How was Urdu pushed out of public discourse? This book on India’s heartland traces the erasure
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Language is more vital and organic to people than inanimate objects, and is a source of great culture in terms of prose, poetry and drama. It is essentially a liberating force in that it allows for the fullest expression of feelings, moods and thoughts. As literary critic George Steiner puts it, “No two languages, no two dialects or local idioms within a language, identify, designate, map their worlds in the same way. The memories stored, the empirical surroundings inventoried, the social relations which the language organises and mirrors (kinship, for example), the colours distinguished in its vocabulary of perceptions, differ, often radically, from tongue to tongue.” Language was a seminal part of the cultural fabric of India – to protect language is to protect plurality and cultural diversity.
When the Constitution was being drafted, the notion of cultural rights, particularly special cultural rights of minorities, was admittedly inchoate. The question was whether minorities ought to be guaranteed freedom in the matter of religion, language and culture and be protected from discrimination and interference by the State. The Congress had supported a policy of preservation of minority culture, script and language as early as in the Karachi Resolution of 1931.
However, Dr Ambedkar, the chairman...