Because language matters. Because it is in and through language that the world is shaped. Also, because language is in itself a theory of beginnings, new ways of seeing and owning this world. As Karen Lord rightly asserts in her groundbreaking book, The Best of All Possible Worlds, “When you’ve been almost exterminated, language is the first thing you cling to, one of the main roots of identity.”
I could relate to all of this very recently. On 29th October, 2024, I lost my father. He was still very active at that time, writing and editing his own creative work, and performing his regular activities without any support. Yet just a few months before this tragic incident happened, I had already started feeling a voice deep inside that kept whispering to me that this sacrosanct thread of our earthly bond is about to dissolve and disappear very soon. It is not that I had not been witness to any death of my near and dear ones before or had not been part of any death rituals before, but the thought of my own father’s death, which had started recurring with a sense of disturbing regularity then, was also putting my own existence in a dilemma. The thought that I may lose him very soon. This very thought shook my existence. It made me feel like an orphan in that very moment of premonition.
We all know that we will lose our parents one day. This is a mortal world, after all. Yet, the wish that such a loss may be postponed a bit, allowing me some more time to interact, to enjoy, to share our joys and sorrows, and, of course, to listen to his intellect as well as to his nagging voice, kept firming its grip on me. While this bargain went on in my mind, I also realized the enormity of time. In those such moments, I was often reminded of a passage from Roland Barthes’ A Lover Discourse, “I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some Hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.”
All deaths are personal losses. One may receive an abundance of prayers and sympathies, but the loss of the individual is something that can be suffered and felt by oneself alone. It is a loss that cannot be expressed in words because the feelings are too moved to be moved away through words. It is like “knowing something through words that could not be put in words.” In fact, feelings are always ahead of language. The distance between the heart and the mind might not be too much, and yet, as it turns out, in our moments of grief and loss, the same distance appears to be an intolerable one to be travelled. I also felt the same on the day my father passed away. That day made me realize the vastness of the duration between yesterday (when he was alive) and the very next day (when he was no longer there with me). Suddenly, the past became an unendurable one, a past that was beginning to erode my very present. A past that I wanted to travel to, to touch it, but I couldn’t. Suddenly, what was withheld had overpowered what was given to me. Between that today and yesterday, my whole life changed. Why so soon? The day was a clear one, but I could see nothing except a haunting absence of someone who had shaped my personal and intellectual journey. It was also a new discovery because it made me realize that I am no longer a child – “to be born again, first you have to die” – and here I was struggling to cope with the death of my father, an earthshaking truth for me.
In this epicentric moment, I also realized the enabling and healing power of language. For it was only by turning to the language of literature, philosophy, and love of my family and friends, that I could brave this devastating loss. The capaciousness of language made me see the meaningfulness of life anew. It dawned on me that in the absence of a language of care and love, no human life is possible. The activity of life cannot be conditioned by the self alone. Rather, it is contingent on the activities of others as well. I was more convinced that language should have an enduring fascination with plural human beings. It is also a truism that our language shapes our relationship and also grants us a place in this world. For we all know that silence can be a kind of violence. Unlike language, silence is a mode of detachment, turning away from the harsh realities, or withdrawing oneself when someone needs you the most. All of this qualifies for the tyranny of silence that only structures and legitimizes the tyranny of political language.
It is a strange paradox that the world appears to be many, yet the tyranny of our political language is hell bent upon making it singularly available. It is such juvenile thinking, an alarming one as well. The oxygen that we breathe in, the water we drink, and the sun that gives us the light are all shared by each one of us. They are all contaminated in that sense of the purity that the tyrannical language invariably imagines, advances, and legitimizes. It is indeed haunting that this language is being heard, more and more, in social spaces, and on social media. As George Orwell rightly pointed out,“…If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Orwell 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.”
The fact remains that the genesis of both love and tyranny is to be found in the language itself. In language itself, we are all made and unmade, much as we are done and undone. As I write each word, I either move towards or away from what I want to say or what I want to do. Writing, for that matter, is not an arrow like trajectory. It is a wrestling with the heart and mind in terms of the language I choose to use. It is also a wrestling with the white paper in front of me, as it is about the intent that I am keen to hide. To make words talk to each other freely is to uplift the veil and to remove the hierarchical pantheons. Just like a story, which once narrated, belongs to everyone as it is subsequently told by several mouths. Nobody owns it. In the same way, the use of language in a political sense is very likely to have xenophobic, oppressive, and debilitating effects on certain groups, communities, and nations. The history of human civilization is replete with such instances. Even the present is conditioned and appropriated in the same way. Seen this way, the past and the present can both be paralyzed and pulverized by the tyranny of language, if we make the language aim at only one side, one colour, and one group, and yet this what our leaders have decided to do. In Praise of Love, Alan Badiou powerfully evokes this notion of tyranny: “Tyranny is the solitude of the person who has lost the power to love and thus can only wield the sterile power to doom both himself and others to death.” For when we miniaturise language by attributing it to a particular race, class, caste, religion, even nation, we assign it a tyrannical character.
If language is the root of the self, then by the same token, it also happens to be a marker of the Other. And because language can not only unite but also demarcate, it becomes all the more threatening when used in political parlance. The question, therefore, turns out to be an eternally urgent one. Can we make language a tool of empowerment, liberation, and engagement with the Other? Can we think of language as a dictionary of humanity?
