War of words

Tamil Nadu’s replacing the rupee symbol with ‘ru’ could lead to a Babel-like verbal battlefield

Does the rupee by another name have the same nominal value? That’s the linguistic, if not the economic, question posed by Tamil Nadu’s DMK govt having used the initial letter of the Tamil word for rupee, which is ‘rubaai’ or ‘ru’, instead of the Devanagari-based rupee symbol in its presentation of the state budget’s logo.

The symbolic move is reportedly a retaliatory response to what is seen by Tamil Nadu to be the BJP-led central govt’s attempt to foist Hindi as the lingual currency of the country onto the state through the three-language formula of the National Educational Policy.

The hoisting of the flag of linguistic revolt has provoked a sharp reaction from the Centre, with the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, decrying it as a “completely avoidable example of language and regional chauvinism”.

However, it’s not just Tamil Nadu and other southern states that see Hindi as a stalking horse of the Centre in its bid to gain lingual dominance at the expense of regional autonomy as expressed through speech and script.

What is increasingly seen as a forcible ‘Hindification’ of the country is viewed with suspicion by the other states, such as Bengal, which are justly proud of their rich linguistic heritage.

The Newtonian principle that every action has an equal and opposite reaction is applicable not only in the realm of physics, but also in the domain of cultural identity as expressed in the written and spoken word.

In the Bible story, a humankind united by a common language began building a Tower of Babel to reach heaven, a project which irked God who confounded humans by making them speak a multiplicity of tongues and thereby scattering them across the face of the Earth.

Thanks not to the Almighty, but to the lesser god of language politics, are we creating our own lingual Babel to sunder our unity?

As a preventive stratagem we might adopt a one-language formula based on a single, region-neutral, politics-neutral lingua franca. Esperanto?