commentary
sufficiently threaten the central g­overnment
in providing that status.
Scholars’ Domain
We need to remind ourselves that classical
language status is not a matter for the
State to decide. It is best left to scholars,
even though they are not immune from
politics, to identify what is classical and
what is not. Further the assignation of
such a status based on accepted scholarly
standards to any language should not also
mean the “inferiorisation” of other lan­
guages. This should be kept in mind in a
context when the world is speaking of the
death of languages, India is in a peculiar
situation where many “tribal” languages
are experiencing a new wave literacy and
writing, and are in a sense being reborn.
Apart from its symbolism, on the
ground, classical language status translates
itself into substantial funds and awards.
The solution to vexed claims and counter­
claims for classical language s­tatus may
therefore rest to an extent in the govern­
ment of India giving up its p­artisan
patronage of Sanskrit and Hindi, and pro­
viding such wherewithal to all l­anguages.
Similarly, respective state g­overnments
can easily fund any amount of language and
cultural development w­ithout depending
on central government funds. Surely
revamping our universities and research
institutions is more important than chas­
ing the chimera of the “classical”. A case
in point here is that the academic struc­
tures in Tamil Nadu have not been able
to absorb the sudden influx of central
government largesse. Unfortunately the
classical language claims have only
served to sidestep the real issues plaguing
linguistic scholarship in India. In a recent
The Natives Continue
To Be Restless
Vithal Rajan
Perhaps, if, instead of
implementing a new generation
of Rowlatt Acts, the government
had tried providing education,
public health, jobs, development
and fair play to all the different
poor minority communities over
which it exercises power, there
might have been little violence
to tackle, and those communities
participating democratically
might have fully cooperated with
the law and order machinery in
identifying and handing over
any miscreants.
Vithal Rajan ([email protected]) is
with the Confederation of Voluntary
Associations, Hyderabad.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW January 10, 2009
T
he natives are restless tonight”,
was a stock phrase used in colo­
nial adventure yarns to signify
an impending revolt. The sahibs loaded
their guns and awaited the night
attack. T he noise outside the compound
could have been a mysterious religious
ceremony or just fun, they did not care,
they knew little about the people they
ruled, and were scared, and so took
p­reemptive action.
From legend this fear of unknown and
unknowable native peoples reached into
life. In the aftermath of the Rowlatt Act,
Earl Russell enquired mildly in the
House of Lords on 6 August 1919 whether
Harkissen Lal, a barrister-at-law of the
Middle Temple, really deserved transpor­
tation for life, with forfeiture of property,
just for asking shopkeepers in Lahore to
draw down their shutters, and whether
the sentence was not “a mere exhibition
of autocratic power”. He was hastily
assured by his noble colleagues that
the accused had certainly intended to
“
intervention in this debate Sheldon Pollock,
the distinguished American Sanskritist,
has pointed out how certain linguistic
scholarly traditions are dying in this coun­
try. One can only extend this worrying
diagnosis. How many scholars are there,
say, who are proficient in both Sanskrit
and Tamil, or in more than one Dravidian
language? Is it possible now for a scholar
in one Indian language to negotiate
through another Indian language with­
out the mediation of English? Do we
have a new generation of epigraphists to
continue the task of deciphering inscrip­
tions being discovered everyday? Surely
these are signs of a serious epistemo­
logical crisis.
Ultimately, languages, classical or not,
are the storehouses of human knowledge,
and constitute the heritage and patrimony
of the entire humanity.
i­nstigate at least a riot if not open revolt.
Lord Sinha, then under secretary of state
for India, was able to assure the earl that
the sentence had been commuted by the
benign government to only two years
rigorous imprisonment.
Such fears of the people they ruled over
had always been there right from the
start of the colonial period, and sepoys
once considered loyal and competent
were regularly hanged, shot, or blown
from the mouths of cannon, from the
times of Yusuf Khan, the first and only
commandant of all the sepoys, who was
treacherously hanged by the British in
1761. Any show of resentment by the
sepoys against abuse or ill-treatment by
callow or junior British officers, any hint
or rumour of words spoken and not
understood could lead to such grotesque
punishment. In turn, such cruelty pro­
duced the Vellore Mutiny of 1806 and the
Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.
Rowlatt Act
After that massacre of sepoys, the British
rulers started to fear all of the Indian popu­
lation, and one unnecessary draconian law
followed another culminating in the Row­
latt Act of 1919, which inevitably led to the
tragic Jallianwala Bagh massacre of well
over a 1,000 unarmed men, women and
children gathered in Amritsar for Baisakhi
15
commentary
celebrations. General Dyer told the Hunter
Committee of Enquiry that “It was no
longer a question of merely dispersing the
crowd, but one of producing a sufficient
moral effect, from a military point of view,
not only on those who were present but
more specifically throughout the Punjab.
There could be no question of undue sever­
ity.” He went on to add that though he knew
the people had only lathis he would have
used armoured cars to fire if the vehicles
could have been brought into that confined
space. This terrible act of his was followed
by the bombing of people in Gujranwala,
and firing on them at Kasur from an
armoured train. Indians were humiliated
under Martial Law, forcing all to crawl on
the street where Miss Sherwood was assaul­
ted, forcing all to dismount and salute
Europeans wherever seen. The Hunter
Committee would not condemn Dyer, The
House of Lords supported him, other colo­
nialists applauded him. In the event, all
belief Indian nationalist leaders might
have had in democratic British rule was
ended forever, and ultimately the barbarity
un­leashed by Dyer stripped the Empire
of its right to rule and sounded its
death knell.
Indian Leaders
The Indian nationalist leaders had the
unique and remarkable quality of being
completely at home both with the poor
masses of India and with their friends in
England, and this is what gave them the
title to take over the governance of India
by a legal act of transfer of power. That
generation of freedom fighters led by
Gandhi understood the Indian masses,
how they thought, lived, and acted, while
at the same time being cast in the mould
of liberal democratic British traditions.
Unfortunately the elite generations that
inherited power from the freedom fight­
ers, while skilled in all the trappings of
democratic governance, its rituals, and its
form, began almost unconsciously from
the first to rule in the old way. Since power
had come to them, they found no need to
go among the people, and differences of
caste and class between those in power
and those over whom they ruled soon
found expression in unnecessary laws to
suppress popular and little understood
sentiments. In 1954, in the heyday of
Jawaharlal Nehru’s rule, India’s independ­
ent government promulgated the Preven­
tive Detention Act, though valiantly
opposed by Acharya Kripalani as a “black
act”. This was legislative proof of the con­
ceptual split that had always existed
between the Mahatma and the Pandit,
and also of the safe transfer of power from
one privileged class of white sahibs to
another privileged class of brown sahibs.
Indian leaders since then till today have
known little and cared less about agricul­
ture or how hundreds of millions of poor
farmers manage to put food on elite tables.
Violence erupted in the 1960s when India
needed to import 10 million tonnes of grain
every year to avert famine. Typical of the
rulers, a solution was found in the Green
Revolution that managed massive support
for rich farmers in a few selected pockets,
to prevent famine which would have been
politically disastrous for the rulers, but
which has never produced enough to pre­
vent hunger among the masses. Being out
of touch with the people, knowing that
AXIS Bank AD
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january 10, 2009 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
commentary
usual political manipulations did not work,
and conscious that the system was giving
themselves most of the benefits of develop­
ment, the rulers took fright, and began
another round of repressive measures.
Restrictions on Freedoms
The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act
(UAPA) was passed in 1967 after the Consti­
tution itself was amended for the 16th time,
to permit restrictions being placed on fun­
damental freedoms, and amended again in
1969 to make it stricter. Harsher laws were
introduced from time to time, such as the
Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA)
by Indira Gandhi in 1973, and under Rajiv
Gandhi the Terrorist and Disruptive Activi­
ties (Prevention) Act in 1985, which was
amended further in 1987. The infamous
Prevention of Terrorists Activities Act (POTA)
was brought in by the National Democratic
Alliance government in 2002. Many state
governments have also busily followed the
trend set by the Rowlatt Act, the “father” of
all Indian black acts, and though the present
government made a show of doing away
with POTA, it brought in most of its provi­
sions through the backdoor by another
amendment to UAPA in 2004.
New Legislation
Now, after the terrorist attack on Mumbai,
just before election year, the government
feels it must be seen to be stern to prove
itself capable of leadership, and so it has
taken the fatal step of passing another
amendment to UAPA on 17 December 2008,
despite the chief justice of the Supreme
Court wisely reminding it that human
rights should not be ignored. The media is
already gleefully stating that a suspect
will be held to be guilty unless proved
innocent and that too only after incarcera­
tion in police “custody” for a full 90 days!
The Bharatiya Janata Party in opposition
wants any confession extracted by the
police to be admissible in court, a step that
even the British hesitated to take in India.
The government has learned little from
independent India’s own history of harsh
misrule, which has set in flames all of the
north-east, Kashmir, and the wide Naxalite
tribal tract cutting across India from Nepal
to Tamil Nadu. Perhaps, if the government
had tried providing education, public health,
jobs, development and fair play to all the
Economic & Political Weekly EPW January 10, 2009
different poor minority communities
over which it exercises power, instead of
implementing a generation of Rowlatt
Acts, there might have been little violence
to tackle, and those communities partici­
pating democratically might have fully
cooperated with the law and order
machinery in identifying and handing
over any few miscreants there might have
been. And what might have been the cost
of adopting such a humane alternative pol­
icy? Perhaps, not even the redistribution of
wealth so feared by the rulers, for by
unshackling the masses an enormous
productive force could have been
unleashed which would have taken the lead­
ers to heights of luxury unimagined so far
by restricted and exploitative thinking.
When the parent Rowlatt Act was
i­ntroduced, an appalled Srinivas Sastri
told the Imperial Legislative Council on
7 February 1919:
When Government undertakes a repressive
policy, the innocent are not safe. Men like me
would not be considered innocent. The inno­
cent then is he who forswears politics, who
takes no part in the public movements of the
times, who retires into his house, mumbles his
prayers, pays his taxes, and salaams all the gov­
ernment officials all round. The man who inter­
feres in politics, the man who goes about col­
lecting money for any public purpose, the man
who addresses a public meeting, then becomes
a suspect. I am always on the borderland and I,
therefore, for personal reasons, if for nothing
else, undertake to say that the possession, in
the hands of the Executive, of powers of this
drastic nature will not hurt only the wicked. It
will hurt the good as well as the bad…
If this was the feeling of an eminent
Indian of his time, cultivated, lauded and
honoured by the British, imagine what
must be the feelings of a poor person
today, whether a Muslim, a tribal or a
dalit, already under constant harassment
by the local power elite and the police?
Especially frightening is the prospect of
adding to the licentious sense of impunity
already exercised by the police. In midDecember, three miscreants who had
criminally thrown acid on two hapless
girls were shot to death while in police
custody in Andhra Pradesh. The only
executive measure conceivably harsher
would be to go back to those of Draco him­
self, who Plutarch says wrote the laws
“not with ink, but blood; and he himself,
being once asked why he made death the
punishment of most offences, replied, ‘Small
ones deserve that, and I have no higher
for the greater crimes!’” Luckily for the
ancient Athenians, Solon wisely repealed
all such laws in the sixth century BC itself.
What Is to Come
Colonel Wedgewood, calling the Rowlatt
Act the “most lawless law”, pointed out in
the House of Commons on 22 May 1919,
that “It is not a law; it is simply an admini­
strative instruction”. That is the point
of all harsh executive action, let alone
draconian laws; they signal to the minions
of a repressive state machinery that they
can act with impunity, and they would be
rewarded for doing so. And in every country
and in every century the purveyors of statedirected violence have demonstrated their
zeal by even more appalling behaviour
than their bosses might have intended. We
only have to remember the Sikh pogrom
of 1984 in Delhi, and the Muslim pogrom
of 2002 in Ahmedabad to imagine what
further horrors await us in the near future.
It would be naïve to expect that the
local constable or the foot soldier will use
judicious restraint when instructions come
down from above to the contrary. It would
be too much even to expect that any think­
ing will take place on the spot except to
deal as harshly as possible with any per­
son identified as “dangerous”. A bathetic
warning was available to our leaders at the
very dawn of independence. A K Gopalan
was the only nationalist leader still in jail
on 15 August 1947, perhaps because he was
a communist. He raised the tricolour in
prison to celebrate our independence,
and was promptly produced in court for
sedition against the Crown!
When they passed the Rowlatt Act in
1919, the British forgot that the Indians of
their time were no longer the Indians they
had beaten to the ground in 1857, and
hence they lost their empire. The Indian
Parliament by passing another harsher
amendment in December 2008 to the
already “lawless” Unlawful Activities Pre­
vention Act seems not to realise that their
minions remain much the same as those
who arraigned Gopalan in independent
India for treason against the king emperor.
Perhaps we should all remember that the
best defence for a democracy, as Pericles
said, lies in our laws and our liberties.
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