There is a vigorous opposition to Hindi in South India. It goes under the name, ’Imposition of Hindi’. On the other hand, it is an undoubted fact that more people in India have access to Hindi than to any other language. North Indians are puzzled to see that so many people in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Bidar and Gulbarga speak among themselves in some kind of Hindi and still Hindi is opposed in the South! Let us understand the enigma of the widespread prevalence of Hindi in South India and the opposition to its imposition.
This article, addressed to young political activists, tries to understand this contradiction and shows that it is the ‘Hindu Nationalist – Fascist’ forces who want to divide the people and rule that are behind this ‘imposition’. The Hindi language and ordinary people from the Hindi region are not responsible for it.
We will first take up the case of ‘Imposition of Hindi’. After that we will consider the how and why of Hindi’s spread across India.
Imposition of Hindi
Even during the independence movement, Congress promoted Hindi. Gandhi personally promoted it and in the South C. Rajagopalachari was instrumental in starting Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha. In 1937, in the erstwhile Madras State, C. Rajagopalachari was the Chief Minister and he made Hindi compulsory. This was immediately opposed by ‘Periyar’ E. V. Ramaswamy and the opposition Justice Party. The three-year-long agitation involved fasts, conferences, marches, picketing and protests. Government crackdown resulted in the death of two protesters and the arrest of 1,198 persons, including women and children. In 1939, the government resigned and the Governor withdrew the mandatory Hindi education in February 1940.1
After independence it started with the article 343(1) of the Indian Constitution which specifically mentioned, ‘The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devnagari script, while article 343(2) allowed continuation of English for 15 years and article 343(3) allowed the parliament the power to extend this period. In 1963 this was extended for an indefinite period. So far so good.2
All hell broke in 1965. As we have seen above, the framers of the Indian Constitution envisaged that by 1965 Hindi would be developed enough to replace English as the official language. When this did not happen, zealots from the Hindi belt, particularly the socialists, took to the streets and went on a rampage destroying property that carried sign boards in English. This created a huge reaction in other regions; particularly in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Thus, Hindi chauvinism was born.2
In Tamil Nadu, the anti-Hindi agitation gained momentum. On January 25, 1965, a minor altercation between students and Congress Party members triggered a full-scale riot in Madurai, eventually spreading all over the State. It involved violence, looting, arson, police firing and lathi charge. Seventy people including two policemen died. Eventually, Lal Bahadur Shastri the Prime Minister assured that English would continue as long as the non-Hindi states wanted. In 1967, DMK won the election and Congress never managed to capture power in the state again. The Official Language Act was also amended in 1967 to guarantee indefinite use of both English and Hindi as official languages.
After this, the movement died within a few years. However, it has been recently revived because of the Hindutva forces ascending to power. They are talking of One Nation, One Religion and One Language! Recently a new law was promulgated in the parliament. Normally, the law is named in both English and Hindi. This time they used only Hindi. This enraged many in South India and a judge declared that he would not use the Hindi name! Once again, this is a reaction to electoral power coming from North India. However, today, South India is far more powerful with regional parties coming to power. So, the discourse has also acquired an edge.
The discourse of ‘Imposition of Hindi’
The main argument of those against Hindi being India’s sole official language is, how can a language which has a literary history of only 150 years be the official language of our country? All the four South Indian languages have the status of ‘classical language’ in India which means that they have a long literary history of at least 1000 years! Another argument put forward, albeit a bizarre one, is that Hindi was invented by a Hindu Pandit appointed by the East India Company in Fort William, Calcutta!
South Indians feel hurt when they are lumped together as ‘Madrasis’ by the North Indians (Hindi wallas). They also feel hurt when in the name of the three-language formula they have to learn their mother tongue, English and Hindi, whereas the North Indians get away with Hindi, English and Sanskrit! Everyone knows that no one really learns Sanskrit in schools. The obvious correction would be to remove Sanskrit as the third language and replace it with any modern Indian language of the region’s choice. But no one wants to touch the subject.
Many South Indians are also angry because of the way Marwari and Gujarati business people have taken over commercial areas in South Indian urban areas – big and small – and are celebrating North Indian religious festival in a noisy and expensive fashion.
Finally, in recent years, there has been a huge migration of North Indian as labour in the South. They are not only from the Hindi region, but also from Odisha, Bengal and Assam. But all of them speak Hindi and most of them are not able to learn the local language. This also irritates South Indians.
The spread of Hindi
We now take up the issue of how and why Hindi has spread the way it has in India. We pose three questions:
- What is Hindi?
- How Hindi has spread so widely?
- Why Hindi has spread so widely?
What is Hindi?
When speaking of the language, the word ‘Hindi’ is used in two senses. In the first case it refers to a group of around 30 languages in the Hindi-speaking region. Acharya Kishoridas Bajpai (1898-1981) refers to it as a ‘commonwealth’ of languages and mentions three characteristics: 1. the use of ‘ka’ pratyay (post position) – like ka, ki, ke, ko, etc, 2. geographical continuity and 3. use of the Devnagari script. The Hindi-speaking region extends from Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh in the North, to Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in the East, and to Rajasthan, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh in the West and the South. All these states have modern Hindi as their official language.
In the other sense of the word, Hindi refers to a specific language of a particular region. The language is known as ‘Khari Boli’ and is the local language of Meerut district in Western U.P. Linguistically, it shares a grammatical structure with Urdu and Dakhni. The latter exists in various forms throughout Western India, including Gujarat, Maharashtra, Northern Karnataka and Telangana.
Hereinafter we will use the word Hindi to mean the literary form of Khari Boli. This Hindi is called a daughter of Urdu and Urdu itself is called a daughter of Dakhni. This needs some explanation. However, the ´Hindi´ that has spread all over India is not this literary Hindi. It is mainly several forms of Dakhni which is linguistically related to Hindi. During the independence movement many referred to this language as Hindusthani. Dakhni reached Deccan up to Gulbarga by the 12th century! In spite of the confusion, we will continue to use the word Hindi for this also just as we use the word English for the myriads forms of English spread all over the world. 3
How Hindi has spread so widely?
When Wali Dakhni, a famous Dakhni poet, visited Delhi in 1700, he astonished the poets of Delhi with his ghazals. He drew wide applause from the Persian-speaking poets, some of whom, after listening to Wali, also adopted the language of the people, Urdu, as the medium of their poetic expressions. Prominent poets like Mir Taqi Mir were among his admirers.
At that time in Delhi, the court poets were composing in Persian and Arabic. For others, Braj and Awadhi were the languages of literary and religious expressions. The spoken language of all was Khari Boli. When the poets listened to Wali in Dakhni, they were struck by the fact that the spoken language of the people was capable of such rich literary expression.
Thus, in the early eighteenth century, after Wali’s visit, Urdu as a literary language was born. Both modern Hindi (written in Devnagari script) and Urdu (written in Perso-Arabic or Urdu script) are variants of Khari Boli spoken in the Delhi and Meerut region. Court circles, Persian and Arabic scholars and especially the Muslims of Delhi adapted Urdu with much eagerness, and from the end of the 18th century the Mughal house turned only to Urdu. For the first 60 years or so the influence of the Dakhni poets, Sufi thinking and an Indianness of diction prevailed over Urdu.
Although Amir Khusro (1253-1325) and Kabir (1398-1448) used Khari Boli in the 14th and the 15th century, ‘Hindi’ became a literary language only in the latter half of the 19th century. Till then the authors were mainly writing in Braj and Awadhi. It was Raja Shiva Prasad ‘Sitare Hind’ (1824-1895) and Bharatendu Harishchandra (1849-1882) who first started writing in Khari Boli in Devnagari script. They were obviously influenced by the popularity of Urdu, which was written in Perso-Arabic or Urdu script. In the beginning the difference was mainly in the script, and the authors knew both the scripts. In fact the famous Hindi author, Premchand (1880-1936) first wrote in Urdu under the name Nawabrai. Thus, modern Hindi is only about 150 years old and, like Urdu, has been inspired by Dakhni.
The three languages – Hindi, Urdu and Dakhni – together embrace a very large part of India. Since they form one family, the speakers have access to all three. This is the reason why ‘Hindi’ is understood by such a large population of India. A more accurate formulation would be that the group – Hindi, Urdu and Dakhni – or we can call it as ‘Khari Boli’ group, is understood by a large number of Indians. Some people prefer the use of the word Hindusthani’ for this language. However, as we said we will continue to use the word Hindi.
How has Hindi reached so far in the South?
It has reached mainly through
a. Trade
b. Religious movement – mainly Nirguna Bhakti movement and Sufi after the 10th century or so.
c Invasions, Army and Migration
d. In independent India, the Central Schools (Kendirya Vidyalays), the armed services and Hindi films.
Deccan is an area that can be defined as lying between the Narmada and the Tungabhadra rivers. The area south of the Deccan is called Dravid. The Deccan has been a meeting point of southern and northern cultures. This has given its culture a special quality. It does not keep its independent existence but spreads and accepts influences from the North and the South. It is a home for Kannada, Telugu and Marathi, and also has contributed to Hindi and Urdu.
So the contact with the North is far older than the Muslim invasion. Both Buddhists and Jain religions that were born in Bihar had significant presence in the South. The Jains even today have an important presence. After the decline of the Buddhists, it was the Shaivaite and Nathpanthis who inherited the Buddhist tradition.
Trade
Even during Ashoka´s time trade between the North and the South flourished. Historian D. D. Kosambi talks of the Dakshina Path which traversed from North to South. Along the path were Buddhist viharas which served as sarai/dharmashala as well as banks for the traders! Obviously, the road served other purposes also and helped the spread of North Indian influence to the South.
Religious movement – The Nirgunia-Sufi Link
But why did a language related to Khari Boli in North India spread all over Western India and parts of South India?
There was a significant movement of Nathpanthis, Nirgunias, Sikhs and Sufis from Punjab to Gulbarga, through Gujarat and Maharashtra. In Maharashtra, Gyaneshwar and his elder brother Nivrutinath are in the direct tradition of Gorakhnath. Hence, we find Namdev (1270-1351), a saint from Maharashtra and a tailor by caste, writing in Dakhni. His son Gonda also composed in Dakhni. Some 50 of Namdev’s poems are included in the Granth Sahib. The Granth Sahib is not just the religious book of the Sikh religion, but is also a compendium of Nirgunia literature of that time. However, the bulk of Dakhni literature is in the Sufi tradition. Sufis too travelled from the North to the South, as did Nanak. Nanak reached up to Nanded and Bidar. Sufis spread all over the Deccan and every district has at least one important Sufi dargah. 4
Invasions, Army and Migration
Soldiers of Delhi were also accompanied with cooks and other workers who spoke Khari Boli. Migration is another big source of spread of a language. In the colonial period Bombay and Calcutta attracted workers from the Hindi region and ‘Bombay Hindi’ and ‘Calcutta Hindi’ were born. Post independence, the South developed much more and the Hindi region became a sort of internal colony supplying labour and raw material! After liberalization in the 1990s this migration became huge accompanied by falling fertility rate and labour shortages in the South. Eastern India – West Bengal, Assam and Odisha also joined in sending labour to the South. However, the lingua franca of all the migrants became Hindi!
Armed Forces and Central Services
Hindi also spread naturally in the Indian armed forces, particularly in the Army. It was also taught in Kendriya Vidyalaya (Central Schools) serving the children of the armed forces and the central government employees. They are a huge network and probably represent the best schools in India as a group.
Why has Hindi alone spread and not any other language?
The language which is understood by people spread over such a large region cannot be one language but a group of languages with something common among them. The situation is a bit like English around the world. There are many forms of English around the world but still a speaker from one region is able to communicate with a speaker from other region. A person with ‘Received Pronunciation’ from London can communicate with a taxi driver in Bombay! This is not true for all the languages in the world. So, what is the secret of English and Hindi?
It seems that there are three reasons:
- It has an extremely simple grammar. Acharya Suniti Kumar Chattopadhyaya, the great linguist once wrote that the grammar of Bombay Hindi can be written on a post card!
- The preposition in English is separated from the noun. In Hindi it becomes post position. So, the words are smaller and easy to learn. In Hindi, the post positions like ka, ki, ke, ko, ke liye, etc. are separate words. That makes life simple for the learner. No other language in India has these characteristics. It appears that English and Arabic are the only languages that share this feature.
- All Indian languages have similar sentence structures. Linguists call it ‘morph by morph equivalence’, that is, if you write the same sentence in two languages one below the other, they will match vertically. This makes learning any Indian language easy for Indians.
Concluding Remarks
- The imposition of Hindi is mainly by the ruling political parties. They pander to the Hindi wallas because that region sends the largest number of members to the parliament! Today the Hindutva forces added a further menace by becoming fascist and communal.
- However, the regional languages have grown much too powerful for any substantive change of this nature to occur. No one can displace the powerful languages like the four South Indian languages, Marathi, Gujarati, Odia, Bengali etc.
- The Khari Boli group of languages have spread all over India on their own for a thousand years without being imposed on by any other language. The reason is that Hindi has some unique features that make it easy to spread. It is still spreading thanks to the Hindi cinema, songs and migration.
- The real gainer in the situation is English. The demand for English medium schools has grown all over the country, particularly in urban metro India. This has happened at the cost of Indian languages, including Hindi. There has been a steep decline in regional language literary magazines. Part of the reason, in my opinion is allowing Sanskrit as a third language in the three-language formula. So, in a sense, it is not just the imposition of Hindi, but the imposition of Sanskrit that has also proved dangerous.5
- However, the Indian language literature is flourishing in small towns and their readership is also growing thanks to increase in schooling. The better educated people are becoming bilingual and even multilingual.
- Hindi is not an enemy of any language. In fact, no language can be an enemy of any other language! North Indians should realise that South Indians are not opposed to spoken Hindi but are only opposed to imposition of Hindi as the official language and the compulsory teaching of Hindi in schools.
- At the same time North Indians should understand that learning to speak a language in the street is not the same as having a compulsory subject in schools and accepting it as the official language.
- Also North Indians visiting South India as simple visitors or as migrants should not demand that the South Indians should know Hindi. The migrant labour, along with individuals settling from other parts of the country should be apologetic that they have not learned the local language.
- On the other hand, South Indian states, which have a lot of migrant labourers but who do not know the local languages, should make provision to teach these labourers the local languages .
- Finally, it is the fascist forces that are using religion, ethnicity and language to divide and rule the people. Down with fascism!
T. Vijayendra (1943- ) was born in Mysore, grew in Indore and went to IIT Kharagpur to get a B. Tech. in Electronics (1966). After a year’s stint at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, he got drawn into the whirlwind times of the late 60s. Since then, he has always been some kind of political-social activist. His brief for himself is the education of Left wing cadres and so he almost exclusively publishes in the Left wing journal Frontier, published from Kolkata. For the last nine years, he has been active in the field of ‘Peak Oil’ and is a founder member of Peak Oil India and Ecologise. Since 2015 he has been involved in Ecologise! Camps and in 2016 he initiated Ecologise Hyderabad. He divides his time between an organic farm at the foothills of Western Ghats, watching birds, writing fiction and Hyderabad. He has published a book dealing with resource depletions, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, a novella and an autobiography. Vijayendra has been a ‘dedicated’ cyclist all his life, meaning, he neither took a driving licence nor did he ever drive a fossil fuel based vehicle. Email: [email protected]
References
1. Wikipedia: Anti – Hindi agitations of Tamilnadu
2. Wikipedia: Language with official status in India, en.m.wikipedia.org
3. Hindi has arrived by T. Vijayendra, https://countercurrents.org/2021/09/hindi-has-arrived/
4. ‘Dakhni: The Language in which the Composite Culture of India was Born’, article in the book, ‘The Losers Shall Inherit The World’ by T. Vijayendra, Third Edition, Year: 2012.
5. English in India by T. Vijayendra, https://countercurrents.org/2021/10/english-in-india/
Comments on T. Vijayendra’s article “The Enigma of Hindi” by Saral Sarkar
Many thanks to Viju for this excellent scholarly and informative article. Learnt a lot. Yet I am not very satisfied with his treatment of the political problem. The latter is in my opinion underexposed. Allow me to make a few points.
1)
That present-day India became known and accepted as a state is basically the result of British conquest. Even in the past, smaller or larger parts of the subcontinent south of the Himalayas – called kingdoms and empires – were results of military conquests. Think of the Mauryan Empire of Ashoka or the kingdom of Vijayanagar or the Bahmani Sultanate. The political unity of these kingdoms and empires were imposed and maintained by force.
2)
When we go abroad, if somebody asks us: “Where are you from?”, we reply: “from India”, or “I am Indian”. We do not reply: “I am Telugudeshi”, or “I am from West Bengal”. That means we have accepted our being a citizen of India as our collective identity. But within India, if somebody puts the same question, it makes sense only if we reply: “I am Tamilian” or “He is Maharastrian.” That means, we all have two collective identities – one related to our citizenship and the other related to our ethnicity. Same is the case in Europe. All Europeans have two collective identities: They are Europeans and they are either French or German or Spaniard etc. etc.
3)
To my knowledge, no Indian is denying his/her Indian collective identity. The problem is only related to our second, i.e., collective ethnic identities.
4)
Before 1947, the Muslim League and its leader Md. Ali Jinnah asserted that India is not one country but a union of many countries. He further asserted that Indian Muslims are a distinct identity group and should have their own nation state, Pakistan, when the British depart. We know what happened then.
5)
The question that arises now is, what collective ethnic identity is really based on. In 1947, in the subcontinent of India, the two large and opposing collective identities were based on religion: Hindu or Muslim?, was the question. Congress leaders, of course, refused to accept this two nations theory of Jinnah. But de facto, in 1947, it was so as Jinnah described it. Otherwise, there would not have been so many violent Hindu-Muslim riots in pre-independence India.
6)
In some places, religion has ceased to be the identity giving force, which it was once. For instance, in Europe, since long, it does not matter at all, whether one is Catholic or Protestant. Take, for instance, what is happening in Baluchistan today. The Baluchis are Muslim. Yet, they are fighting for independence.
7)
In India since 1947, as Viju describes it so well, mother tongue has taken over the place of religion as the basis of collective identity of parts of the Indian population.
Or take, for instance, the history of Bangladesh, erstwhile East Pakistan. The people there are still Muslim. In 1947, they joined Pakistan. But then they fought for independence.
Catalonia, a small region in north-east Spain, the people of which speak Catalan, is trying to gain independence from Spain. They are insisting on their language identity.
8)
In the last legislative assembly election in West Bengal, when the BJP tried to win a majority there, they brought many volunteers from North India. The
Bengali Chief Minister of the state called the BJP the party of “outsiders” (She used the Bengali word “Bohiragata”)
I wonder, what a person from Uttar Pradesh would say, if asked about his second collective identity. What would a person from Maddhya Pradesh say? The names of the two states refer only to their geographic location!
In conclusion, I would like to say: such conflicts arise when one ethnic identity group tries to gain the upper hand, tries to dominate over the other ethnic identity groups. The desire to dominate, desire to be distinct, identity feelings, are inherent in human nature. What to do? What is the solution?
Sometimes, for the present, I think it is better to create a strong Indian English and declare it the only official language of India. Or to declare India to be a union state, like the European Union.
Response to comments by Saral Sarkar
1. I deliberately avoided many political aspects of the situation. I wanted to focus on the lingustic aspect. Otherwise the article would have been too long.
2. India is not like Latin America where local languages were undermined and a foreign language – Spanish or Portugese – becacame the main language. Many Indian languages are highly developed and have long literary histories. English cannot replace them. So Saralś idea that a developed Indian English language can become the sole official language will never be accepted by Indian polity.
3. Infact Indian English is fairly well developed and several Indian authors have won all kinds of literary awards internationally. However all the great Indian English writers are bilinguial/multi linguial and are deeply immersed in atleast one Indian language and culture.
4. India is the biggest publisher of books in English language and has a fairly huge market for English language books – probably bigger than for any other Indian language. In India discourse In all natural sciences and even in social sciences takes place in English.
5. However in politics, and particulalrly in elctoral politics Indian languages rule. Also Indian language press is huge and carries the political discourse.
6. Coming to politics, the elephant in the room is the tension between federal and centralising forces. This is the main driver of Indian politics. Both are strong. The demand for one National Lnaguage expresses the centralising forces. Justice Ekbote – a profound scholar from Hyderabad and a former minister of libraries – wrote a book in Hindi – A Nation without a National Language! But this is totally unacceptable to regionally strong federal forces. So the present uneasy compromise of having two Óffical languages’will continue and we will have no Nationl Language! It is working and no one wants to tip the apple cart!
Vijayendra
March 15, 2024
