What Cleaves Us Apart Can Bring Us Together

Language divides only when we want it to. When we speak someone else's language, we create an instant rapport. But politicians find it more useful to use it as leverage

- HARISH BIJOOR

Language divides. It breaks up geographies into easily differentiated territories. India is a sum of its many language areas, each demarcated with fuzzy—and at times porous—lines on the map.

The states Reorganisation Act of 1956 represents the big ethos of the specificity of states on linguistic lines. What started in 1886 as India's first linguistic movement in the Bihar and Orissa province of yore, actually culminated in the birth of Orissa, the first Indian state to be reorganised on the lines of a spoken language. To date, Madhusudan Das is respected as the father of Odia nationalism. In 1956, all of it was put down on paper and the story of the many states of India, as divided on the basis of language, began.

In this long journey of 69 years, a lot of water has flowed under the many bridges of the many languages of India. Any language spoken by more than 10,000 people as a first language is considered to be ours. And that remains the beauty of Indian polity, politics and the great reality of being an all-embracing Indian.

We love languages. We are linguists. Many of us speak five to six languages without a problem. We seamlessly switch from one to another depending where, and with whom, we are. Language, in more ways than one, does not belong to the state where it is spoken the most, as much as it does to the speaker.

When I want to get close with some of my childhood friends, I lapse into Telugu or Tamil. The connect is quick and memorable. When speaking to my waiter at a Darshini restaurant in Bengaluru, who is from Uttar Pradesh, I switch to Hindi. My auto driver gets a bit of Malayalam or Telugu or Tamil. When I connect with a client in Ahmedabad in Gujarati, it lights up his eyes. What's the problem with language then? Actually, there is none. There is one only when we want to create it.