Assam’s multilingual social fabric runs into rough weather as and when dominance of any language is thrust upon its people. The recent governmental diktat ordering compulsory introduction of Sanskrit at the school level up to Class VIII created ripples of dismay across all the linguistic communities of Assam. Although the state government has back-tracked from introducing it as a compulsory medium of learning by citing lack of sufficiently qualified teachers, it left its uncut disruptive mark on the consciousness of Assam’s educated middle class.
The precarious language scenario of Assam is well-known. The imposition of Assamese as the only medium of instruction in the 1960s led to widespread protests across Assam resulting in an ethnic, cultural and linguistic divide. A similar situation repeated itself in 1972, when Gauhati University declared Assamese as the only medium of higher education.Peace and goodwill prevailed by evolving what is called the Lal Bahadur Shastri formula,which resolved the issue by declaring Assamese as the main official language with two of its subsidiaries — Bodo for Bodo areas and Bengali for the Barak valley of Assam.
In the pre-1979 Assam movement period, one could see the emergence of a neo-Asomiya language identity, as a large number of Bengali Muslims from East Bengal and East Pakistan had settled in Assam from the early decades of the 20th century and declared their mother tongue to be Asomiya. This has contributed to the maintenance of linguistic balance in the state, as Asomiya could retain its place as the dominant language of Assam,somewhat upholding the creation of States within the Union of India on a linguistic basis in 1956. The threat of demographically losing its higher place to Bengali, nevertheless, remained as a major source of political and linguistic angst in the social psyche of the dominant Asomiya cultural and linguistic identity.
After the Assam accord, the situation remained stable, as constitutional recognition of Asomiya as the state language remained permanent under both the Shastri formula and in terms of demographic superiority of Asomiya as a language. It is in this context of permanently shelving any fear of loss of cultural superiority of Asomiya as a language and as a culture, that the recent move by the BJP-led Government of Assam in introducing Sanskrit assumed a greater significance.
In one reading, the threat of dislodgement of official superiority of Asomiya as a language came from some sources internal to Asomiya linguistic and cultural identities, as these forces wanted to re-establish the language’s umbilical lineage with the great Indian tradition of Sanskrit.
The responses and reactions to this move started with the age-old debate about Asomiya being gradually marginalised in the privately-run English medium schools and also by the new generation, as they take to English as the medium of instruction. As recognition to this reaction of angst, fear and apprehension, the Assam government, by another diktat, made Asomiya compulsory as a language to be studied by all the students in private-run schools of Assam. The Tower of Babel reappears with its fragile structure only to be a spectral guarantee to the state’s fragile linguistic balance.
The larger context of using Sanskrit as a mother language to create a sense of “Hindu identity” cannot be missed. At the same time, the discomfiture of the conglomerate ethnic, cultural and very local components and blocs of people within the Asomiya linguistic identity, comprising many tribal and indigenous groups far removed from Indo-Aryan races and languages, became more than evident.The presence of a large number of NeoAsomiya speakers constituting almost 30 per cent of roughly 20 million Asomiya speakers, who are of East Bengali origin, became even more challenging as it could have invoked a sense of alienation from the Asomiya linguistic domain for these people, referred to as Miyas by nationalists of a certain variety. Although Assam’s Muslim groups did not express any overt reaction to the idea of their children learning Sanskrit, yet the state’s cultural elite expressed their awareness of such a possibility. Added up with Asomiya’s fragile tribal, poly-ethnic and polyglot interior, these Neo-Asomiya speakers, a minority within a minority for all practical purposes, for the first time, got a silent recognition of their number from the Asomiya mainstream as a significant component within Asomiya speakers. Assam’s cultural elite cannot write them off given their sheer number, as other tribal and poly-ethnic constituents also show a certain veering towards their pre-original languages such as Tai Ahom, Matak, Khamti, Tangsa, Tai-Phake or Moran or any other such pristine language forms. This is a process of ethnic and linguistic fragmentation,which is going to spell trouble for Asomiya as a modern Indian language and as a growing and developing language of the state of Assam.
It is in this paradigm of unstable and yet determined trajectory of forging a linguistically modern and progressive language and literature such as Asomiya — whose place in the world is recognised and appreciated — faces a topsy-turvy situation with a variety of diktats. Sanskrit, supposedly the mother of all Indo-Aryan group of languages such as Asomiya, Hindi, Oriya and Bangla construct a mainstream, which Asomiya already belongs to and does not require a fresh entry and re-inscription. Yet, the Assam government with its attempt to forge a larger Hindu identity ran against a slow and steady historical process of creating a firm and sustainable Asomiya linguistic form, which created a sense of insecurity in the very people whom it intended to Sanskritise. The unintended institutional and cultural impact is of such a grave nature that it is rolled back like a dry leaf in the wind.
Herein comes a historic moment of self-realisation, if one could call it so. The realisation that Asomiya does not need a certification from a supposed Sanskritic linguistic tradition, rather it needs consolidation from within by building up a bulwark of committed Asomiya speakers, who identity it as their mother tongue in the steeply contested ethnic and linguistic mosaic of the state.
Assam is the only home of the Satriya tradition, a fledgling syncretic tradition of religiosity, cultural harmony and linguistic sublimity that brings diverse ethnic groups together and bridges the Sankardev, Ajan Fakir and Guru Teg Bahadur-led traditions.The state also retains its pre-Sanskritic and Sanskritic influences at the same time. Therefore, introduction of Shastric Sanskrit cannot cut much ice within this indigenously developed tradition of harmonisation. Asomiya as a language can boast of this enriching and engulfing tradition of cultural and communal melting ground that floats above any narrowly conceived re-routing into a mono-litihic Sanskritic tradition. Assam’s cult of female deity worshipping, its Tantric heritage, its magical performances and its multifarious rituals of an ethnic origin celebrating femininity, is simultaneously inside and outside the pan-Indian pan-ethnic religious culture. The little tradition of ethnic Asomiya groups assumes a larger role than mere learning of a greater tradition like Sanskrit. In microcosm, the ritualised everyday lives of small-time practitioners of faith create the sense of parampara or honouring ancient traditions in Assam and not the Purana Sahstra dham-based mainstream Hindu tradition. A Bodo dance form called Bagadumba or stoning of the idol of Lord Shiva at Chatrasaal in Goalpara, the formless deity at Kamakhya, Khampti’s Sautantrika Buddhist tradition, Wihu Khu of Tangsas, Jonbil fair of tribes of hills and plains,offering of rice beer at every invocation of God of the village by Mishings, Hazrat Shah Miran’s Vasihnavite poetic forms and hundreds of such little and different traditions cannot be captured within the dragnet of mainframe religiosity of the Indo-Gangetic Himalayan origin.
To a large extent, if Sanskritic roots have supplied succour to the Asomiya language,there is this other reality of cultural de-Sanskritisation and emergence of creative forms of re-conceptualisation of the entire Sanskritic tradition in new syncretic terms. In this context, the joining up of people from different ethnic origins and neo-Asomiya groups within the fold of Asomiya is a laudable cultural achievement that mainstream India is not aware of. The talk about a nationality formation of Asomiya and the rise of Asomiya linguistic nationalism is a lived reality of Assam that cannot be underwritten by the state. Else, the state will mismanage its immensely rich cultural diversity and will stifle and trample the growth of home-grown cultural syncretism, supposed to be the bridge between different groups and identities.
Last but not the least,the place of Asomiya as a language within modern Indian languages needs to be strengthened and augmented not by imposing institutional rules, but by encouraging existing little traditions that do a bottom-up integration of cultural identities into a common linguistic “form of life”. Any deviation from this process of integration by committing an epistemic violence to the rich internal diversity of Asomiya as a home of language and culture would create a rift and dissonance of the deadliest kind and so, better it be integration without Sanskrit.
Prasenjit Biswas is with the North Eastern Hill University, Shillong and the author of Between Philosophy and Anthropology, and Suraj Gogoi is a Sociologist based at the National University of Singapore.