Lunch with BS: Ganesh Devy on elements that have led to ugliness in society

Devy, founder, Bhasha Research and Publication Centre & chief editor discusses how we are moving increasingly towards a visual language from an oral one

I meet Ganesh Devy in his room at the India International Centre (IIC). We still have some time before we can go to the restaurant at IIC where our table is booked, so we decide to stay put in his room and begin the conversation. The first thing that he says amazes me. “We met last on September 5, 2013. So it has been four years and three days.” He is right — I later checked. How does he remember this, I wonder. But I am to be more befuddled by his ability to remember later in the interview. 

Devy is arguably India’s foremost linguist. For the better part of the past decade he has been assiduously working to bring out one volume after another — there are 50 volumes — of the first ever People’s Linguistic Survey of India. In the past he was a professor of English but now, instead of teaching, he works to unearth languages and their history. He has just started work on an international collaboration to map the languages of the world as well, while also running the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre and an Adivasi Academy to investigate and report on languages that most of us have forgotten. Languages and words are distilled versions of thousands of years of human experience, I recall his words from my first meeting with him. Imagine what wealth we lose when we lose a language, he had said.

This time, however, the discussion starts with a politically charged and gloomy topic. It is a couple of days since journalist Gauri Lankesh was gunned down in front of her home. “I met her on the 26th (of August),” he says. Devy was in Bengaluru to meet the chief minister and met Lankesh as she came out of the CM’s office. Both had the same query: What was the progress on M M Kalburgi’s muder case? It is a pattern, he says. They kill the person spearheading the effort to bring culprits to book. “Pansare was doing the same after Dabholkar’s murder, then Kalburgi and now…” he trails off. 

Why are people buying this, I ask. He posits the question over a much longer framework. What we are seeing is the inherent lack of freedom in Indian society. Seventy years ago we attained Independence and we stressed political freedom because it was the most important aspect at that time. But as time has gone by, our own tussles with freedom and equality — within the family, outside it or in the work space — are all being questioned. Freedom is not a single-storey building, he says. It has many layers and merely having a layer of political freedom is not enough.

He says there are four elements that have led to the current ugliness in society and each must be countered if we are to move forward. One, tyranny of the unelected where one organisation, which is not at all representative of the Indian masses, dictates Delhi. Two, the hegemony of the middle class, which, much like the British during the colonial era, uniformly — albeit “wrongly”— believes that it is its “pious duty to civilise” this country. This class of people don’t have to be goaded to be cruel by any politician. Three, an autocratic ruler who doesn’t listen to the people. Four, and he says this element is rarely given due importance, the absolute limits of caste, class and gender discrimination in our society.

By now I am even more depressed than I was when I had come in to meet him. But then he shows why he doesn’t despair. This is not happening for the first time in India. At the time of the Bhakti movement, caste and theological shackles had becomes inhuman. There were kangaroo courts and people were routinely punished outside the legal system. This also happened just before Buddha. There are numerous examples, he says. “At such a point in society, the orthodoxy becomes more orthodox and the heterodoxy becomes more heterodox. So it is today. The leftists are more left and the rightists are more right.” Such extremes raise tensions in society till it reaches a breaking point. “This country has stomached much worse and survived to have such a long continuity. That’s because we realised early enough that allowing diversity (to prosper) is Dharma.”

On that reassuring note, we move towards the restaurant. One of his students, who is with us, and I order a vegetarian thali while Devy orders a vegetarian “ghar ka khana”. As we wait for the food to be served, I notice his phone. It is a Nokia E5. I am shocked to see that this old model is still functioning. I enquire and he says it is eight years old but continues to serve him well. The discussion moves to how modern communication devices have become such a big part of our life and I am curious to understand how a linguistic expert sees this development. 

Sure enough, Devy has much to share. He sees this shift in the light of the decline of conventional languages. “You see, we are moving increasingly towards a visual language from an oral one.” First, about 500,000 years ago, humans started communicating with body parts such as a nod or a laugh. They still do. Then over time we used tones and music. It is in the last 70,000 years that we began using speech for communication. But, he reckons, existing languages are too limited by their grammar. For instance, to convey a sense of time we use tense. But till now we have artificially managed by dividing the world into time zones. As humans evolve and move over time and space, it would be images that would be more handy because even though images can reflect a specific time they are also timeless and not bound by a “tense” like a written sentence is. 

As we (his student and I) gobble up a sumptuous Indian meal of dal, three types of vegetarian dishes with curd and salad, Devy tells us how this visual language is changing things for us. “One crucial change is the outsourcing of memory.” He then gives a hilarious example. He says he has saved his wife’s number with his wife’s name in his phone. But in order to avoid forgetting who it is — since there are others with the same name — he has also written “my wife” alongside her name in the phone book. All three of us guffaw at this but I am also reminded of his sharp and precise recollection of our last meeting. All the more amazing, I think.

As we end our lunch, I ask him if the violence in language that we see around us these days bothers him. In the immediate context, he says, this is happening due to a variety of reasons, especially the advent of television, what used to be private language has become public and vice versa. He is also quick to point out that he does not judge this intermingling; it has its positive effects, too.

So what is he working on now? He says he is working on a Dakshinayan thought series, which will be published in several regional languages. “These are thoughts that’ll sustain us during periods when nights are long and days are short.” With a mischievous smile he explains what these books will be carrying: “We are bothered about sedition charges so we are not saying anything new that has not already been said in the past. So while these thoughts are not seditious, they are every bit progressive.”