New Delhi: For the past two weeks, the top civil servants in India's labyrinthine bureaucracy have been sent back to school.
Graduate degrees are commonplace in this crowd. Plenty have diplomas from Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard, and most were raised speaking English - the language used in most official documents and correspondence in India.
But these days, they are spending their evenings frantically looking up words after new Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that all official documents must be written in Hindi, spoken by hundreds of millions across northern India. While many bureaucrats speak the language, few know the formal phrases needed for official communication.
"It's unbelievable how much time I spend rifling through the Hindi dictionary," said a senior official, who asked not to be named for fear being seen as criticizing the new government. "A simple letter now takes me ages."
Modi's campaign promises included a vow to crack the whip on Delhi's gargantuan and slow-moving bureaucracy, but the language shift is also clearly part of an outsider's attempt to etch his own imprint on the political culture of the Indian capital.
Modi made streamlining the bureaucracy a campaign platform, vowing "maximum governance and minimum government."
He also said he wanted to restore a sense of pride to India's dejected millions, many of them battling unemployment and grinding poverty. One quick boost would be giving prominence to Hindi, the language of the masses.
So a day after the new government took office, India's home ministry ordered officials to switch to Hindi on social media. Modi also ordered officials to use Hindi in all official correspondence and to take notes in Hindi. Modi himself declared he would only speak Hindi with foreign leaders.
The changes have shaken the government's power managers.
The newly elected lawmakers "speak a different language and are socially conservative in their outlook," Kumari said. "Certainly, there is a sense of disquiet among the bureaucrats," she said.
Modi could not be further removed from Delhi's reigning English-speaking caucus.
The son of a poor tea-seller, he rose to become the longtime chief minister of his native Gujarat state in western India. His patchy education was mostly in Hindi and Gujarati, and he earned his university degrees through correspondence courses.
While Modi rarely speaks English in public, he is said to speak the language fairly well, even if he's not completely at ease.
For the senior civil servants, the sudden language shift is an added burden.
"Most officials think in English. But if they have to translate documents, or write letters in Hindi, it would slow down the process," said Amitabha Pande, a retired civil servant.
