against the linguistic states under which they lived as marginal. This paper revisits the issue considering a certain example of Bundelkhand Liberation Movement. Rather than viewing this identity crisis as the contradiction of the center-peripheries relation, it is suggested here that the crisis of identity can be understood better when situated within the political as well economic problems of modern nation-state.

Key Words

Identity, Desire, Genealogical fantasy, Linguistic State, Plurilingualism

Introduction

This paper seeks to exemplify or revisit the question of identity in case of re-structuring the linguistic states in India. Before taking the main tasks and arguments of this work, something on the method of the observation and the data analysis have to be calculated primarily. As any preconceived idea or model or method of analysis perhaps also in quantification produces nothing but so many paradoxes, here a 'subject' intervenes into the observations and at the same time s/he keeps distance observing the discourse, non-discursive formations and the other 'men'.

1. Objective

The most important thing is to give an example or a case, which helps to understand the thesis.

1.1 The thesis

According to the format of the linguistic state in India one may comprehend following two-folded issues mainly. Assuming a prototypical idea on 'modern' Indian states we can continue formulating a linguistic nation state as follows 'primarily' or 'essentially':

Fold 1 (Private property):
a. an (imagined) boundary, i.e., land as private property
b. a homogenous, total, well shaped language as a modular form (et al. Anderson 1983)

Fold 2 (The machinery of modern state):
a. Printing technology to write over the private properties
b. State apparatuses (Ideological State Apparatuses = ISA and Repressive State Apparatuses = RSA, et al Althusser, 1977)

The main occupation of this paper is to engage with the functions in re-structuring a linguistic nation state.

1.2 The example

This paper examines the 'desires' for a separate state of Bundelkhand, covering an area of lower Uttar Pradesh and the northern part of the Madhya Pradesh. Let us bring this example in focus just to indicate the objective of this paper.

Bundelkhand is called 'historically' the land of Bundela kingdom and also sociologically a so-called 'linguistic community'2 of India. With a great majority of population, four southern districts of Uttar Pradesh and eight northern district of Madhya Pradesh speak 'Bundeli' language, which is recorded by the census as a 'dialect of western Hindi'. 3

The separation movement for Bundelkhand is known as "bundelkhOnD mukti andolOn" or the "Liberation Movement of Bundelkhand". It is merely a projection of a desire of 'formal elaboration'4 in the era of Indian post-independence by more than one organization like Bundelkhand Mukti Morcha (BMM). As an observer I had to examine this example of desire, the discursive and the non-discursive formations of the projection of Bundelkhand state, enough with my positional subjective competence, ideologies and imaginations.

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Meithei Personal Names | The Status and Teaching of English in Pakistan | ELT in Higher Education in Iran and India - A Critical Review | Demands for a Separate Linguistic State - The Question of Identity and Territorializing Bundelkhand in India | Case Marking in Gojri | Religion and Fiction | Writing Across the Curriculum -
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