Konkani by Constitution: The legacy of BN Rau

LAst hebdomad, on aug 20, Konkani speakers crosswise bharat joyfully famed Konkani Manyata Divas, the anniversary of the day in 1992 when their mother tongue became, as delineated in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, “official”. This was the much-desired outcome of an agitation that had been brewing since 1962, when the proposal to absorb Goa, newly freed from Portuguese rule, into the state of Maharashtra, first came up. Fearful that this would mean the sidelining of not just Goans, but of their main language, Konkani, the move was staunchly resisted by Goans.In 1967, a plebiscite called the Goa Opinion Poll ensured that Goa retained its status as an independent state. But the fight for the status of Konkani as a distinct language — it was widely believed to be a dialect of Marathi – continued. In 1975, an officially appointed committee of linguistic experts concluded that Konkani was indeed an independent language. That did not change the daily provocations faced by Konkanis in Goa, however – the official languages there continued to be Marathi, Hindi, and English. Finally, following an angry agitation that left six dead, Konkani was declared the official language of Goa in 1987. In 1992, it became the 16th official language of India.Although Goa continues to be home to the largest number of Konkani speakers (42.7% of the approx two million in India), Karnataka has a sizeable 35%, of which a significant chunk lives in Bangalore.Perhaps a good way to commemorate this important linguistic anniversary is, therefore, to recall the Himalayan contributions of Benegal Narsing Rau (BN Rau), an extraordinarily accomplished Konkani jurist and diplomat from Karnataka, who prepared the very first draft of the Indian Constitution.Born in Mangalore in 1887, BN Rau attended the newly minted Canara High School (estd 1891) there, graduating in 1905 as the Madras University topper and a triple gold medallist (English, Physics, Sanskrit, and a year later, Mathematics). In 1906, he went up to Cambridge to read mathematics, where his admiring fellow Cantabrigian, Jawaharlal Nehru, referred to Rau, in a letter home, as “frightfully clever”. Returning to India in 1909, having successfully cleared the Indian Civil Services (ICS) exam, Rau was posted to Bengal, where he served as a judge in several districts of East Bengal and Assam.By 1931, Rau had risen to such prominence that he was invited to be part of the Second Round Table Conference, one of three peace talks organized by the British government to discuss constitutional reforms in India. In 1935, working with the Reforms Office, he drafted the landmark piece of legislation called the Government of India Act, 1935, which proposed a federal system of government, granted a large measure of autonomy to the 11 British-ruled provinces, established a Federal Court (the precursor to the Supreme Court), and invited princely states to be part of the Indian Federation (most demurred, but the Diwan of Mysore, Sir Mirza Ismail, spoke up in its favour).To no one’s surprise, when the task of drafting another critical document, the Indian Constitution, came up in 1946, it was to Sir BN Rau (the knighthood had been conferred in 1938) that everyone looked. On August 29th, 1947, the partly elected, partly nominated body called the Constituent Assembly of India, which had first met on 9th December 1946, elected a Drafting Committee headed by Dr BR Ambedkar, with Rau as Constitutional Advisor. In October 1947, Rau submitted his draft of the Constitution, comprising 243 articles and 13 Schedules, to the Drafting Committee for consideration. By the time the “Constitution of India” was adopted on 26 November 1949, almost three years of passionate debates later, it had grown to 395 articles and 8 Schedules. In his speech to the Assembly on that historic day, Ambedkar acknowledged Rau’s role. “The credit that is given to me does not really belong to me,” he said. “It belongs partly to Sir BN Rau.”(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)