Dear All,
Was the WMF brief for the India office limited to languages in India or did it include South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives – and by some definitions Tibet and Afghanistan as well)? According to what I could find online, the public announcement of WMF specifies Hindi and 20 other Indian languages. As I’ve discussed with some of you before, the term “Indic” could be problematic when used to refer to contemporary languages, and I’m sure our South Asian neighbours will take strong exception to their languages being given this description. The issue isn't merely a philological one to do with the etymology of words, but has extensive social and political ramifications, as we would all know from different kinds of contexts.
If we’re presently intervening in generating content and increasing editorship for languages used in India, we should perhaps be using the term “Indian languages”. If we’re including languages that have a different originating location geographically, like Nepali, we should say “South Asian languages”. Of course there will be the problematic cases of Bangla, Punjabi and Urdu which are spoken across borders. I heard from Wikipedia users in Kolkata that the majority of Bangla wiki editors are from Bangladesh. This was a casual remark and needs to be borne out by an actual survey. It would be an interesting challenge to confront this problem rather than avoid it.
Here’s a brief note on the Indic/Indian question:
*Indic:* a theoretical concept used to *refer to common characteristics* of the languages falling in the family of languages native to India. Most often the term 'Indic' means ''of Indian origin". This usage is in line with the assumptions of classical philology that Indian languages and customs share a common root and origin. Such assumptions have either been*challenged for their overwhelming homogeneity * or have become* theoretically less and less useful* over the years in understanding the growth of Indian culture and society. At any rate, Indic in contemporary theoretical usage refers to ancient and medieval historical texts and languages of the Indian subcontinent and has an archaic ring to it.
*Indian Languages:* a term referring to all the languages which are in use in India. Unlike the previous term, it doesn’t contain any hidden theoretical or ideological assumptions and may be used to refer neutrally to languages which have been in India for a considerable amount of time. This usage may be more appropriate to Wikipedia’s NPOV position.
Eg., While there can be debate about whether Urdu is an Indic language, there can be no controversy in stating that Urdu is an Indian language. While Nepali and Sinhalese are definitely Indic languages owing to their linguistic genealogy, we may choose to, or not choose to, term them as Indian languages based on the geographical and political context we’re referring to. [Here, I would strongly recommend using the term South Asian languages - this usage is common in defining a disciplinary domain as well, such as South Asian Studies. Famous university departments such as the SALC at the University of Chicago explicitly use the term South Asian Languages (and Civilizations, but that is another story).] By the way, South Indian languages are technically speaking not 'Indic' at all, since they belong to the Dravidian language family. We can't also forget that it is three South Indian languages - Kannada, Tamil, Telugu - that are regarded as classical languages in India.
Although there’s no clarity on exact usage of the terms, there’s a general consensus about using Indic to refer to ancient and medieval texts. For example, see, Sheldon Pollock, *The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India* (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 2006).
The other point I want to add is that the term 'Indic' comes out of the colonial and Indological approaches to the subcontinent. Indology is a variant of Orientalism and has been criticised as such by Edward Said, in * Orientalism* (New York: Vintage, 1978); see Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_%28book%29*. *There’s an extensive critique of Indological translations in my book *Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context* (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1992). For a recent discussion of Indology, see also http://www.himalmag.com/component/content/article/88-beyond-indology.html.
It might be an interesting exercise to google ‘indic’ and then google ‘indian’, and see how the searches throw up quite dramatically different things, and then add the word ‘languages’ to each search to see what shows up.
I’m aware that the input format and text editor consoles use the term “Indic”- so it is up to the team and the extended community to discuss this and find an acceptable resolution.
Looking forward to the discussions on this topic.
Tejaswini