— Khurshid
Alam, Founder-Editor, Contemporary Literary Review India.
Language is not an invention. It is not a
theoretical construct devised in a university seminar. Nor is it the outcome of
scientific experimentation in a lab. Language is born of the people—shaped
slowly over centuries, through daily use, communal rituals, shared struggles,
and inherited memory. It binds people not by rule, but by rhythm—of feeling, of
expression, of identity.
Every language is a tapestry of a
community’s inner life. It holds within it the songs of harvest, the cries of
mourning, the logic of local idioms, and the pulse of oral tradition. It cannot
be imposed, theorized, or invented. When politicians attempt to enforce a
language top-down—divorced from the lives of the people—it ceases to be a medium
of connection and becomes a tool of control. History has warned us, repeatedly,
of the consequences.
One of the clearest examples is the
language policy in post-independence Pakistan. The central government’s decision
to impose Urdu as the sole national language—ignoring the deep-rooted linguistic
and cultural identity of the Bengali-speaking majority in East Pakistan—was not
just a political miscalculation. It was a cultural affront. Language became the
frontline of resistance. The Bengali Language Movement of 1952 was not merely a
plea for recognition; it was a struggle for dignity. The eventual secession of
East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 was, in part, the result of
this linguistic imposition. The attempt to enforce a singular linguistic
identity on a pluralistic society proved to be both culturally blind and
politically catastrophic.
In contrast, history also offers examples
of organic linguistic acceptance—where a language is adopted not under
compulsion but through cultural exchange and mutual respect. Consider the case
of Gujarati merchants and Persian traders during the early medieval period.
Persian—then the language of courts and commerce—entered Gujarat not through
imperial decree, but through interaction, trade, and intermarriage. Over time,
it enriched the Gujarati language, leaving behind a legacy of shared vocabulary
and literary forms. There was no imposition—only absorption. No conflict—only
convergence.
Language binds people when it emerges
from their lived realities. It cannot be assigned by decree, nor can it be
codified fully by scholars. Linguists may study it, classify it, even theorize
about its evolution—but the spirit of a language belongs to those who speak it.
Attempts to dissect it too finely often fail to capture its emotional charge,
its musicality, its cultural resonance.
As editors and scholars, we must remain
conscious of this distinction. Our role is not to police or prescribe language,
but to listen—to its transformations, to its resistances, to its silences. We
must support the preservation of marginalized languages, not simply for academic
record-keeping, but because each language holds a unique way of seeing the
world.
Let us, then, reaffirm the truth: a
language lives because people live it. It flourishes in poetry, in protest, in
lullabies, in street slang. It is a force of belonging, not bureaucracy. A
heritage, not a policy. And most of all, it is a human inheritance that must
never be reduced to a tool of power.