I was excited to receive my appointment letter to join Hindustan Steel Limited (later to be renamed and transformed to Steel Authority of India Limited), one of the largest Central Public Sector enterprises at that time. The salary and benefits ranked on par with the entry-level of Federal Civil Services. It was considered a prestigious and fortunate start for a youngster in the 1970s.
I set out to join my cohorts for the induction training at Rourkela in Orissa (now Odisha). It was the first time I was travelling beyond Chennai, then more benignly called Madras. My earlier brief encounter with the southern metropolis was when I went for the selection tests and interviews for job openings including the Steel sector career which I was eventually joining.
The day I landed in Chennai was not a pleasant one, though. Apart from the sweltering heat and an acute water shortage, the day witnessed sporadic violence and vandalism on the streets. It was my first face-to-face exposure to sectarian animosity, exposing the ugly underbelly of my country.
I understood that the trigger for the orchestrated violence was the intra-party rivalry in the regional heavyweight Dravidian Party, the DMK. The struggle between the son-of-the-soil Muthuvel Karunanidhi and MG Ramachandran, his friend turned bête noir, for the control of the party coffers and leadership in the post-Annadurai period was getting fiercer and uglier by the day.
The Karunanidhi faction was bent upon playing the ‘outsider vs insider’ card to blunt the grass-root support enjoyed by MGR whose many roles as the underdog fighting the powerful and the oppressor won the hearts of the ordinary Tamilians.
MGR’s little-publicized origin, with his parents having migrated to Sri Lanka from Northern Kerala, came in handy for the rival faction to fan the chauvinistic local sentiments. The target of the orchestrated violence happened to be the hapless wayside vendors and petty shopkeepers from Kerala.
I have off and on witnessed subtle and not-so-subtle regionalism play out nastily in many parts of India where my official assignments took me to. Regional animosities and tactical drumming up of ‘we and they’ emotions have been a key part of the political chess play in India. However, my first exposure to crude and intimidating street violence around regional parochialism was an eye-opener for me. How far removed from the crass reality was my puffed-up and curated notion of national unity and composite identity!
There is an undercurrent of divisiveness in the collective Indian psyche. While exclusions, conflicts and exploitation are common in most societies, in India the traditions, heritage and civilizational overhang contribute to rationalising and rewarding sectarian tendencies. History, culture and customs do skew the relational equilibrium in the larger community!
I travelled from Chennai to Rourkela by train, a journey that seemed at that time like an exile to an unknown land and people. I was not fluent in Hindi, though I studied it as a language in school. Speaking in English had the spontaneous impact of creating a distance and alienation from ordinary folks - vendors, coolies and fellow passengers. The local lingua franc establishes a connection that is instantaneous, spontaneous and reassuring.
Sitting in the slow-moving train, gazing outside through the glassless window, ignoring curious stares of the mofussil crowd hopping in and out, braving the hot air blowing in and the coal dust spawned by the Engine, I felt a stinging alienation creeping up and overpowering me from all around.
On reaching Rourkela station, the administrative officer from the Steel Plant was there to welcome me with a placard, with my name along with three others shabbily scribbled. As I moved to him, I glimpsed for the first time three cohorts of mine, who would be part of the group of trainees. The host welcomed us. We introduced each other and shook hands. I could hardly make sense of the names and their pronunciation because the accent, tone and delivery style were unfamiliar to me.
I realised later that surnames were more important and valued in the Hindustani society than the first names. Because the traditions and lineage were reflected in the surnames more than the names. The social hierarchy’s pecking order premised succinctly on casteism was still sacrosanct for even educated Indian youth in the 1970s. Is social equalisation better now than decades back? It is a million-dollar question.
We were accommodated in the trainee hostel in twin rooms. We stayed together for the next two months and slowly integrated into one batch of prospective executives in the prestigious steel industry cadres. Hindi was the natural medium of interaction in socialising. Slowly but surely, like a child learning to walk by falling and getting up again, I picked up conversational Hindi.
My fellow trainees from Tamil Nadu had the greatest difficulty and discomfiture in learning and practising colloquial Hindi. They had not studied Hindi in school. Not only that, but in the Dravidian political milieu in which they grew up Hindi was considered alien and antagonistic to the Southern linguistic legacy. Those from the rest of the South, like those from Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra had less of a cultural and emotional barrier in taking to Hindi as the essential link language for communication.
There was a long and deliberate de-Sanskritization of the Tamil language by the protagonists of the Dravidian movement. This made Tamil perhaps the only Southern language with a heavy localisation of content, grammar and usage, unlike Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada which still have a high influence of Sanskrit in vocabulary and usage.
As the years rolled by, I spent more time in different parts of India. When I moved to different global locations, wherever I interacted with South Asians in general and Indians in particular, I became convinced that Hindi was a natural, instinctive lingua franca that could establish a comfort level and also serve the purpose of functional intelligibility for a large section of people. Not just South Asians but even Arabs, most of them, can manage functional Hindi (though most Arabs would identify the language more as Urdu than as Hindi). The familiarity of the Arabic script makes Urdu a comfortable add-on for Arabs.
Bollywood, Railways and Uniformed Services are the three pillars of wide acceptability and practical usage of Hindi as a link language. I met many Tamilians who have lived in pan-Indian locations for work, academics or trade do speak fluently, and better-quality Hindi than even the native speakers.
How regional politicians erect walls of separation among people of the same country and culture was a perplexing revelation for me during my movement and stay across the Great Language Divide of India.
In the many-layered learning matrix of work and life in the vast Indian context, political sensitisation is a critical component.
In many ways, India is like Europe. Moving across Europe opens up a collage of diversities, wrapped in an overall unity for economic and competitiveness upgrades. In India too, the diversity that is visible all across is indeed a strength and a potential force multiplier for competitive federalism and global assertiveness.
It is a pity that mired in selfish political divisiveness and unable to realise the true strength and opportunities due to low human and infrastructure development India’s story has been one of complacency and ‘missed buses’ for long.
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