“Hindi as an exclusive national franchise would give rise to surreal scenarios: it would be a sight to behold Fali Nariman, Soli J. Sorabjee, K. K. Venugopal, K. Parasaran or Ashok Desai getting lost in translation as they fumble with delicate matters and nuances in the language. Will the Thirukkural and Gitanjali be sung in Hindi? Will English be spoken and taught in Hindi? Will Prasoon Joshi write the new national anthem?” – Ravi Shankar
All language is an amalgam of cultures, some extinct and some thriving. Yet, it is a vehicle of proto-ideas that shape the world. Language is the story of mankind, and as sacred as the word of god. To claim that one language alone represents a nation is a betrayal of the cultures that gave it form. Last week, a petition was filed in the Supreme Court pleading for Hindi to replace English as the official court language since the latter is a “ghulami bhasha”, or the language of slavery. Hindi, too, has a ghulami legacy, unlike other Indian languages. It is an amalgam of Persian, Arabic and Turkish, reflecting the pre-British conquests of India. In the form of Urdu it was in the Mughal court that Hindi first gained prestige, where it was the official language. Hindi’s inherent sophistication comes from Sanskrit. And ironically, Rigvedic Sanskrit is one of the earliest Indo-European languages, which include English and most European languages.
Has the cow belt’s position as the BJP’s power base led to the preponderance of the Hindi lobby as a political bloc? The government recently had to rescind instructions that all government correspondence and social media be in Hindi, in the face of opposition from the states. Hindi as an exclusive national franchise would give rise to surreal scenarios: it would be a sight to behold Fali Nariman, Soli J. Sorabjee, K. K. Venugopal, K. Parasaran or Ashok Desai getting lost in translation as they fumble with delicate matters and nuances in the language. Will the Thirukkural and Gitanjali be sung in Hindi? Will English be spoken and taught in Hindi? Will Prasoon Joshi write the new national anthem? The national narrative is a vast babble of myriad tongues giving the single message that “We are India”. The 1961 census recorded 1,652 mother tongues, including dialects, sub-dialects, dialect clusters and non-subcontinental languages. India hosts 415 living languages of the world’s 6,912. Hence, no language is superior to another; to assume so is to hide a deep insecurity about the endurance and limitations of one’s own.
The majority of Indians do speak Hindi. Its best ambassador is Bollywood, which has a pan-Indian influence. Bollywood, however, has created a vocabulary of its own, a mix of Punjabi and Hinglish which shows that language is a living, breathing thing that is constantly evolving. But to engage other nations, a country needs a linguistic identity. Hindi is India’s linguistic identity as much as English is the world’s lingua franca. Hence when Narendra Modi conducts global dialogues in Hindi, it is a signal that the Indian identity will not be compromised. It, however, does not mean that every Indian should speak, write and conduct all business only in Hindi. Ironically, the Indian judicial system, the Indian Penal Code and our very democracy are derived from the colonial experience. But the world has moved on, and India’s colonial past is as relevant as Vikramaditya sitting on a stone and passing sentence in bucolic majesty.
Over 220 Indian languages have become extinct in the last 50 years. The challenge is to preserve our manifold languages, which would certainly become diminished by the imposed spread of one language. A language does define the identity of a people, but not of all people. Hence a bridge between cultures is important for an exchange of ideas without an interpreter present. English is the language that unites the modern world as well as all Indian states. It translates the cultures of the world, bringing Plato or Sartre to India and taking the Bhagvad Gita to the world. At a point when India is engaging the world with greater ferocity, Hindi could be its ceremonial ambassador but not the coinage of its cultural, economic and technological prowess. French, German, Finnish or Russian are the identities of their respective countries. Of India, Hindi is not. Thinking national today is thinking global. Jai Hind cannot be misunderstood as Jai Hindi. – The New Indian Express, 24 August 2014
» Ravi Shankar Etteth is an author, cartoonist and columnist for The New Indian Express. Email him at ravi@newindianexpress.com
Filed under: india | Tagged: english, hindi, india, india government policies, indian politics, narendra modi, national language, politics, psychological warfare, sanskrit |
BHARATA BHARATI 
Tamils are willing to learn Sanskrit (and Hindi) if Hindi speakers are willing to learn Tamil. Fair and square, isn’t it?
The Bihari collector in my Tamil Nadu district doesn’t speak Tamil. So he administers the district in English. But he should be speaking Tamil as the chief administrator of a Tamil-speaking district. That is only common sense. But common sense seems to escape everybody when it comes to government administration, language and politics.
Nobody—least of all Ravi Shankar—has expressed any hatred in this column except the Hindi advocates. Some of their abusive comments have had to be binned. Is that indicative of the Hindi-speakers’ culture and mindset? If so, why should we bother with them at all.
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Much of internet is dominated by English serving South Indians who are blinded by their hatred for Hindi. Mr Ravishankar, read Ramcharitmanas and please tell me words not derived from Sanskrit and then read any Tamil or Kannada work and see the difference.
BJP did not get anything from Kerala, AP, Telangana and Tamil Nadu so do not cry for anything.
Also, SRG criticised communists opposing Hindi as national language, it is amazing that a language well understood by around 60 percent of Indians should not become national language but rather a foreign one which is transmitting its own degraded culture.
As on Sanskrit, sorry but it will be equally opposed by English lovers like Ravishankara and many chauvinist Tamilians.
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Thank you. I am sure both SRG and RS would agree that organising the states on the basis of language was ill conceived.
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Rest assured, MODI WILL NOT IMPOSE A LANGUAGE UPON THE NATION, however, he will facilitate in understanding the situation.
India is a densely populated country, divided into provinces, each one with its own characteristics, looks, languages and style. India has suffered many barbaric invasions in the past, from the neighbouring as well as the far away countries.
The British were the last rulers, unique in style. Their purpose was to rule the land, and convert the people to Christianity (believers in the same faith makes it easier to rule), ended up with the creation of one of the greatest fictional story – The ARYAN INVASION of India, creating two fictional races, the ARYANS and DRAVIDIANS, one superior, fair skinned and learned, the other inferior, dark skinned and backward, became famously, part of their Divide & Rule Policy. We need to get out of this crunch and discard the English labels. Even the California Education Authority has accepted that there was never an invasion but only a migration.
Indians are arya people and dravids happen to be their teachers.
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The grave mistake was not about “forcing Hindi as a national language”. The grave mistake was dividing the nation using linguistic bifurcation in the first place. Ancient Bharath was never bifurcated linguistically. This is why so many languages and communities could thrive here. South India alone had close to about 143 languages just about 200yrs ago, but we hardly have less than a tenth of it right now. In the name of linguistic chauvinism we’ve simply killed many languages over the past few decades. Linguistic chauvinism not only kills languages but kills accents too. For example, today the Brahminical Tamil is almost extinct in TamilNadu. It was constantly made fun of in the media and today no Brahmin dares to speak it. The same fate is awaiting for other accents of Tamil too. As long as states are bifurcated linguistically, language will continue to be used as a weapon for politics.
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South India does not speak Hindi and does not want to speak it. So what is the compromise solution?
Language chauvinism whether Hindi or Tamil does not help matters. A national language must be national in character and cannot be identified with any particular state. This leaves Sanskrit as the only option as it belongs to every Indian and every Indian would equally have to learn it.
Sanskrit is the true Indian and Hindu language of identity–not the Hindi-Urdu of UP and Pakistan.
Sita Ram Goel, who wrote novels in Hindi, always maintained that forcing Hindi as a national language was a grave mistake. Both he and Ram Swarup advocated Sanskrit as the national language.
Of course the cowboys in UP and Dilli will not want to hear this. But who cares what they want. They will never get Hindi as a national language because the Dravidians in the south will never allow it.
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Nonsense, nonsense & triple nonsense ! Hindi is the Khadi Boli of millions of rural folk in north India, it existed even before the Ghulami time, Ravi Shankar is talking about. The legal luminaries Ravi talks may fumble but their daughters/sons & successors will not, let Ravi be rest assured.Ravi should answer a counter question. Are Geetanjali and Thirukkural being sung in English today? They will continue to be sung in the language they are sung today.Another question, which language is the national anthem if not simple Hindi? Is it English? God, how stupid people can become in their hate!
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