On 2 June, a journalist of Times Now channel that is owned by a Agrawal Jain family from Uttar Pradesh, accosted Vishwanath Mahadeshwar, the mayor of Mumbai. He leads an elected body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, representing the popular will of the people of Mumbai. Vishwanath Mahadeshwar was the former principal of Raje Sambhaji Vidyalaya and Junior College, Mumbai. Recently, he voiced his opinion that “The entire Maharashtra should know Marathi.” The journalist was ostensibly following up on this statement. Mayor Mahadeshwar answered in crisp Marathi the questions and the aggressive and demeaning statements made by the journalist. This exchange became “news”. An analysis of the exchange would show the poor and unfortunate standard of English language TV journalism in the Indian Union.
After Mayor Mahadeshwar makes clear his views and why he chose to speak Marathi, the journalist asks, “You are the mayor of Mumbai, you are the mayor of all the citizens irrespective of their language, irrespective of their religion, irrespective of their caste. Do you think you are the mayor of just the Marathi population of Mumbai?” The mayor answers in Marathi that he and his party has nothing against any specific group. Then the journalist continues, “Why is it that you are always speaking in Marathi and enforce it […]despite the fact that you know English?” The mayor answers in Marathi that his party stands for learning Marathi. The journalist then for a moment breaks into Marathi and then quickly corrects herself and again asks why, if he knows English, he insists on the use of Marathi. Ignoring the awful English grammar knowledge of the journalist, he reiterates his stance. The journalist then asks, “Is that the stand of the party that you are supposed to speak only in Marathi and not in Hindi or English?” The mayor replies that the party has no role here, which is quite a bold and commendable non-partisan statement to make. The journalist repeats her earlier aren’t-you-mayor-of everyone question. To this, the Mayor again repeats that there is no animosity against any group and that Marathi is the official language of the whole state of Maharashtra. Mumbai happens to be in Maharashtra, whether some people like that or not. At this point, the journalist points out that the leader of the mayor’s party, Uddhav Thackrey of Shiv Sena, spoke languages other than Marathi also. To this, the mayor replies that there is no bar against speaking other languages but for addressing a general audience, he (the mayor himself) speaks Marathi. The journalist is stuck in some question loop, as she says then, “So, despite […] knowing English as a language, why is it that you are still speaking in Marathi?” Now that is an extraordinary statement to make to the mayor of a city of Maharashtra, a state whose official language is Marathi! The mayor feels visibly insulted at such a question as anyone with any dignity ought be. The journalist continues, “Why are you still speaking in Marathi when you are a professor, you are a principal of a college, you are well educated, you can speak English fluently, on camera why is it that the mayor of this Mumbai is actually speaking in Marathi?” Braving this direct insult at his own language, the mayor replies that his mother tongue is Marathi, Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra, the official language is Marathi, people largely know it and hence he speaks his mother tongue. The harangue of the journalist again loops back into questions she had already posed earlier. He says that it is not compulsory that everyone should speak in Marathi – replying to the journalist’s earlier point. Finally, the mayor asks the journalist whether she was asking questions or arguing. Then he asks the million-dollar question: does the journalist have any objection to him speaking in Marathi? Incredibly, the journalist replies, “You should also speak the language that everybody also understands for the channel that requires it, your own boss does that”. At this point, the mayor who has had enough of this, starts walking away. The insistent journalist asks a final question, “So you mean to say that every citizen must speak in Marathi?” Obviously, the mayor had demanded no such thing, which leaves the observer to wonder if the problem is one of comprehension with the journalist. To this, Mumbai Mayor Vishwanath Mahadeshwar says one last time, this time in English, “No!” One did hope that the journalist understood the meaning of the English word “no”. The journalist insists, however, “You just said that”. The mayor, replies thrice, in English, “No, no, no.” The “interview” ends.
Why is it that what is acceptable for the Prime Minister is not so for the mayor of Mumbai?
This episode shows the kind of rot that underlies the standards of journalism and the context in which this rot is only natural. Let me go into the problems, anxieties and fallacies that came through in the journalist’s stance. The journalist wants the mayor to speak other languages (English in this case) because the mayor represents people from all linguistic backgrounds. This is interesting, because the Prime Minister of the Indian Union always speaks in Hindi to non Hindi populations and also in international forums like the United Nations, where almost no one understands the language. I have never seen anyone protest that. If anything, some Indian Union citizens feel very proud that their Prime Minister goes abroad and speaks to foreigners in a language that they do not understand. We have yet to see Times Now call out Narendra Modi on why he speaks in Hindi to non-Hindi people. Why is it that what is acceptable for the Prime Minister is not so for the mayor of Mumbai? If anything, the mayor of Mumbai has a far better reason to speak in Marathi. After all, he is the mayor of a city in a state that was formed explicitly on the basis of a single language, Marathi. The Samyukta Maharashtra Andolan foiled the plans of the non-Marathi elites of Mumbai (then Bombay) to keep Mumbai out of Maharashtra. We live in times when a journalist in Maharashtra seems to be unaware of all this. All large non-Hindi states were formed explicitly on the basis of language – Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Gujarat, Punjab, West Bengal, etc. The Indian Union, on the other hand, was not formed on the basis of any single language. The Indian Union does not even have any national language irrespective of the long-standing false propaganda of Hindi chauvinists and Delhi-headquartered ruling parties.
Vishwanath Mahadeshwar
The journalist’s questions show how ill-conceived, if not outright false, the mainstream media’s notions of linguistic matters are. The fact that the mayor knows English shows that he does not always speak in Marathi but does so in a certain official capacity. When the journalist asks “Why are you still speaking in Marathi when you are a professor, you are a principal of a college, you are well educated, you can speak English fluently, on camera why is it that the mayor of this Mumbai is actually speaking in Marathi?”, let us all understand the hubris and contempt for the Marathi speaker or for that matter any mother-tongue speaker that is contained in these questions. The operative word is “still” - which means English in their ideology is some higher language than Marathi. This is the class that uses English as a class and education marker, and thinks so poorly of Marathi that it finds being educated and speaking in Marathi incompatible. In another world, in another time, this would be plainly called racism.
Mumbai is special. It is special in the way the Marathi speaker is sidelined in its economy, culture and all avenues of upward mobility. Would anyone able to make this journalist’s argument in a Hindi state? In the Constituent Assembly debates discussing the making of the Constitution of India that was still in the future in 1950, English-knowing Hindi-speaking leaders refused to speak in English, despite requests and protests from non-Hindi speaking leaders who mostly did not know Hindi. This special status of Hindi has continued and those who upheld such double standards then became major champions of Indian nationalism whilst their successors have helped create this power architecture where only Anglo-Hindi rules and is a pre-condition for first-class Indian citizenship. Systemic and systematic discrimination of this scale is pathological – it is needed by the imperial ideology of a certain class, a very powerful class that has aims to put the plaster of Anglo-Hindi on our mother tongues, aims to induce a kind of inferiority complex amongst non-Anglo-Hindis, turning the latter into second class citizens in their own linguistic homeland. All this goes under the banner of “cosmopolitanism”! This faux cosmopolitanism of the Anglo-Hindi class stands exposed when in Times Now and other English TV channels, anchors break into Hindi, interviews are conducted in Hindi, talk-show guests often speak in Hindi and no translation into English is provided, even though a majority of the non-Hindi population of the Indian Union do not understand Hindi. Perhaps it’s about time that Mumbai rose up and cast Bombay to the dustbin of history. Putin speak Russian, Karunanidhi speaks Tamil, Mahadeshwar speaks Marathi. In this world of homogenisation as part of political and economic domination, contempt towards mother tongues is often linked with contempt towards the poor and the rooted.
Garga Chatterjee is a Kolkata-based commentator on South Asian politics and culture. He received his PhD from Harvard and is a member of faculty at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He blogs at hajarduari.wordpress.com
