Languge, culture and nation - building : challenges of modernization

The contemporary doctrine of "welfare state" often leads the State machinery to intervene in the domains which primarily concern the cultural and moral fabric of its people. These developments have considerably enlarged the role of the State in the affairs of social welfare and cultural promotion. With the result, the dependency of individual on the State is on the increase; many sections of society look to the State as the maaii baap "sole guardian" or as a manipulator.

At times, the State's obsession with such concerns, such as the policies based on religious fundamentalism, language chauvanism,

"sons-of-the-soil" doctrine, and finding justification for differential treatment to different sections of its population erupts into direct confrontation between ethnicity-based movements and the State. Such narrow loyalties woven around ethnicity appear to be impending the processes of nation building.

In recent decades the South Asian region as a whole has become an active theatre of such traumatic developments subsequent to the holocaust of Partition arising out of the frenzy of the "two-nation" theory. Many regional movements have been questioning State policies concerning the nature of relations between the "mainstream" and "minority" cultures, between "developed" and "developing" languages, and so on.

The Study provides a perspective from a vantage point of language and culture which are of direct relevance to the processes of nation-building. The book highlights the characteristics signifying vital reality of cultural and linguistic variation in Indian life. It illustrates the intricacies of verbal interaction on the Indian subcontinent and presents profiles of a few speech communities surrounding the Hindi Urdu-Panjabi amalgam, the Panjabi diaspora, the "transplanted" Sindhi, and the constructive partnership between English and Indian languages in the process of nation-building