Some 2,000 years ago, Tholkappiyar, the fabled author of Tolkappiyam, said that poetic words can be distributed in four types: Iyarcol, Thirisol, Thisaiccol and Vadasol. Of these, he held, ‘Vadasol’, words from northern languages, “become fit to be used in Tamil only when they adopt Tamil phonetics discarding their northern phonetics”.
From ancient times, a sensitivity to language difference has almost been the core of Dravidic self-hood. A similar sensitivity existed among the speakers of Prakrits in ancient times. It was in one of the Prakrits that Mahavir had presented his teachings in the sixth century BCE. Eighteen centuries later, Acharya Hemachandra, a major Jain scholar, poet, mathematician and philosopher, produced his Desinamamala, a treatise on the importance of Prakrit words used in Gujarat of his times as against those from Sanskrit. In the process, he gave a tangible form to the Gujarati language. Mahatma Gandhi, who defined the idea of selfhood for India in Hind Swaraj (1909), chose to write this iconic book in Gujarati. So, language sensitivity has been a feature of selfhood in the case of every Indian language.
