When we speak of power structures in society, we should be very careful lest we trivialize the whole issue. It is not as if some people with a lot of money, a codified language and a strong army have become good friends and have carefully planned to exploit the rest of the world to perpetuate a status-quo, although at some level of abstraction, I feel that is fairly close to the truth. The power structures in society are far more complex and function in highly sophisticated and pervasive ways. First of all, these good friends often have several scores to settle among themselves; these wars are often fought over the bodies of poor, innocent people, whether in Hiroshima or Bhopal. The codification of language is not simply an index of the exclusive appropriation of discursive control; it actually structures the terms of negotiations and settles the distribution of the loot, whether in Hiroshima or Bhopal. The point we need to appreciate, however, is that in different ways and in different speech varieties, power permeates different strata of society and is used for exploitation. It is seen at home when husbands assume that they are brief, clear and substantial and their wives chatter-boxes, confused and trivial; when wives assume that their new Santali speaking tribal servant should automatically understand their language immediately and that it is his fault if he does not or he simply doesn't want to work and therefore, pretends not to understand - after all, she is trying her best to 'simplify' 'her language'; when fathers talk to their sons and daughters in different languages and apply different moral standards for evaluating them; the list of sites where language, power and exploitation interact in complex ways within the domain of home is indeed endless. You can witness it in the small village where the landlord makes sure that the poor peasants have no access to education; or in the small town where the bureaucrats and the politicians make sure that the kind of schools that their children go to in the metropolis never reach the towns etc. It is also evident in the ways in which we celebrate the 'well-built', 'energetic', 'intellectually alert' and 'dynamic' people with 'an excellent command over the English language' and completely marginalize the disabled, weak and mentally challenged. Mr. Devashish Ohri, ex-Director of Arthur Andersen, tells us, ' successful corporate professionals are masters of technical, managerial and people skills, with the latter gaining importance (The Hindustan Times, August 16, 2001). 'People skills', mind you. On a larger canvas, we of course know, or certainly partly know, why things are the way they are in Palestine or Pakistan; in Africa or Latin America or the erstwhile USSR. Any simplistic formulation in terms of the individual, social formations and the State may not capture this extremely complex web of the processes of exploitation. It seems probable that language simultaneously determines and is determined by all the three.
     In several studies of interactional discourse (e.g. Brown and Gilman 1960; Brown and Levinson 1987; Hodge and Kress 1988; Watts 1991; Fairclough 1993; Gumperz 1982), the focus has largely been on asymmetrical relations among the participants and the resulting patterns of linguistic dominance or communication breakdowns. It has often not been seen that the event itself is a part of the larger network I tried to outline above. It is instantiated by language and so are the participants and the power relations obtaining among them and that the language being used in the event is not dissociated from the event. When we speak, it is not the case that we can say what we like. There are very strong prohibitions: 'we know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like' (Foucault 1972: 216) and Foucault continues:
.. Speech is not merely the medium which manifests - or dissembles - desire; It is also the object of desire. Similarly, historians have constantly impressed upon us that speech is no mere verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but that it is the very object of man's conflicts. (p.216).
     As I tried to argue in my previous lecture also, we need to rework the agenda of linguistics so that the disjunction between the study of language and society can be obliterated. I don't have any ready-made package or module to offer. Even a viable framework will evolve over a long period of time involving intensive research. One can only, following from what I have been trying to emphasize, suggest some broad guidelines at the moment.
a)
Multilinguality: Our first task is to redefine language in such a way that multilingualism is regarded as a normal state of linguistic competence and behaviour; code-switching and code mixing no longer remain objects of wonder; so-called partial linguistic competence is also treated as a normal affair, not just normal but as respectable as anything else in the context of a multilingual repertoire. This parameter of the new framework as you can see has highly significant consequences. To a person examining mixed codes from the point of view of normative monolingual grammars, grammars may look all mixed-up; and yet, it is exactly here that we may understand the creation of new grammars within the constraints of a Universal Grammar. Further, it is this multilinguality that makes it possible to simultaneously use language for extended periods of oppression and rare spells of rebellion.
b)
Universality: We need to recognize that in spite of the infinite variability of the environmental stimuli the human mind structures the universe around it in fairly specific, often predictable, ways. In fairly obvious ways our physiology and the not-so-well-known neural networks of the brain restrict us. It is possible that it is this universality, that the universal constraints of any language design must obey, which makes multilinguality so normal and common. Multilinguals flourish on the streets, and by the millions and not in the university departments of languages and linguistics, and by the handfuls.
c)
Equality: Nowhere else is human equality and dignity so unmistakably celebrated as in the case of language. Ordinary mortals might often achieve linguistic or literary depths unknown to kings and millionaires. However, in essential phonology, lexicon and syntax, perhaps all possess systems of comparable richness and complexity. This is a domain where universality interacts with the environment to construct multilinguality.
d)
Inequality: This is the least explored aspect of language and one, which is most central to our project. In spite of linguistic universality, equality and multilinguality, language is consistently used as a tool for social exploitation. Notice that the nature of this tool is very different. Language, I have tried to argue, is not just an object you can use as an instrument. It is as if the hammer and the nail were the same not just made of the same material. When you, through unjust means, appropriate more land or water than what legitimately belongs to you, you deprive your brothers and sisters of actual quantifiable amounts of land and water and to that extent exploit them. When you insult their language by stigmatising it as a pidgin, dialect, khichri or sub-standard etc., you dehumanize and demoralize them. Moreover, you use your language, which is now manipulated to be the only path to success, to perpetuate discrimination at all levels - to generate and sustain consumerism, to make knowledge inaccessible and incomprehensible, to use human body and its parts as objects to sell products, to promote gender discrimination etc. Language is constitutive of this process of social exploitation and we do need to examine and understand these processes, so that the parameters of universality, equality and multilinguality may be witnessed in their full glory.

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