Mumbai: As anyone will tell you, the Hindi spoken on the streets of Mumbai bears no relation to the real thing. Proponents of shuddh Hindi will not even deign to include the Bambaiya patois, with its rough and ready ways, in the list of Hindi dialects. For them it is just an agglomeration of words jumbled together to convey a thought in the quickest and crudest way. It is a tragedy, they will say, that Bollywood has spread this lingo far and wide and sullied a beautiful tongue.
By some miracle, growing up in Mumbai, I somehow ended up learning rather good Hindi. I credit this to a parent who loved the language and encouraged me to speak it correctly and read great authors like Premchand in the original. Regular visits to Delhi for years burnished my skills and though I can do Bambaiya with aplomb, I speak Hindi well enough to take part in television shows. This impresses my Mumbai friends considerably, though undoubtedly some in Delhi and elsewhere cringe at my use of English words every now and then.
Yet, though I can speak, read and write the language, would I describe myself as a Hindi speaker? Hardly. This is not because my “mother tongue” is Punjabi, but because I conduct most of my life in English. This is no different from millions of urban Indians who studied in “English medium” schools.
English becomes their first language, especially in the workplace, but they are equally comfortable speaking in Hindi and/or in their native language, which they deploy wherever necessary. They can see and enjoy Hindi films, talk to friends and relatives in Marathi/Gujarati/Bengali/Tamil/Telugu and switch to English when required.
Upbringing has something to do with it but education is what made this felicity with Hindi possible even in a city like Mumbai. The three-language formula, negotiated by the Centre with the states, ensured that Indians grew up multi-lingual. The government made it mandatory that children be taught both Hindi and English, apart from the language of the state. Thus, in Maharashtra, Marathi was part of the curriculum along with the other two languages even in English-medium schools.
This was in 1968, a few years after anti-Hindi riots in Tamil Nadu (then Madras) as a reaction to what they saw as the hegemony of northern Hindi speakers. Jawaharlal Nehru had then assured the aggrieved parties that Hindi would not be imposed and this delicate compromise was finally drawn up. Both Hindi and English are official languages and Central government offices are expected to communicate in both, but in practice only English is used. A curious fact is that even today institutions like banks and the railways have specially appointed officials to promote Hindi within the organisation and the government funds programmes to spread its use abroad, but in practice this has not yielded any great dividends.
Officially imposed Hindi is heavy and turgid, difficult to use in daily life and indeed impractical too, since it doesn’t make any sense even to the millions who count Hindi as their native language. In fact, Bollywood cinema has done more to spread Hindi all over India than government interventions. The most popular Hindi today would be Hindustani, with its mixture of Hindi and Urdu, but that would not pass muster with the high-minded scholars of Hindi. Internet is full of funny, literal translations of common English words into “pure” Hindi, e.g. vidyut prakashak kanch golak for light bulb.
So, does this mean Hindi or its usage is somehow inferior compared to English? Or that we must all only speak, read and write in English, the language of our colonial oppressors, and forget our own culture? Shouldn’t we take pride in our own heritage? Critics, ranging from socialist Lohiaties to Sanghi nationalists, have always derided “Macaulay-putras”, the children of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose famous “minute” on education of 1835 is alleged to have created generations of deracinated Indians, brown on the outside but English in every other way. They are seen as somehow inauthentic, as opposed to sons of the soil who speak in Hindi.
These are reductive arguments which relate language to culture in a very narrow sense. The truth is that English is no longer a “foreign” language in India — not only do many speak and use it on a daily basis, even more now want to learn it. It increases employability, not just in India but also abroad. One of India’s great strengths is that its professionals can converse freely with others from all over the world, because English now is the global language of business. Millions of not-so-well off families want their children to go to English schools to get an advantage in life.
The new PM says he will converse in Hindi with international leaders. That is a personal choice which must be respected. But when an order is issued that Hindi should be “given priority” by government officers in their social media accounts and in official letters, it becomes a diktat. It brings back memories of deep fissures in the country which resulted in violence in the 1960s and starts looking like a hegemonic imposition on non-Hindi states.
Why then has the Modi government, barely a month in office, come up with this controversial rule and needlessly irritated the states? Part of the answer is the Sanghi formulation of Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan, which posits that national harmony can only be achieved if all speak in one language (and, presumably, accept that India is a Hindu country). But is it just love for Hindi or is there also deep-rooted resentment against the English speaker, the Macaulay-putra who has lorded it over the rest of the country for decades?
Whatever it is, this government has angered not just south Indians but also those who are no less Indian just because they speak in English. Not that state-level leaders have not played politics with language, but things have settled down over the years — why stoke those fires again. To link language with nationalism is a very dangerous move and the government’s attempts to carve out a uniform identity in this diverse country could lead to a lot of upheaval. The cause of Hindi will not be served by such tactics; if anything, anger against it will grow. A government committed to stability and growth should not spend its energies on such non-issues. The quicker this short-sighted order is withdrawn the better.
