The “acceptable” Tamil or Bengali on-board a Chennai to Kolkata flight is one who understands English, if not Hindi. A Tamil lady who does not know English or Hindi does not deserve to be fully serviced at the airport or on-board. She is made to feel inadequate and out of place. It is a sad, sad commentary on the diversity showcasing PR blitz called “Incredible India.”
Incredible indeed. It is similarly incredible that no local train ticket within West Bengal or Tamil Nadu has the station names printed in Bangla or Tamil. With its warped vision of what is tourism and who is a tourist, the Government of India has got its priorities all wrong.
Nothing in the Constitution of India bans safety announcements in Tamil and Kannada for flights between Chennai and Bengaluru.
It is the deep ideology of the Indian Union that conceives the non-Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan peoples as ill-formed citizens, whose mother-tongues and concerns need to be suppressed, who need to be beaten into a new shape for cohesion and assimilation as equal citizens of the Indian Union.
To a self-respecting Bengali like me, this is humiliation designed to show me my place with a hint of what about me needs to change so that I am “acceptable.”
That the funding for this discrimination actually comes largely from non-Hindi states via central taxation makes it even more disgusting.
The rules about official languages that are incorrectly cited in support of Government of India’s Anglo-Hindi formula doesn’t become a hindrance when German or French or, Arabic or Russian or Chinese or Japanese needs to be enabled. Its only when non-Hindi sub-continental languages are excluded that a smokescreen of laws and logistical limitations is built.
Servility to outsiders and dominating less powerful insiders seems to be the path of choice.
This post-1990 fetish about feeling sufficiently international by copying Euro-American scaffolds of homogeneity disregards the reality of tourism in India.
A large survey from 2002 by the Union Ministry of tourism shows that about half of all domestic tourists (excluding social travel), numbering more than 100 million, travelled for “religious purposes and pilgrimages.”
Of the top 10 tourist destinations in India, eight are religious and pilgrimage sites. Of total number of trips made by all domestic tourists, those who are cultivators or agricultural wage-labourers contribute the largest proportion.
More than 80% of all domestic tourists are not college graduates. More than 70% of all tourist trips are made in buses.
Let’s think about these numbers and realise how deliberately off-the-mark the high-profile tourism initiatives of the Government of India are.That would give us an idea about who it serves vis-a-vis who it ought to serve. That is the context in which Mahesh Sharma’s multi-lingual helpline has to be seen. In the post-1990 scenario, when public utilities in the Indian Union are shrinking and the public space is becoming increasingly exclusionary, the Anglo-Hindi reshaping of the public space has the stamp of approval from big money and powerful urban cosmpolitan elites.
While Ahomiyas, Meiteis, Maithilis, Bengalis, Tamils, Marathis, etc have no place in this new Indian ideology, it has no place for the “officially Hindi” poor Awadhi or Bhojpuri tourist either.
These facts about India in general and about the tourism scene in particular may not be palatable to those whose idea of tourism is some version of firangi orientalism inspired “ethnic” exotica gawking or firang-style backpacking “off the beaten path.”
But, however unpalatable it may be to certain miniscule-yet-powerful sensitivites and self-conceptions, it’s important to keep it real.