Udaya Narayana Singh On Words, Worlds And The Self Through An Inner Language

Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh, noted linguist, writer and translator, has advanced India's multilingual scholarship. Founder of the National Translation Mission, he won the 2017 Sahitya Akademi Award.

Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh, noted linguist, writer and translator, has advanced India's multilingual scholarship.

Source : Anurag Kumar Thakur

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Key points generated by AI, verified by newsroom

• Prof. Singh excels as a linguist, poet, and cultural theorist.
• He believes multilingualism enriches identity, fostering India's civilizational strength.
• He champions language vitality, translation, and preserving linguistic curiosity.

Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh is among the rare figures in contemporary Indian intellectual life who have moved effortlessly across literature, linguistics, translation and institution-building while remaining rooted in Maithili. Poet, playwright, translator, editor, linguist and teacher, he has spent decades enlarging conversations around language, memory, identity and India's multilingual imagination.

Born in Kolkata into a bilingual family, Singh inherited Maithili from his father, Prof. Prabodh Narayana Singh, and Bangla from his mother, Anima Singh. This linguistic inheritance shaped both his creative and intellectual journey. Equally at ease in Maithili and Bangla, and deeply engaged with Hindi and English, he belongs to a diminishing tradition of scholars who move across languages without sacrificing depth or intimacy. Among Maithils, he is affectionately known as ‘Nachiketa’ Ji.

His academic and institutional journey has been equally remarkable. He served as Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru, and later became the first Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Over the years he taught linguistics at the University of Hyderabad, the University of Delhi and The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. At Hyderabad, he founded the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies, which emerged as one of India's important centres for language and translation research.

A noted scholar of linguistic diversity and endangered languages, Singh has remained engaged with language documentation and multilingual studies. He also established the National Translation Mission' for the Govt of India in 2006. Alongside his academic work runs an equally rich literary career with works such as Madhyampurush Ekvachan, Jahalak Diary, Chhaya, Antigone Ekavingshat and Priyamvada. His Jahalak Diary received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017.

Recently, he spoke to Ashutosh Kumar Thakur.

Q: Before language became scholarship and literature, it was first heard at home. What kind of household shaped you, and what did your parents leave behind in you that still survives in the writer and linguist?

A: My parents never insisted on my language choice. Coming from two different linguistic backgrounds, Bangla from Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh) and Maithili from Saharsa, I myself became a kind of experiment they hoped would succeed. My father introduced me to Sanskrit texts and literature while my mother took me to Bengali theatre and English films. At home there were books everywhere. They both taught Hindi literature, so texts by Prasad and Mahadevi waited for discovery. My mother loved mathematics and collected folklore meticulously. She sang beautifully. My father had no musical instincts but possessed a remarkable command over words and spoke effortlessly. I think I inherited different skills from each of them.

Q: You have lived and worked through Maithili, Bangla, Hindi and English. Do multiple languages enrich a writer's consciousness, or do they also create tensions within identity?

A: The tensions are very real. You often feel that no single language fully expresses the self. Sometimes the thought begins in Bangla and appears on paper in Maithili. At other times an idea forms in Maithili and finds expression in English. It is not simple. Certain memories return only in a particular language because they are tied to place and experience.

Yet multilingualism enlarged rather than diminished my literary world. Tagore, Ramanujan and Beckett all moved across linguistic traditions. Different languages awaken different creative instincts. Maithili, Bangla, Hindi and English all contributed to my literary personality. I do not think multilingualism creates multiple identities. It creates one identity that finds different forms of expression.

Q: I remember asking you once which language you spoke at home. You said, "Bangla." When I asked, "And Maithili?" you smiled and said, ‘I speak Maithili with myself.’ I have stayed with that sentence for a long time. What does it mean to speak a language with oneself?

A: When I said that I speak Maithili with myself, I did not mean a literal inner conversation. I meant that every person has a language in which the self-first becomes audible.

Bangla has been the language of family and everyday intimacy for me. Maithili became something different. It carried older rhythms of memory, inherited silences and questions that did not necessarily seek answers. It was the language of echoes.

There is a difference between the language of the world and the language of solitude. The language of the world communicates and negotiates. The language of solitude remembers and listens. For a writer, that inner language becomes a homeland of consciousness.

Q: Does every writer eventually have a secret language, a language of solitude beneath public speech?

A: I think all of us possess a private language formed by childhood sounds, recurring landscapes and emotional experiences. My journeys from Kolkata to Mithila exposed me to different landscapes and dialects. There were memories, social encounters and personal losses that accumulated over time.

Before words arrive, writers often experience a pre-verbal language filled with rhythm and emotion. As Noam Chomsky once distinguished between competence and performance, the language within us often remains richer than the language that finally appears on paper. The language within us often remains richer than the language that finally appears on paper. Translation can only capture the outer layer. The deeper language remains hidden.

Q: You had the intellectual freedom to work entirely within larger linguistic domains. Yet you repeatedly returned to Maithili. Was this literary commitment or cultural memory?

A: Anyone looking at my poetry anthologies would notice long gaps between them. Kavayo Vadanti appeared in 1966, Amrtasya Putraah in 1971, AnuttaraNa in 1981, Madhyampurush Ekvachan in 2005, Jahalak Diary in 2015 and Chhaya in 2024.

I kept returning to Maithili, and perhaps that itself answers the question. My Bangla poetry came much later. The repeated return was certainly linked to cultural memory.

Q: Your writing suggests language is not merely a medium but also a way of seeing the world. How has linguistics changed literature for you and literature changed language?

A: Linguistics taught me that every language is a complete intellectual universe. Grammar is not simply a system of rules. It is a history of choices and ways of understanding experience.

Literature, on the other hand, taught me that grammar acquires memory and vocabulary acquires compassion. Poetry made me realize that meaning often lies not only in what language says but also in what it cannot say.

Literature also saved me from becoming only a linguist. Linguistics seeks systems and patterns. Literature reminds us that human experience always exceeds systems. This is perhaps why writing poetry, translating Tagore, compiling dictionaries and documenting endangered languages never appeared separate to me. They all arise from the same belief that every language carries a distinct way of being human.

Q: You are both a poet and a linguist. Poetry searches for mystery while linguistics often seeks structure. Have these two disciplines complemented each other or argued with each other within you?

A: They have mostly existed in what linguistics calls ‘complementary distribution.’ In my youth, I believed literature was made of language. Over time, I have come to think that language is also made by literature. Great literary works do not merely use language. They expand its expressive possibilities. They create new metaphors, alter rhythms, reshape syntax and gradually influence what later generations consider sayable.

Poetry and linguistics seem to move toward different destinations. Poetry seeks ambiguity and resonance, while linguistics searches for systems and patterns. Yet they have never really argued within me. Linguistics gave me analytical tools to understand how language functions, while poetry continually reminded me that language can never be fully captured by systems. One studies the architecture of language, the other inhabits its silences and shadows.

I have often felt that poetry protects me from excessive certainty and linguistics protects me from romantic confusion. Together they have allowed me to see language both as structure and as mystery.

Q: You have travelled widely and inhabited many linguistic worlds. Has travel made you more aware of difference, or has it made you realize that human experiences across cultures are fundamentally similar?

A: I have travelled across more than two dozen countries with very different cultural landscapes. Such journeys have definitely enlarged my understanding of the world, but they have also made me aware of how little we all really know.

Travel perhaps did not directly shape my poetry, but it certainly entered my theatre and dramatic imagination. I have also spent a lifetime watching films from different countries and languages. Cinema became another form of travel for me. I have never really travelled through Hungary, and I visited Japan only briefly, yet their cinema left deep impressions on my understanding of theatre.

Travel first teaches you difference. You become aware of unfamiliar gestures, social rhythms and cultural habits. But if you travel long enough, difference slowly begins to reveal an underlying similarity. Across cultures, human beings continue to carry the same anxieties and hopes. They seek affection, dignity, memory and meaning. Languages may change, but certain emotional landscapes remain remarkably constant.

Q: India's linguistic plurality is frequently celebrated in public discourse. As a linguist, do you see multilingualism as India's greatest civilizational strength or also as one of its unresolved challenges?

A: India's multilingualism is both a strength and a challenge, but historically it has been one of our greatest civilizational resources. After the Second World War, many newly emerging nation-states struggled with the relationship between majority and minority cultures. India also faced similar questions at Independence.

One possible path was to leave speech communities to compete among themselves in politics and public life, allowing stronger languages to dominate weaker ones. Another path was to imagine India as what Suniti Kumar Chatterji called "the harmony of contrasts," where multiple linguistic and cultural communities remain connected through shared institutions and functional relationships.

India largely chose the second path. That perhaps explains why our multilingual experience survived despite many tensions.

I often recall Jawaharlal Nehru's words spoken in Shillong in 1952, where he spoke of India's immense variety as the basis of its unity. India was never imagined as a space of sameness. It was conceived as a civilization capable of holding differences together.

Multilingualism does create challenges of policy and representation, but it also gives us something invaluable. It teaches us that identity need not be singular.

Q: You have observed Indian languages closely over several decades. What concerns you more today, the disappearance of languages or the shrinking curiosity towards them?

A: What concerns me more is the shrinking curiosity towards languages. Languages disappear physically only after they disappear emotionally and intellectually.

Many among us have gradually come to believe that our own languages have limited usefulness and that English alone can take us toward modernity and development. This is a strange inheritance of colonial thinking. Languages do not become irrelevant because they fail us. They become vulnerable when we stop investing imagination and confidence in them.

English is undoubtedly important, and I have worked extensively through English myself. But the problem begins when we start treating our own languages as temporary instruments rather than as living repositories of memory, knowledge and creativity.

The loss of curiosity is more dangerous because once curiosity disappears, preservation itself becomes mechanical.

Q: When does a language truly begin to die? Is it when people stop speaking it, or when they stop imagining and dreaming in it?

A: Languages begin to die in the mind long before they disappear from the street. There are always forces that prefer linguistic uniformity because it simplifies trade, administration, media and many other structures of power.

Smaller communities therefore constantly negotiate difficult questions. How do you see yourself? How do others see you? Which perception do you finally accept? How deeply do you remain connected to your language, landscape, food, memory and forms of expression?

A language survives not merely through speech but through emotional investment. When people stop dreaming in a language, creating stories in it, singing in it or imagining futures through it, the process of decline begins. Language is not simply a communication tool. It is also a way of imagining oneself in the world.

Q: Your engagement with translation has been both practical and theoretical. Is translation an act of fidelity, negotiation or creative betrayal?

A: I have always looked at translation somewhat differently. Translation in India has historically been a form of cultural travel. Our civilization has survived through continuous acts of movement across texts, communities, regions and time.

Translation allows us to travel between languages while remaining connected to ourselves. It is not merely about transferring meaning from one language into another. It is about creating relationships among literature, culture and society.

If one examines our epics, classical narratives and literary traditions, one discovers that movement and retelling have always been central to our imagination. Stories travelled and changed forms repeatedly, and yet they retained their emotional core.

This perhaps explains why we use the term anuvad, which suggests something like reverberation or resonance. Translation is not duplication. It is an echo that carries an earlier sound into a new space.

So I do not see translation simply as fidelity or betrayal. I see it as mediation and travel.

Q: Universities today appear increasingly driven by skills and employability. Are we gradually losing spaces for reflection, doubt and intellectual curiosity?

A: To a considerable extent, yes. As our universities continue expanding to accommodate larger populations, we are often paying more attention to infrastructure and employability than to intellectual culture.

Curiosity has perhaps suffered the greatest decline. Reflection, disagreement and sustained conversations across disciplines are becoming increasingly rare. Universities cannot survive merely as centres of skill production. Their role is also to create spaces where uncertainty is welcomed and difficult questions can be asked.

Education ultimately becomes meaningful when it teaches us not only how to make a living but also how to understand life itself.

Q: As Maithili Literature Coordinator at Sahitya Akademi, are you enjoying this phase of your journey? How do you see this role: administration, cultural responsibility or literary intervention?

A: I am merely trying to set a few things right. Left to myself, I would have abandoned the role, had it not been for the commitment made to my literary community. There is some degree of administration as it happens in all government run institutions, and we had not been very good at it earlier. Perhaps, one cannot make fundamental changes in these roles but only leave a legacy worth following.

Q: What new initiatives, projects or literary conversations are you currently trying to build through your work around Maithili?

A: Currently translating or re-creating a few classical theatre productions. Creating some digital footprints through visual conversations with some fellow authors.

Q: Looking at contemporary Maithili literature, what excites you most and where do you feel there is still a serious gap?

A: There are still noticeable gaps in travel writing, serious academic essays, popular science writing, detective fiction and screenplays. What excites is the emergence of a few very good women authors.

Q: You have seen languages as a scholar, taught them as a teacher and lived them as a poet. Which of these three selves has understood language most deeply?

A: In order of preference: 1. Poet, 2. Scholar-researcher, 3. Teacher.

Q: If a young writer came to you today and said, ‘I want to write in Maithili,’ what would be the first thing you tell them?

A: I shall try to give three pieces of advice: 1. Read a lot, not only what the others have written in Maithili, but what our neighbours have written, in Odia, Assamese, Bangla and also in Hindi – including what is emerging in Bhojpuri and Rajasthani; 2. Translate both ways, into and from Maithili, as much as you can – that will perfect your expression; and 3. Travel, as much as you can. 

Q: A hundred years from now, when a reader encounters the name Udaya Narayana Singh, what would you want that first sentence about you to say?

A: A poet-playwright, who happened also to be a linguist, translator, and cultural theorist, Udaya Narayana Singh spent a lifetime listening to the conversations between languages. He sought not merely to describe multilingual worlds but to inhabit them, believing that every language enlarges the possibilities of being human.

(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur writes on literature, culture, society, arts and environment, with a special interest in the shared histories and cultures of South Asia.)