multi-storied #39: Hold your tongue

To introduce this new story in the New Yorker, a little mea culpa:

Years ago, when I was working for a business daily, we decided to publish a short editorial about a UNESCO report on disappearing languages. I wrote the editorial, but the “line” was decided by committee: Three or four of us thought we’d be contrarian and say that, in a globalizing world, it was natural for languages to vanish. And being a business daily, we were obviously pro-globalization. A few smaller languages were a small price to pay for all the multifarious benefits of our shrunken world, we argued. In my own case, maybe there was some defensiveness to it as well. My father speaks and writes at least five Indian languages fluently; his mother spoke five languages as well, even though she never finished school. I can speak three and read two-and-a-half.

Well after writing that editorial, this question prickled away at me. I felt we’d gotten it wrong, but I didn’t know precisely how. Then I heard of Ganesh Devy, the literary scholar who has assembled the People’s Linguistic Survey of India. The survey was designed on the premise that we must know what languages are out there before we set out to save them. And it aimed to give hope to communities worried about the future of their language. “If they want to lead a movement to preserve it, they have something to start with now,” Devy told me in August.

I’ve been meaning to write about Devy and the survey for years, in part to find out answers to questions I had: about how such a survey is conducted, how quixotic a quest it is to preserve small languages, what we lose when we lose a language. But the story of Devy’s own life is no less remarkable:

When Devy was thirteen, his father abandoned the family. They moved to a shack with a tin roof, and Devy occasionally worked after school, as a street vender or a furniture porter. Twice he started undergraduate studies but left after a year; the second time, he moved to Goa, working in a bauxite mine by day and then cycling to a library to read English books with a dictionary by his side. He felt that English met his curiosity about the world in a way that Marathi literature did not. “I thought English was a condition of modernity—of having a social condition beyond caste and religion,” he said.

Devy assembled around 3,000 people to work on his survey, and has, for years, been editing and publishing volumes with titles like “The Languages of Tripura Part I.” The fieldwork took around four years. The nuts and bolts of what a linguistic surveyor collects — and what, to air one of the criticisms of the PLSI, Devy’s surveyors sometimes failed to collect — fascinated me. So did the findings, which sometimes read like tragic or triumphant stories in their own right:

In the northeastern state of Sikkim, on the other hand, the social linguist Balaram Pandey had to help write about Majhi, a language he didn’t know, because he could find only one living speaker—an old man who once ferried boats for a living, and who died soon after Pandey interviewed him. “He told me, ‘Nobody understands my language, so I go down to the river and speak to the stones,’ ” Pandey said. Another of Sikkim’s sixteen languages, Bhujel, was once thought nearly extinct, but in the past decade scholars have developed a script, a dictionary, a digital font, and textbooks for it. In 2022, the Sikkim government added Bhujel to the list of the state’s official languages—a triumph that Pandey ascribes to its inclusion in the P.L.S.I.

The full story is here.

While writing this article, I had to deal with a sort of corollary to the maxim of Chekhov’s gun. If a gun features in the first act, it must be fired by the third act, the maxim roughly runs. By extension, if you have the chance to introduce a gun into a story at all, should you place it in the first act?

Nine years ago, at the front door of the house above, a man from a Hindu nationalist outfit shot and killed M. M. Kalburgi, an iconoclastic Kannada writer. The house lies on a quiet Dharwad street, populated mostly by the solemn houses of university professors. Devy and I visited the house in August; he had met Kalburgi only once, but he moved to Dharwad wholesale to help Kalburgi’s family seek justice, to show solidarity, and to make some noise.

It seemed obvious to me, while starting this piece, to open with the murder. What a dramatic scene it was! I had interviewed neighbours, witnesses, and Kalburgi’s family; I could recreate it in pin-sharp detail. And since I love reading pieces that drop you right into the middle of a scene, I tend to write like that as well. When I wrote my first-ever piece for the New Yorker, I remember the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, instructing me to revise my opening. I had all this visual detail and action of Arvind Kejriwal out on the campaign trail, he reminded me. What better way to immerse a reader into the action?

But as I wrote through the details of Kalburgi’s murder, I kept running into logistical hurdles. I’d thought of this scene as a way to introduce Devy and explain why he lives in Dharwad today — but was that really what the reader needed to know up front? Kalburgi’s killing also demanded the laying-out of a lot of context: Who was he? Why did he rile these Hindu nationalists up so? What about the other writers these right-wing lunatics were killing at the time? I’d spent 300 or more words without even getting to Devy, let alone the idea of languages living and dying. This felt like a huge mistake.

The kind of opening I don’t often like to use is what might be called the “cold open.” It introduces the central idea directly: no characters, no scene, no action, nothing. I fear cold opens might run too dry and abstract, and lose their readers. But perhaps I only need to learn how to do it better — to do it in a way that isn’t dry or colorless. This piece offered that chance, thanks in part to something that the linguist Ayesha Kidwai had said to me in passing during our conversation, and that had stuck with me. So here, in closing, is the opening:

In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a script and a literature, with newspapers and codified grammar and chauvinists and textbooks. But there is another word, boli. It, too, refers to language, but its more accurate meaning is “that which is spoken.” In its sense of the oral, it hints at colloquialisms, hybridity, and a demotic that belongs to the streets. The insinuation is that a bhasha is grander and more sophisticated than a boli. The language of language infects how we think about language.