Are you smug in your linguistic bubble?

Sometime in the 1940s, the writer Sharadchandra Muktibodh wrote an exasperated letter to the editor of an influential Marathi literary magazine. He had submitted his poems to several magazines but all he had got was a pile of rejections. He said in his letter that this would be his last shot at publication in a Marathi journal; another rejection would force him to abandon Marathi and try his hand at writing in Hindi, in the footsteps of his brother Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh.

Such bilingualism has a lot to teach us at a time when the rapid spread of English and growing migration across state borders leads to linguistic tensions, and often chauvinism. The Muktibodh brothers grew up in Gwalior district, which was a Hindi-speaking area with a large Marathi population because it was under Maratha rule. Hindi is the main language in Gwalior but the Marathi families that settled there because of Scindia rule embraced Hindi as their language as well.

Other parts of the country have had similar traditions of bilingualism. One that comes to mind immediately is the area along the border between Maharashtra and Karnataka, where many families speak both languages fluently. This area has given us the poet D.R. Bendre, who wrote in Kannada and Marathi.

The great classical vocalists Bhimsen Joshi and Kumar Gandharva were also products of the cosmopolitanism of the Dharwad-Belgaum area in what is today north Karnataka. The former would sing Teerth Vithal Kshetra Vithal (a Marathi bhajan) with the same intensity as Bhagyada Lakshmi Baramma (a Kannada bhajan). The latter would sing Marathi compositions with a lovely Kannada lilt; but he went even further after he migrated to Dewas, in Madhya Pradesh, and immersed himself in the poetry of Kabir and the folk music of the Malwa region.

In an essay published in 2009, historian Ramachandra Guha dealt with a variant of the same problem—the demise of intellectual bilingualism. He focused largely on people who were at ease in both English and their mother tongue. In fact, citing Harish Trivedi of Delhi University, he pointed out that several of the greatest Indian language writers of the old generation were professors of English—U.R. Ananthamurthy, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Nirmal Verma and Firaq Gorakhpuri, for example. Premchand wrote the first outline of the Godan plot in English, and then switched to Hindi to create one of the masterpieces of Indian literature.

“Facility with more than one tongue was a matter not just of skill but also of sensibility. The writer, his work, and his audience, all benefited from the fact that the person in question was in command of more than one linguistic or cultural universe,” Guha said. He mentioned specific towns that have a rich bilingual heritage—Dharwad, Mysore, Kochi and Allahabad.

Modern cognitive scientists have argued that bilingualism improves cognitive skills and perhaps reduces the risk of dementia in old age. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often—you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language. It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving,” Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain, told The New York Times earlier this year. The reporter added: “These (cognitive) processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention wilfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind—like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.”

A complex country such as India needs cultural accommodation, and bilingualism is one way to go about the task. The inability to gain mastery over an Indian language has become a boast for many. One can reasonably ask whether the rapid retreat of the Indian elite from Indian languages mirrors its broader retreat from public life—not voting in elections, living in gated communities, never taking public transport and desperately seeking private schools. It is a linguistic bubble trapped inside a social bubble.

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Niranjan Rajadhyaksha is executive editor, Mint.

Write to Niranjan at impartialspectator@livemint.com