Language and Identity in Saurashtra

Abstract: This article describes the necessity of various signs or “mark-ers ” that identify and distinguish a community from the others in Indian society. It points out that references to images or models are necessary to understand the language of identity as practised in Saurashtra. The author shows how Indian society provides a large scope for interaction that creates or maintains rank differences or “hierarchising transactions”, and also how the rules of hierarchising transactions are better seen as implicitly structuring different kinds of such behavioural schema. It shows that the rules of interaction and the grammar of language of identity imply that people must share a number of presuppositions that link social categories and their stere-otypes on the one hand, and a repertory of recognised types of situa-tion on the other hand. Indians, used to the caste system, are familiar with the necessity of identifyingthemselves and others by various signs or “markers ” to borrow Barth’s (1969) term for ethnic boundaries. Nevertheless, the veritable language of identification that results has seldom been described or analysed. It does, however, provide us with an angle to criticise simplistic or reifying notions of the “caste system.” Ever since the publication of the classic work of Gumperz (1958), and an excellent article of Berreman (1972), the purport of such identification does not stop at caste. Rather, Indian social actors refer to various markers of rank and distinction, revealing a complexity of the social world which goes well beyond any simple notion of “system”. Interactionist or sociolinguistic approaches have opened up new perspectives on Indian society, and relegated the idea of a “caste system” to one of several models structuring society and serving as a reference for the languages of identity in common use. Nevertheless, the work of Gumperz and other socio-linguists tend to ignore too many of the implicits rooted in such images or models. I try to show how reference to such images or models is necessary to understand the language of identity practiced in Saurashtra