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