That great Sundanese novel you haven’t read

My wife, who has spent several years working in the Tamil film industry, has a pet peeve regarding the use of the term ‘Bollywood’ by foreigners. Too many of them believe that the term is synonymous with ‘Indian movies’; even if they are aware, or are told, that films get made in other Indian languages, there is often an assumption that the minority language film industries must be tiny, niche, amateurish, and relatively new. (International awareness of Tamil movies, at least, does seem to be growing, due in part to the climax action sequence from the Rajnikanth film Enthiran going viral on the internet.)

I encountered similar misconceptions regarding Indian literature when I visited the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 in Germany, where my company’s stall was prominently displaying translations of Tamil literature. Many Europeans expressed surprise. “I have heard about the Tamils in Sri Lanka,” one Frenchman told me, “but I thought that in India, everyone spoke Hindi.” Others were better informed about India’s linguistic diversity, but were shocked to learn that there were thriving publishing industries in Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, etc. Several of them seemed to be under the impression that these minority languages were tribal dialects spoken primarily by loincloth-clad hunter-gatherers with no formal education.

Ignorance rules
To many Indians, this seems infuriatingly ignorant. After all, everybody here knows about European languages, even the minor ones. Any Indian who has been to college can be expected to be aware of the existence of Hungarian, Polish, and Danish. Even less educated people are often pretty knowledgeable about European geography. I have a housemate, an elderly monolingual Tamil-speaking woman who studied only up to Class VI, who (largely due to her addiction to Sun TV News) knows that there is a language called Greek that is spoken in Greece and another called Finnish that is spoken in Finland. She knows this despite the fact that she has no connection to Europe whatsoever; she has never been there, has no relatives living there. She knows about these languages despite the fact that they have comparatively tiny numbers of speakers (see table). Imagine, what would it be like if Europeans had a similar level of GK about our part of the world? What if you could take for granted that the average European had heard of Odia and Santali, and knew that they were spoken in the Eastern part of India?

Why this huge imbalance? Why do we know so much about Europe’s tiny ethnic and linguistic communities, when Europeans know so little even about our huge ones? It’s not clear that we can blame colonialism; countries like Greece and Finland were never colonial powers. Is it simply because the Finns are economically more powerful than the Santals? Or is it partly because Finnish, unlike Santali, enjoys the status of being the national language of a country?

It is difficult for most Americans or Europeans to comprehend the multi-lingual stew of a typical Asian or African country, where minority communities are often under little or no pressure to learn another dominant language; where ethnic groups speaking unrelated tongues have shared the same land for centuries, or where neighboring territories with vastly different cultures have been thrown together inside strange borders drawn on maps by European colonists. There’s a tendency to paint the world with broad brushstrokes — “the Af-Pak Zone”, “the Arab World”, “Francophone Africa” — and to defend an ignorance about the diversity within those regions. But when influential leaders start to think in terms of these lazy generalisations, it can have disastrous results. I have noticed a worrying tendency among English-educated Indians, who should know better, to do the same.

Global discrimination
I’m not suggesting that everybody be required to mug up a list of the 500 most-spoken languages in the world. For most people, it’s not something that matters to their lives at all. Still, the huge disparity between the media attention and scholarship accorded to European languages and that accorded to the regional languages of Africa and Asia seems to be an indication of a strangely pervasive global discrimination (I am tempted to use the word racism, but it’s highly problematic to conflate the concepts of race and language). One gets the impression that academic institutions and the globalised media consider the speakers of these unsung languages to be people of lesser importance, with less important things to say.

There are some good efforts by small publishing houses and literary magazines, like the exciting new Singapore-based web magazine Asymptote, to address this grievance.

I’ll give just one more example. The Sundanese people of Western Java, Indonesia, have a literature stretching back centuries, as well as a vibrant modern publishing scene including several daily newspapers, weekly magazines, short stories, novels, and literary awards. To my knowledge — after quite a bit of searching — not one work of fiction, not even a short story, has ever been translated from Sundanese into English. Sundanese has 34 million speakers. That’s more than Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Icelandic combined. But I’ll bet you’d never heard of it before. Doesn’t that seem a little skewed?

Rakesh Khanna is
co-founder of Blaft
Publications