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Anyway, fortunately for all of us studying linguistics in the early 1970s,
we did not have to wait too long to be exposed to the best contemporary
sociolinguistic traditions and, as they say from the horse's mouth. The
following year, a seminar-cum-workshop in sociolinguistics was organized
at CIIL itself. I think it will be no exaggeration to say that after Deccan
College, Pune, it was that workshop that made a significant contribution
to the Indian linguistic scene; it was indeed a turning point for many of
us. In fact, most of the contemporary serious researchers including several
professors and heads participated in that workshop. As some of you would
recollect, the faculty that rainy summer included Willaim Labov, John Gumperz,
Jenny-Cook Gumperz, Michael Agar, Norman Zide and Donald Taylor. It also
included an extremely distinguished Indian faculty including Professors
P. B. Pandit, D. P. Pattanayak, M. Apte, H. S. Gill, Bh. Krishnamurti and
R. N. Srivsastava. Participants were divided into several groups and each
group worked closely with a member of the faculty. Proceedings of that workshop
are available in Pattanayak (1977). The workshop was important because,
it gave us sociological, ethnographic and social psychological perspectives
on language. It trained us in the techniques of questionnaire design, data
elicitation and data analysis but most of all it trained us in working as
a team, a tradition which I notice is weakening once again in India. I strongly
feel that the kind of questions we are beginning to raise about language
and society cannot even be conceptualised in any detail unless we learn
to work in teams across disciplines. |
In the following years, I wrote my M. Litt. Dissertation, a piece of work
(Agnihotri 1973/1977) most of you may not be familiar with but one, which
I still respect. It was essentially an empirical investigation of an issue
close to my heart: the issue of one language called Hindustani being lexically
(and artificially) stretched into two, Sanskritised Hindi and Persianised
Urdu for socio-political and religious reasons. I respect it even today
because, it dealt with a question I asked myself and it used the techniques
of data elicitation and analysis that I designed. For example, I translated
a passage from Prem Chand into English and asked two groups of native Hindi
speakers, one comprising lecturers of Hindi and the other comprising lecturers
of other subjects, to translate it back into Hindi. I think it was a clever
idea and it worked very well. There were several such ideas in that work.
A greater part of my work since has largely been derivative. Perhaps, it
is unfortunately true of a greater part of work done in India generally.
We engage in the exercise of data collection and analysis often under the
umbrella of theories borrowed from elsewhere - it is almost like looking
for a theoretical peg to hang our analysis on. A note of caution may again
be in order here. I am not advocating the creation or even revival of special
Indian theories, motivated by and relevant to exclusively Indian conditions.
Such a theory may not even legitimately be called a theory. We need theories
of universal validity - theories that are motivated by the human condition,
at this historical moment manifested largely in the exploiter- exploited
situation. The significance of asking the right type of questions about
the human condition becomes clear, through in retrospect and with the advantage
of hindsight, in my doctoral work (Agnihotri 1979/1987) at the University
of York. As some of you may know, this was the first study of its kind,
concerning the assimilation of Punjabi Sikh children to the local variety
of English in the city of Leeds in U K Migrant groups are often as fluid
as pidgin and creole societies and the Le Pagian frame work (Le Page 1968,
Le Page and Taburet-Keller 1985) of looking at individuals as creating pattern
of linguistic behaviour in terms of the processes of diffusion and focusing
was readily available. The formulation that no two individuals speak exactly
the same language and that it is created through a process of negotiation
among its speakers looked very convincing. It seemed so attractive to find
in your own supervisor a peg to hang your data and analysis on. I could
not explain my mixed code data in any other way. It also helped me to examine
the processes of assimilation among immigrant Sikh children in Leeds. But
there were several other questions, which kept surfacing from time to time
during my research. Among others, these included increasingly inhuman immigration
laws, racial discrimination, interventions made by Christian volunteers
and white NGOs, crisis of identity among children, the burning question
of using turbans in the Leeds transport, remedial English classes, mid-day
dinner rituals at school etc. Each one of these issues had an important
sociolinguistic dimension defining the human condition that characterized
the minority-host relations in UK at that time. I am not suggesting that
if I had the courage of my conviction I could have dealt with all these
issues in my thesis. Far from it. As you know, it is neither possible nor
desirable. However, what I am suggesting is that this particular piece of
research was conceived and executed in a largely socio-politically neutral
space. |
Our subsequent work (e.g. Khanna and Agnihotri 1982; Agnihotri, Khanna
and Mukherjee 1988; Agnihotri and Khanna, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1997a; Khanna,
Verma, Agnihotri and Sinha 1998; Agnihotri, Khanna and Sachdev 1998) since
1980 has been collaborative. This work has had two major threads outside
the formal description of Hindi morphology (Singh and Agnihotri 1997) and
editing Chomsky's (2000) lecture on the 'Architecture of Language'. It has
been considerably influenced by the quantitative variability paradigm of
Labov (1966, 1972, 1972a) and the social psychological framework of Le Page
(1968), Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) and of Gardner and Lambert (1972)
and Gardner (1979, 1985, 1988). The essential features of this large body
of work has been the isolation of some diagnostic social, social psychological
and linguistic variables followed by their quantification across a carefully
selected sample and, finally, a co relational study of these variables.
This has really been hard work though the results have not always been so
promising. Two most important things that we learnt from this exercise were:
(a) social variables are overwhelmingly more important than social psychological
variables like attitudes, stereotypes and motivation and (b) quantitative
analysis, more often than not, reconfirms the obvious as is perhaps the
case with (a). We realized that it was not particularly useful to continue
working in an ideologically neutral space if one were to seriously explore
the relationship between language and society. |
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