Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh – Future Direction
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Well, Friends, we're very privileged that Mr. Sudip Banerjee is here with us. Not only because he is an important functionary in the ministry but also because on his own right as a thinker and a writer and a person who has been on so many different missions connected to education in the country. Now, may I before I begin to talk about the summary of the conference, request Dr Rajyashree, one of our deputy directors to offer a floral bouquet to Mr. Banerjee.
Now what I'm going to do on the screen as you can see here is kind of telling you the story of the signs of despair that we have currently. But I'm not going to present the whole thing as a hopeless case but essential. I'm trying to find out for myself or for my colleagues here, what are the lessons we have learnt from this conference, from numerous deliberations that we had during the last few days. We know that this is a conference which is a tribute to that monumental scholarship of Prof. M B Emaneau, a real person who works in both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, a person who doesn't stick to only linguistics per se but also works in lexicography, folklore and literature. So as a mark of respect for the person and his scholarship we had organized the whole conference in several sessions and these sessions talked about language, literature, culture and also the space – India . We had in total about 112 to 160 observers, local scholars and participants in all at any point of time. In total, 73 registered scholars taking part from India and abroad. Totally 40 papers including 6 papers were taken as read. Thematically the details are as follows. We had 11 papers-‘ India as a linguistic area', 5papers – ‘ India as a socio- linguistic area'. And experiences from other speech areas – there were 5, India as a literary area or a cultural area, there were about 7, 6- Dravidian studies and 6- folklore. Now having done this, where do we go from here? We know that Emaneau's work is not just one paper, there are several, beginning from 1954. This was done 50 years ago. The citation index which was presented to you here as part of the conference proceedings shows that the paper is still relevant today. In the 1990's, this had maximum number of reference and citations. Now, even if this is the case, since the best minds of South-Asian linguists are gathered here, we would like to know if this event here leaves some messages for the generation of researchers currently engaged in human language studies from numerous angles, which way should South-Asian linguistics go? We need to take a stock of these matters; I have, to my understanding, the way I have understood deliberations divided the learning process in the 7 lessons that I have learnt from the entire scenario. The first thing is that, what we have learnt from the entire thing is that something which is very dangerously neat, a very neat explanation, a very neat theory – beware of that. There is some fuzziness, there is some unclarity, there are some problems and we always thought that at a particular point of time, the modernist enterprise thought that like any other science. Science of languages must depend on descriptions that would be based on methodology i.e. a fixed kind of methodology that would be a tool, set of tools and a set of formulae. I have a suspicion that those things are not so neat and not so easy and when I look at the entire humanities and the whole process of the scienticism that were attempted to be brought to humanities. It is true that we need rigor; there is no doubt about it. But we should also be wary of the pseudo-scienticism which is very important. We must remember that a large part of language studies are amenable to mathematics, are amenable to formulate expressions and descriptions, no doubt about that. But at the same time many of the things that we thought at one point of time is language universals. We have taken it for given as language universals. We see after a period of time that this blank-fire it becomes something which is true to only of our local space. And more and more data as it is coming, we see more and more tumbling down of the universals that are happening. The third thing is social linguistics and linguistics both were used for prognosis purposes, for prediction purposes. I recall, with interest those of you have seen the papers by Ferguson and Munir Chowdhary regarding the deglossia in Bangla at one point of time, He had made a prognosis that by another 30 years, 40 years, this is going to happen. Now many social linguists, scholars, Ferguson had himself done the deglossia in the word. Many sociolinguistics scholars have come to make those predictions. Same case with historical linguistics – which direction the particular discipline is going and you make the prediction. Now as we see that and more data coming y these predictions are not coming entirely to be true but what we need to believe in is that such predictions are difficult to really stick to because language is not a space. Language is not a kind of phenomenon which is very simplistic kind of directional phenomenon, it goes in multiple directions. Therefore, it is very essential for us to learn this lesson. The 4 th lesson that we have learnt from this is, what I call ‘history as a teacher.' Now throughout modernist enterprise in linguistic science, we've seen that all our analytical tools have been built on categorization and classification. Now this tool in turn, depended on their faith on dichotomies and trichotomies. Whether you call them Sassurean dichotomies or Jakobsonian dichotomies or Chomskian dichotomies. Somehow we've been unable to break this jinx and think about more complicated configurations. It appears that this is again an attempt to neatly categorize and categorize human languages and we forget that this is not necessarily the case if you really start looking at language very carefully. In the beginning, I talked to you if you remember about the possibilities of model and models which will be mentally overlapping, criss-crossing and this is very important, that we need to remember this kind of thing. There was a time when the demand for uncovering the real structure of languages was based on only and only the observable and describable. Something which was not observable was relegated at the background. There is a lot of change which has taken place beginning with Chomsky coming into the picture. We have learnt not only to be restricted only to things which are indescribable and observable directly but we've also taken a leap from statisity to enter into the unknown territories of human mind. There is know doubt about that particular progress that had happened because of Chomsky. So a new discourse in linguistics emerge in this period of time where analysis of mental phenomenon and mental institutions very important as important as something directly found. So intuition had a many a major role. Now in this conference we have also been told that language is a site of human struggle. Jayant Lele's paper to me was a striking paper, where he made this comment that in the modernist tradition we could really care whether linguistics should be used or employed to build a rational space. But today it is very difficult. Some of the speakers in the last session told us that it is not only important to do linguistics but also important to make linguistics relevant, for social development, for development of country, development of the nation, and therefore the rich narration of the tensions that some of the socio-linguists need to give and need to talk about would be as important as pure linguistic language descriptions. I think also it is important for us to understand that the last 50 years was the period of defining amnesium because this tries to deny the past and tries to foreclose the possibilities of a new kind of future.
In the kind of linguistics done in the last 50 years id the declared lack of confidence in knowledge and tradition, that what was built earlier must be demolished before we begin anew I think, that is something where we made a mistake. Again and again whenever we have progressed whether it is film over case for case theory or any other kind of progresses we have made, in theory building, we have again been reminded that things which were discovered earlier, things which were talked about earlier, were also still relevant, maybe relevant in a new garb, in a new manner, but it was important that this was thought about. The modernist agenda as I can see from several deliberations here which raised the banner of revolt in linguistics, it believed in a consistent unlearning. In fact one of the things which was told to me when I want to do modern linguistics from Calcutta, which was a seat of non modern linguistics those days, comparative philology, into Delhi university to do linguistics, I was told to unlearn whatever we had learnt earlier which is very strange. But any way I accepted the dictum of the teachers that taught us modern linguistics there. But I think today if some body is going to do that I will definitely stand up and say ‘Let's not do that.' So I think this is important for us. Linguistics at that point of time was used mainly for what Hocket was talking about as arrest of the rapid fading. As you know all of us are aware here that language is a phenomenon which fades very rapidly, which disappears very rapidly, and all that we do the technology, where it is recording, where it is filming or it is audio taping or it is writing deep down, all this was technology that common human beings used to arrest this rapid fading of language. What did the linguist do to arrest this rapid fading of language, what did the linguist do? Linguists also by trying to write up grammar descriptions did whatever they could to arrest this rapid fading, so documentation became important as far as the description of language landscape was concerned. I think it is very important to free linguistics from its passive use and use linguistics as an instrument of change and my colleague Rajesh Sachdeva made the point very succinctly, when he was talking about the northeastern phenomena and what we need to do in the northeast. Today I think that the difference has happened in thinking is that we cannot do linguistics only in terms of ‘is'; we must do linguistics in terms of ‘ought'. There must be a scope for utopia, there must be a scope for normative criticism, and there must be a scope for dreaming. In think this is very important because otherwise the science of language cannot progress. And this is very crucial because there'll be so many surprises, there'll be difficulties, there'll be problems because we'll be suddenly surprised with many new phenomena, there'll be breakdowns in the theory building, there's no doubt about it. There'll be some problems initially and some uncertainties. So we shouldn't really expect very neat theory for us to live with, to sleep with and to teach to the students. I think this is very crucial, the time is very difficult and we're passing through a very difficult moment and the whole idea is that it is neither from the deductive nor from the inductive that the new science of language will emerge. This has to be somewhere in the middle and for someone who has taken a course from Bernard Comri, I learnt the very hard way that this is something very crucial that you really cannot just depend on those items. This is a slide, which we've already seen earlier that Turbesque is the one who talks about the sprashch group and the sprachbund, the language area from where Emaneau had picked up and described India as one of the potential language area. There is no doubt that but if you remember that in my initial presentation I said that perhaps one should think about bringing in the fuzziness in the linguistic area concept, bringing in a different kind of model building where there could be an overlapping model, so we are just crossing a model which is a very neat kind of model and even simplistic other models like this. But we have probably more complicated models to be built here. Now in order to do that, the question is what have we done? This question can always come up whether you have done something, which reflects this kind of thinking, which we have had. We have tried in our own ways because we had our own limitations in the institute. As Prof. Pattanayak was pointing out there was a point of time when we had 2 more disciplines here, we don't have them right now but whatever we have we try to do certain things in a manner which will help Indian linguistics, South Asian linguistics go in a particular direction so this consisted of achieving of 118 languages data, we've worked on about 18 tribal or border language published about 520 books, have another 60 books in print we did cassette courses in Assamese, Urdu, Marathi Bengali. We did radio courses to teach Hindi for the people who would teach through the medium of Kannada and other Dravidian languages. We published this kind of languages and the new king of publications that we have had. We had created the Ashok Kelkar e-book here, which is one of the many books we have already published. So it is not one kind of publication that we have engaged ourselves in, there are various kinds of publications that we've been through and we have also worked on not just tribal languages of a particular region but many regions which can be easily here, worked on dictionary, folklore readers and various other phenomenon. Several 10 th plan projects, which we've worked, on, those of you who are interested in translation or online teaching or script teaching, or automation, information sciences. Probably was talking about building of indexes for the other linguists in the country just as we have done for Emaneau here. This kind of things we have done and lot more and we have many other goals in language technology that we can think of talking about here. Main question is do we know the read map. I think we know the road map; we've at least tried discovering the road map for ourselves. I show this picture in particular as our work on the Andaman and Nicobar, those of you who are not aware of the work we are doing it would be better for me to tell them probably that before the devastation happened two days before two of our vary bright researchers had been back, with 25 hours of video of the 12 Nicobar Islands languages, culture and society. They had worked for three months there and collected enormous amount of data from those languages and it is great tragedy that many speakers of those languages have probably been wiped off. This could be the last tape in both audio and video for those languages. So in respect for these people, I've chosen this picture to be drawn here, in talking about the road map. I think we have undertaken a series of step that would usher in change in the way we ought to do linguistics in the country and we can mention some of these we're trying to promote the inter-lingual harmony and allow pluralism. Our regional language centers in 7 places in the country have taught 1100 hours of contract courses in last 33 years for 8000 school teachers we have tried also promoting Indian languages through awards and fellowship. We offer senior fellowships, doctoral scholarships, tribal scholarships and also the Bhasha Bharathi Samman.We are doing projects to build up connectivity among various Indian writing systems called Lipika, we have also held exhibitions in Delhi and in Varda, we are trying to promote ‘South Asia as a linguistics area' kind of research and this example is one of the best examples. We also ought to be able to project that we've created a whole web page called civil grammars organization, movement to new areas clinical linguistics and corpus linguistics, and this whole web site in corpus linguistics, the emily CIIL 90 million word Indian language. Corpora is available now on the net from University of Lancaster and CIIL joint projects. The CIIL Uppasala project also creating another kind of situation and we have this national resource center for translation which we have built together with NBT and Sahithya Academy, this is something which we have done by establishing a whole web site which is called the anukruthi.net and those of you who would like to go through the facilities here can easily do that. We have worked a lot on the literacy area and we‘ve imparted some instructions to foreign students at CIIL. We've also setup a whole archive of contemporary Indian manuscripts beginning with some manuscripts of Ashok Kelkar and other writers. More importantly we're doing library automation which can be seen in website that we have. You can take a virtual tour of the entire library automation; it should work in a manner, which will be quite satisfying for scholars in South Asian linguistics. The other thing we're planning to do at the moment is the working on various Indian languages, television language teaching programmes in Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada. The main problem that I can see is that we still need to ward off the ill effects of the global gobbling up the local. The dragon that you can see here, huge dragon and in the open face of the dragon there is a human being which is stuffed in and the poor fellow is trying to get freedom, trying to get rid of it and it doesn't know how to get rid of it. This is the kind of scenario, which is happening here, and I'm particularly referring to the scenario of the English problem. Of course we have hard opinion that English need not be our adversary but what is happening quite often is that in various respects and ways it is inevitable that it is turning into a debate between vernacular languages and English. But what we need to have is the mythical hero who comes here to fight the dragon. The mythical hero is many fanged and crowned in so many languages, armed with so many Indian languages. So I need you to understand we have really miles to go before we make any impact in this area but definitely this has given us enough courage and tradition, the conference has given us enough direction. Thank you very much for being very patient about the description of the conference.
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