Maharashtrian Linguistic Provincialism and Indian Nationalism

Abstract

PERHAPS THE MOST WIDELY NOTED social and political phenomenon in independent India has been the growth of provincial demands on the Union Government. Typically, and to the consternation of Prime Minister Nehru and friends of Indian unity, these demands have been headed by the insistence that Indian state borders be redrawn on the basis of language, and on the principle that each state be, more or less, a unilingual political unit. To this end, provincial politicians, often supported by mass enthusiasm and occasionally by mass violence, have insisted that their areas be either detached from one state and attached to another, or formed into a new state so that the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the recreated or new unit speak and understand the same mother tongue. Western writers, largely following the lead of the Government of India, have been inclined to stress the fissiparous and disruptive tendencies of these linguistic-provincial movements.' By and large, the arguments made by provincial leaders that unilinguism on the state level facilitates democracy and national unity by meeting a widespread popular demand and by serving as a cultural and ideological half-way house between national unity and the traditional fragmentation of society into a myriad of villages, castes and dialects have been ignored.2 Or they have been regarded as a screen behind which large and strong castes or communities whose borders are coterminous with language borders can strive for political hegemony at the provincial level. Western as well as Indian writers have expressed apprehension that the new and conglomerate Indian Union will eventually be unable to compete democratically or successfully for the loyalty of its citizens against longlived and entrenched provincial and communal loyalties and interests that are geographically concentrated and politically organized in several unilingual states. While it does not directly contradict this gloomy prognosis of the chances for survival of a united democratic India, this article, it is hoped, will suggest another perspective in which the problem of linguistic provincialism can be viewed-the perspective of party politics. An investigation of the effect of India's border controversy with China on the alliance between Communists and Praja Socialists in the cause of Maharashtrian linguistic provincialism