language wars.

In his richly informative book Henry Hitchings chronicles the language wars of English, its continuous skirmishes, its controversies, its often rancorous disputes. The Language Wars is impressively comprehensive, its author immensely knowledgeable. He takes up the subjects of spelling, grammar, punctuation, pronunciation, metaphor, regional speech, jargon, the influence on language of the internet, and profanity, both lyrical and gross. 


Ideas Have Consequences is the title of a once famous book, but words, being the substance out of which ideas are composed, turn out to have even greater consequences.

http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1973/article_detail.asp


That book is about wars in the English language - wars within the language.What the review sparked in me was the idea of the cultural wars being fought  against other languages and cultures , by English. More specifically the wars that define certain cultural practices as the  right ones simply because they are written in English. Cultural language wars . of the controlling kind. The ones that create hierarchies,  hegemonies and monotheistic ideas of History as the singular top down version of many many Histories.

The singular idea of one great History of Photography comes to mind.

 I am reminded of  the article Raghubir Singh wrote in The Telegraph where he insisted that one had to be  educated in the English Language to be a good photographer. That was in the 1980s. Decades later  I am  still  shocked when I think of what he wrote.What he said  is also a pointer to so much of what is wrong with photography  in our part of the world. The colonised mindset of a mind colonised by the English Language. The language that only a certain class has  real access to, even today.

This is a class that, even today, controls the cultural content and context of what passes for Globalisation  in the cultural sphere. Westernisation !

They fit effortlessly into international art festivals  and workshop circuits. Taking to them like ducks in water. Taken to them by the international art curators because they fit in so easily. Go with the flow , raise no challenges to the order of things.  They are , after all , the new Comprador Class . Cultural collaborators.    

"Photography is obviously a Western art form. Unless one is an intutive genius, on has to be aware of Photographic History and aesthetics, and as the United States provides the leadership in photographic art and criticism, it is necessary for the Indian photographer to be an Anglo-Indian - somebody educated in an English teaching school"

Raghubir Singh  in Modern Photogrpahy, October, 1976