That Kamal and Kannada episode

The claim was clearly incorrect. But it couldn’t be shrugged off as yet another false claim that public figures make all the time. At bottom lay the tensions of linguistic inequality in India’s federal polity.

Even a half-alert listening of Kamal Haasan’s remarks at the audio launch of his film, Thug Life, would tell that he wasn’t seeking to either denigrate Kannada or stir controversy. While acknowledging the presence of the Kannada actor, Shivarajkumar, in the audience, he said: “Actor Shivarajkumar is my family living in another state. That’s why he is here. That’s why when I started my speech, I said ‘my life and my family is Tamil’. Your language (Kannada) was born out of Tamil. So you are included in that line.” His spontaneous chain of associations though was riding on the spurious idea of Tamil culture being the cradle of South Indian civilisation, the oldest Dravidian language, and so on. The backing the actor’s claim later found in Tamil Nadu confirmed the stable health of the old Dravidian propaganda there.

The claim of Kannada emerging from Tamil found immediate refutation in Karnataka. Rightfully so. Numerous scholars including David Shulman, the author of Tamil: A Biography, and Peggy Mohan, the author of Father Tongue, Motherland: The Birth of Languages in South Asia, have pointed out that South Indian languages have descended from a shared language (some term it ‘proto-Dravidian’). While these languages have interacted with each other and not evolved in an insular fashion, none can be said to be a mother language from which another language spawned off. The oldest surviving inscriptions might belong to Tamil but that doesn’t mean that the other languages weren’t around at that time.

In response to the backlash, Kamal Haasan asserted that “historians had taught him language history,” and his statement was “made out of love.” Since language issues, he added, were best dealt with by historians and archaeologists, politicians including himself “were not qualified to talk about it.” Not expressing regret for his remarks however, he stayed defiant in theatrical fashion: “Love does not apologise.”

His reasoning was schizoid: “Politicians like me shouldn’t talk about language history, but I’ll still hold on to my claims.” If he had at least named the historians he got his facts from, we could have judged his understanding better. And what is this about love never apologising? Apologies can of course be rooted in love.

Viewing this matter in terms of a citizen’s right to the freedom of expression will miss the point. After cultivating sentimental bonds with their fan communities over decades, film stars cannot turn away from them suddenly and take refuge in law. He or she will need to at least listen to them. Kamal Haasan’s refusal to re-examine or regret his claims also appears odd given his opposition to the imposition of Hindi in the country in the past.

His resistance to the politics of Hindi language supremacy ought to have made him sensitive to the tensions of inequalities among Indian languages at large. Consider an instance of the latter. The Union Ministry of Culture granted the Classical Language status to Tamil in 2004 and to Kannada four years later, in 2008. The delayed conferral of the classical language status to Kannada, which meant delayed access to central funds to conserve, document and digitise the Kannada literary archives, was a sign of differential clout between the two languages at the Centre. This and other such instances of differential bargaining power show India’s lack of commitment to fairness inside a federal polity. Such a commitment fosters a democratic ethos between different language communities. The numerous linguistic conflicts seen in independent India hold up the dangers of language imposition and nepotism.

The charged responses to Kamal Haasan’s remarks in Karnataka can be made sense of only within Kannada’s struggle for linguistic equality within the country and for linguistic security within the state.