Five of the world’s major language families are present in India—but beyond that, quantification has proved elusive. After 1961, the Indian census did not count languages with any rigor; it mainly published the names of all the languages that people *said* they spoke. The last one, from 2011, registered over 19,000 “mother tongues”—“a plain absurdity,” Samanth Subramanian writes. “In the world’s most populous country, no one knows how many languages are living, or how many have died.” In India, the politics of language have always been especially overt. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) came to power, the future of Indian languages has become more uncertain. “In addition to its well-known Hindu fanaticism, the B.J.P. wishes to foist Hindi on the nation, a synthetic marriage that would clothe India in a monolingual monoculture,” Subramanian writes.
The B.J.P. believes that India can cohere only if its identity is fashioned around a single language. For the literary scholar Ganesh Devy, India’s identity is, in fact, its polyglot nature. The coexistence of languages, he thinks, has long allowed Indians to “accept many gods, many worlds”—an indispensable trait for a country so sprawling and kaleidoscopic. Since 2010, Devy has been working on the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (P.L.S.I.), which has enlisted more than 3,000 volunteers to map India’s motley splurge of languages for the first time in a century.
Read Subramanian on the scholar hoping to preserve languages, and protect them from being bullied out of existence: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/4rhgax