Stepping Away From Homogeneous Multilingualism: Publishing in Indian Languages
Slightly over 12 per cent of India’s population speaks English, either as their first language (about 0.02 per cent) or as an additional language. This means over 900 million people in India do not use English as a communicative medium. In mulling over these numbers, also consider that India is the second-largest English language publisher in the world. With such a large gap between what is made available to the population of the country and what it can consume, what does this mean for the future of translation and writing in India?
Of course, a country like India is going to make considerations for all its official languages — both at the national and regional levels. Schools have to adapt and respond in order to make their medium of instruction accessible to their populace, while students often have to keep up with the demands and rigour of learning more than two languages from the age of five, specifically in a country where the language of formal educational structures and the language of home don’t match.
Formalized training and learning systems aside, we all grow up listening to stories. Ours is a culture of storytelling, of stories and recounting of history and memories being passed down from one generation to the next, usually things we remember hearing — sometimes things we make up. When it came to the language of stories, the notion of formal learning systems slipped away. Often, it was that much easier to slip into building a world using words from a language that made sense to you, not necessarily relying on English as much as the mother tongue. Where then, do books in Indian languages for children feature today?
While children’s literature has had a place in India for a long time, the advent of liberalisation allowed for a shifting focus in how languages (and children’s books, consequently) were perceived. Over time, books have become something children could read for pleasure, for the sheer satisfaction of reading, over meeting an invisible requirement. Quite simply, access to more money in publishing capacities meant that people could consider writing in vernacular languages, driving the focus back to ideas of storytelling that we’d grown up listening, laughing to, and thinking about.
What this means for personhood is that a reader (the child or the parent) doesn’t have to be made to feel like English is the linguistic standard to be met to access literature. After all, English is not the only language critical thought occurs in — but when close to 50% of the literature around a person occurs in that form, it can be easy to fall into that thinking trap. The use of regional languages, dialects, and the focus on the communities and their storytelling allows for a massive shift in two forms. First, readers are made to feel like they have ownership of what they’re reading — they relate to what is being said, how it’s being said, and the language that is used to say these things — which attributes agency to an individual and helps them perceive themselves in larger ways. Second, access to literature not in English allows for the opportunity to break away from puritanical ideas of representation — of access to cultures that are not rooted in Brahminical hegemony. Yes, the process is slow and often takes time to naturalize, but now — more than ever — it becomes important to realise the role of these hierarchies in shaping the social identity of an individual, and just how important it is to ensure all voices have a chance to be heard and presented, not just the loudest ones.
This also creates room for literature to exist in everyday capacities — not everything has to be rooted in literary tradition and what constitutes the rules of written language. For languages that aren’t as well documented, communicative patterns are reflected in the manner these stories are told and these books are written, which means the spoken language (in print, storytelling formats) can become a tool and point of access to sustain the interest of readers while helping the communities grow.
It’s natural for a child to want to feel heard and understood, and governments and larger scale organizations are beginning to realise the role of regional literature in facilitating this for students. Thus, state governments, government schools, and mobile and community library projects in conjecture with not-for-profits tend to have the most demand for these areas. Translation efforts by local communities in making children’s books available in the dialect spoken in their region — not just the official language of the state — has made for increased readership as well as a stronger relationship with education and schooling systems.
Time and time again, there are indicators that the best way to facilitate a child’s overall development is through engaging in localized processes that are understanding of cultural contexts and backgrounds. With this understanding blooming in the Indian publishing industry as well, there is hope that #OwnVoices finds its way to vernacular literature, not just in forms that would be considered ‘proper’, but in ways that allow people to assimilate their own realities.
