Inaugural address – Prof. Ashok R Kelkar

Friends, I have just uttered a performative sentence namely ‘I hereby' and so on. It's rather an unusual kind of performative sentence because the expression ‘hereby' in it refers not only to my uttering the sentence but to my lighting the lamp, so the lighting the lamp was a part f the sentence, what does it signify, perhaps what I did was a ritual act or was it a ritual act. After all what is a conference or a seminar, a conference or a seminar is, in a way, ritual theatre, it is ritual heater but unlike the normal kind of theater, there is no division between players and playgoers. Everybody is a player and a playgoer and we here together stage this play, this conference, so this is exactly like a ritual where people take part in the ritual to get only like a ritual. The course of a ritual is preordained; everybody knows what is going to follow what but this is ritual theatre and in theater we're not supposed to know what is going to follow. There may be a schedule, 1 st schedule was modestly called tentative schedule, but even the final schedule is also a tentative schedule for the very good reason that like theater, like drama, we don't quite know what's the next thing that's going to come. In a theatre the next emerges from what is going on, now a theatre, of course that's a play, and this combines the spirit of a play and a ritual. Being a ritual, it is serious play and in a ritual although we don't quite know what is going to come next being a play, in a ritual we do know what is going to emerge in the end. What is going to emerge in the end is the creation of something totally new, ‘Apoorva Vastu Nirman', as they say. So here we are engaged in this complex exercise which is partly ritual and of course which is linguistics, we mustn't forget that. Now let me see there is another piece of ritual that I have to perform, I have to doubt the wisdom of selecting me to inaugurate the conference. I'm supposed to say, ‘Couldn't they have found somebody better?' so I think I should say that, in fact I should express my discomfort about being hosen here to inaugurate this conference. Expressing this discomfort is very difficult because I also feel comfortable, comfortable about coming back to this institute. When a representative from this institute welcomed me at the airport and then when we came to Mysore, I told him frankly, coming to this institute, I don't feel like a guest at all because I was closely connected both with the conception and the inception of this institute, but at the same time the happiness about coming to this institution is one thing, but this discomfort of inaugurating this is another thing. For one thing my contact and interaction with Prof. Emaneau was very limited and fragmentary. In fact way back in 1957, I actually missed an opportunity of becoming his student. This is how it happened, I was a graduate student in Cornell at that time and I discovered to my happiness that Cornell rules permitted a foreign graduate student to take up one semester away from Cornell and have it counted towards his credit. So I proposed that I visit Berkley , California to spend some time with Prof. Emaneau. It would have been an escape from the chill and fog of Ithaca , but it would have also been an escape in a different direction to work with Prof. Emaneau whose work was so involved with our languages, South Asian languages. But unfortunately that didn't quite work out, I spent a semester away, alright, but not a t Berkley , California but at Yale with Prof. Bernard Block, Prof. Wells and the others. Next I had a chance to meet him in person for the first time that was in summer of '59, we were both in the faculty of the summer school of linguistics at Coimbatore . I was giving a course in phonetics, when I made the happy discovery of a young phonetician who became a distinguished linguist, Prof. D N Shankar Bhatt, he should have been here. And Prof. Emaneau was giving a course in historical linguistics you will recall that in those days there used to be a tussle between historical linguistics and historical linguistics. The seniors felt that they were at home with historical linguistics but they wee very doubtful about the usefulness of descriptive linguistics. Many of them were happy to take Prof. Emaneau's course. At the end of the course, however, it turned out that some of the neophytes – beginners in linguistics did much better than the senior linguists in historical linguistics. And I think Prof. Emaneau in a way, without probably realizing it did a signal service to Indian linguistics because it brought it home to people that historical linguistics and descriptive linguistics form a seamless web, you can't say that you can do only historical linguistics without having clear idea about linguistic analysis in the first place. Later on, I think in '68, Prof. Krishnamurthy who is a kind of ‘Anthevasin' to Prof. Emaneau proposed that we bring out a Shashtipurthi volume in honor of Prof. Emaneau and I was very happy to contribute an article to it. I chose to write on Boro kinship terms, I thought, it would be a very appropriate contribution because Prof. Emaneau was always anxious to link up language with it's matrix in culture and society. I had always a soft corner for languages which are otherwise ignored or neglected and Boro was one. But that was not the last, in 1984 came the DEDR of Borrow and Emaneau, the revised edition of the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, that book has been sitting on my reference shelf ever since. I have had frequent occasions to consult that book as a student of the Marathi language. As we used to say jokingly at Deccan College ‘Marathi language is an honorary member of the Dravidian family' and naturally this my sound strange but it should not sound strange in South Asian as a linguistic area. Of course many people have intuitively felt it but it was left to Prof. Emaneau to bring evidence for the push of this institution. But this was not the last opportunity to interact with Prof. Emaneau. The first Marathi encyclopedia came to in the 1920's, more recently the government of Maharashtra thought that it would be a good idea to bring out a fresh Marathi encyclopedia because that had become very out of date and eventually they reached some of the final letters and I was asked to contribute an article on the Vietnami language and of course I didn't know too much about the Vietnami language and who came to my rescue again, Prof. Emaneau. I wonder sometimes whether just are we are remembering him. So as I said, somebody whose contact with Prof. Emaneau was more substantial than mine would have been the right person. But it is not the only discomfort that I have in being here. Let me now turn to the second half of the title of the conference on South Asian Linguistics. If you do a Panini like vigraha of this phrase, you'll realize that this phrase admits itself to two vigrahas. South Asian linguistics is either the study of South Asian languages or the South Asian study of languages, I'm a South Asian and naturally refer, hence South Asian happens to be the cradle of linguistics and it also happens to be museum of languages and in a way I'm happy because what better background can a linguist ask for. Background to be born in the cradle of linguistics and the museum of languages, and also I'm a linguist. Now being a South Asian and being a linguist, does that add up? I don't quite know. Being a South Asian, I write in two South Asian languages namely Marathi and Hindi, but I also write in a non-South Asian language namely English. As a linguist, I've written about South Asian languages like Marathi, Hindi, Kashmiri and a few others like Boro, for example. But I've also written about non-South Asian languages like English, French and few others like Georgian, for example. Now my source of discomfort is that not many South Asian linguists do this. As early as 1940, Dr V S Sukhthankar, the great editor of the Bhandarkar institute edition of Mahabharatha complained in the oriental conference that Indians have a bad habit of confining their attention only to their own language, so a Marathi speaker will talk only about Marathi, a Tamil speaker will talk only about Tamil and so on. At the most he will extend his attention perhaps to Hindi, perhaps to a classical language which is close to him – Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Pali, for example and so on. But even here, you'll find that Urdu speakers will look at Sanskrit and vice-versa. Many Indo–Aryan speakers will look at Sanskrit but not really T Persian and Arabic and it was really thrilling to hear Prof. Sunit Kumar Chatterjee reciting Ayaths from Quran and it is a part of his phonetic course because he wanted to illustrate some of the ‘Mohakhama' consonants in Arabic. That doesn't happen very often, at the most ha will look at the particular language family but if you look at people here working on a Dravidian language family, they will be mostly Dravidian language speakers and so on, down the line, and this not a very satisfactory state of affairs. If a westerner like Prof. Emaneau can look at both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, why can't we do that? Why do we have to be so parochial in our interest as linguists? Of course there are honorable exceptions like B M Shankar Bhatt is one who has done field work, for example, in all the major language families of India . But there are not many like him, and this makes me very uncomfortable, very unhappy. Also when it comes to choosing your medium, as I said, I have followed the three language formula, writing in Marathi, Hindi and English. And it gives me the satisfaction of getting different kinds of readers. But I find that many scholars either choose to write solely in English or solely in their mother tongue. I hope that this unsatisfactory state of affairs will change. I'm also uncomfortable because of another aspect of this. I said that South-Asian also means South-Asian study of languages and afterall if I study South-Asian languages, I study them because I study languages and that is why I have to look at non-South-Asian languages also, to also look at languages in general, linguistic theory in general. And again the situation is not very satisfactory and I'm uncomfortable about that. Somebody just mentioned about globalization of language. I have a longish article on ‘integrating knowledge globalization'. And knowledge globalization is fine, but knowledge globalization should not be only euphuism for knowledge westernization. A South-Asian linguist, for example, can look at language from a western or western-like point of view as I have been doing and also from South-Asian point of view. We have again not a very happy situation. There are the people who swear by Panini, or Kachayana or the Perso-Arabic grammatical tradition. These are the people whom we could call ‘purvagami' or swadesi prasth. And there are people who wholly write in the western tradition without caring to look at what we have from our ancestors. We could think of them as ‘paschimagami' or videsh prasth. I'm not arguing for either of these points of view because I'm unhappy with either of these points of view. What I'm arguing is that it is time we attain our ‘swaraj' in the field of linguistics atleast if not in other fields. Truly enjoying our swaraj in the field of knowledge is being free to pick-up our insights from where we can, from wherever we want to. We don't have to follow our own ancestors, we don't have to follow the west, we have to follow ourselves and follow our own insights. This means making our own contributions to linguistic theory. Now, making our contributions to linguistics theory is not always a matter of paradigm shift, the growth of knowledge is not only a matter of paradigm shift but also a brick by brick growth and I don't mean a brick by brick growth about facts that Indians do in plenty, but a brick-by-brick growth in terms of insights. And that also makes me uncomfortable. I've talked about my first discomfort namely not being close enough to Prof. Emeneau. I've talked about my second discomfort about being somebody from South-Asian Linguistics. I've also some discomfort of what is coming now. Because they told me that they are going to launch an e-book “Collected Papers of Ashok R. Kelkar”. Now the word ‘collected' reminds me of an old fashioned typewriter, the younger people may not even have seen. When you come towards the end of a line, it gives you a polite tinkle telling you that you are coming to the end of a line and then people started talking about collected papers of Kelkar that makes me uneasy. I don't know that whether collected papers is a closed set, a sampoornaganam as a samskruth grammarian would say or an open set or an akruthiganam. I hope that since this is an e-book it will remain an open set. Right now, I'm in the middle of preparing two papers- one on French intonation and another on mediation as a design strategy in language, culture and society, so eventually I may have more papers to add. I hope Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh will not have any objection to adding new papers to the e-book. When you undertake something of this kind, I think it is good that I got all these discomforts of mine out of my system and now that I've done this, I can call upon all of you to leave your personal worries and discomforts and also your collective sorrow, for example, our sorrow in the earthquake cum tidal wave disaster outside, behind the door of this conference hall. And here let us truly and fully enjoy our pursuit of knowledge. ‘sahana bhavathu' Let us truly, fruitfully gain strength from this, sahnau bhunakthu, let us also gain the fruits and the insights and the glory we gain from this, saha veeryam kara vaavahai, let us also get rid of our animosities.