Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Britain's multiculturalism: lessons for Karnataka

Obviously this blog is also inspired by Sen's book.

In the book, Sen talks of how Britain has come "a long way" from its strong intolerance towards other cultures to now being a pretty decent multicultural nation. He does raise doubts that part of what seems multiculturism may actually be just plural monoculturism (with people of different cultures crossing each other like "ships in the night" without any real interaction).

In any case, Sen completely misses the point about language. He completely misses the fact that whatever multiculturism is seen in Britain is seen in a 100% English language environment. If immigrants decide to impose, say Punjabi or Urdu on Britain, go about painting roadsigns in that language, start flooding Britain with people from their home-countries in an uncontrolled fashion, we'd be seeing absolute opposition to any sort of multiculturism. The British would have booted out each and every person not respecting the English language.

Here is where a lesson lies for karnATaka and immigrants to karnATaka: Respect kannaDa and then go about using whatever religion you prize, whatever dress you wish to wear. Multiculturalism is okay in karnATaka. That is very healthy indeed. But if immigrants come to karnATaka with an imperialistic feeling of superiority over karnATaka and kannaDa, such bastards must be thrown out of karnATaka.

And we as kannaDigas must learn to be linguistically (and only linguistically) intolerant to imigrants. There is no question of giving kannaDa a second place. No Hindi, no Tamil, no nothing. kannaDa should reign supreme here. The idea of India is not against this claim at all. Fools claim that Hindi is the national language of India. That is bullshit. There is no article of the Indian Constitution which stakes such a claim.

Am I saying that the fact that the British "would not have tolerated a different language", is license for us not tolerating? No, that's not what I'm saying. The message I want to pass on is that the right way to build a multicultural environment is to first respect the most important ingredient, viz., language, of the most important culture which forms part of the "multiculture" idea - the language of the land immigration into which is being discussed, viz., kannaDa.

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