Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

S. KULKARNI
in the Indian caste hierarchy by American social anthropologists, there was a
spate of sociolinguistic activity in the subcontinent. Most of these studies
(compiled in Ferguson and Gumperz’s 1960 publication, Linguistic Diversity
in South Asia) were primarily concerned with the effect of caste on linguistic
maintenance and change. These studies evince a certain bias in that most of
them were conducted in rural and semi-urban communities where the social
structure was most conservative and where caste was, largely, the unit of all
social action. This enabled the American sociolinguists and their Indian
cohort to consolidate the notion of ‘caste dialects’ in India. In the 1970s,
however, the caste-oriented position came in for heavy criticism; indigenous
sociolinguists questioned the overstated importance of caste and dismissed
‘caste dialect’ as being a “meaningless nomenclature” (Pattanayak 1975:
97).
Retrospectively, this outburst appears to be a reflection of the
politically charged climate in the country at the time. In the 1960s and the
’70s the non-Brahmin low castes had successfully formed a united front
against high caste oppression. Reservations (quotas) in government services
for the dalits or the Scheduled castes (outcasts, having the lowest status in
the traditional social order) and the Scheduled tribes had existed since
colonial times. Demands were now being made for an extension of
‘protective discrimination’ for the middle caste peasantry which constituted
52% of the population. These demands were struck down by the Supreme
Court in independent India and state-level Planning Commissions were
instructed that the criteria for reserving posts should be “economic” and not
caste-based (Omvedt 1993: 69-70. Also Bayly 1999). The 1970s were a
decade of “caste-class” debates. Marxist writers insisted that the ‘caste-war’
was essentially a ‘class-war’. Prominent high caste social scholars like M.N.
Srinivas too joined the “campaign for economic criteria” for reservation in
public services and stressed the harmfulness of dealing politically with caste.
Thus, the pursuit of a “classless and casteless society” resulted in ignoring
caste rather than finding ways of abolishing the system (Omvedt 1993).
The shift in focus away from caste benefited Indian sociolinguistics
by effecting the inclusion of other social factors such as education,
occupational status, age, sex and urban affiliation in investigations of social
variation in language (see for instance Pandit 1969; Bernsten 1978).
However, the role of caste identity and its interaction with class and other
social factors in the process of sociolinguistic change have never been fully
explored (but see Bapuji 1994). Relatively little is known about the
significance of caste in facilitating or stalling dialect shift / maintenance in
the process of linguistic standardisation in urban centres in India where, as
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