Hindi movies and TV programs are doing a fair bit to spread the language in its popular Hindustani version, rather than in its stilted Sanskritised avatar
A fight over language is something that Tamil politicians relish. Defence of Tamil is a cause that is feverishly popular across the state, and Union Home Minister Amit Shah is mistaken if he thinks that daring the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister to teach engineering and medicine in Tamil would leave him daunted.
Textbooks in these subjects are already being written in Tamil and it is not inconceivable that these would begin to be used in formal education.
When Latin used to be the universal language of scholarship in Europe — Isaac Newton wrote his Principia Mathematica in that language — there would have been derision at the notion that Europe’s local vernaculars, the vulgar (meaning 'of the people') tongues that gradually evolved into English, French, German, Danish, etc., would be capable of articulating and communicating abstract as well as empirical concepts with the precision and rigour science calls for, and Latin was capable of.
But, of course, these languages proved more than capable not just of serving as the bridge between the erudite and the masses but also of further advancing science itself through research.
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Colonised world
In contemporary times, it is only in the colonised parts of the world that the notion survives that unless you study in the coloniser’s language, you would be incapable of true comprehension of the world.
South Korea’s population is smaller than Tamil Nadu’s. Koreans learn in their mother tongue, and learn things well enough to develop companies like Samsung, LG, and Hyundai, which carry out cutting-edge research in technology and design and produce world-class products.
The Scandinavian nations are smaller than South Delhi in terms of their population. They study in their respective mother tongues, and do well enough, culturally, scientifically, and commercially. Yes, the Scandinavians do learn languages other than their own mother tongue — German and English, for example.
But they are not deluded into thinking that unless they deploy a foreign language as their medium of instruction, they would not master that tongue. That is a delusion most Indians are proud to wallow in.
Even after English grew as a powerful language of commerce, industry, conquest, and hegemony, the British elite continued to teach their young Latin and Greek. This was intended as a means of civilising all members of the elite into a uniform code of culture.
In their colonies, the English introduced English studies in the place of Latin and Greek in their educational institutions back home.
A rare species
The North Indian elite are a rare species. They disdain their mother tongue — rare is the well-off North Indian who uses Hindi for anything other than quotidian transactions — but still want the rest of the country to learn and use their language.
Most so-called native speakers of Hindi are incapable of reading Hindi literature, leave alone producing it. They are wholly ignorant of the relative youth of their language, of its departure, early in the 19th century, from the Hindavi/Rekta/Urdu admixture with the encouragement, in part, of Christian missionaries in search of a language in which to specifically address North Indian Hindus.
Most North Indians go under the misguided notion that Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, unaware that modern North Indian languages are derived from assorted Prakrits, that Sanskrit (meaning ‘refined’) itself was a language restricted to the elite, so much so that minor characters and women in Sanskrit plays spoke a Prakrit, rather than Sanskrit.
While proud of their presumed Sanskrit pedigree, few North Indians can name a Sanskrit poet, apart, perhaps from Kalidasa, leave alone recite a stanza from a Sanskrit poem.
Forget Sanskrit literature, the average Hindi speaker is unlikely to have read a Hindi poem by Muktibodh or heard of Jaishankar Prasad and his Kamayani. He has no idea of the literary masterpieces in Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, or Bengali. Yet, when he turns up at a Bengaluru restaurant, he is annoyed when the waiter does not understand Hindi. Why don’t you people learn the national language, he mutters in an undertone.
Hindi is not national language
Hindi is not India’s national language. There can be no single national language in a diverse democracy like India, with a bounty of rich languages, each embodying the cultural identity of a population as large as a European nation, if not larger.
Hindi is right now treated as the only official language apart from English, and that is a democratic deficit. All the 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule deserve to be official languages of the nation.
Yes, there would be link languages — Hindi and English would be the prominent link languages. In the East and the Northeast, it would be Bengali. In the South, it could be Tamil.
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No rule of majority
There is nothing automatic about the language spoken by the majority being chosen as the national or official language of a multilingual nation.
When Indonesia became free, it adopted Malay as its national language, although Malay was spoken as their native language only by some people in Jakarta, and the numerically-dominant languages among the 700-odd spoken by Indonesians were those spoken by people on the island of Java.
Malay, however, was the language of trade and commerce across the Indonesian island chain, and so that was chosen as the national language, Bahasa Indonesia.
Hindi’s organic growth
Hindi is far more widely-understood and appreciated across India today than it was in the 1960s, when Parliament tried to impose Hindi on non-Hindi speakers and then backtracked in the face of a severe backlash, particularly in Tamil Nadu.
Let that natural evolution progress, instead of being hampered by attempts to impose the language. Hindi movies and television programming are doing a fair bit to spread Hindi, in its popular, Hindustani version, rather than in its stilted, Sanskritised avatar.
Also Read: Why does South, except TN, have no problem with Hindi? | Talking Sense with Srini
Let Tamil Nadu continue with its two-language policy for schools. That is what North Indian states have, too, in substance, if not in form. That will promote Hindi’s organic growth, while attempts to force Hindi down people’s throats would only hinder the process.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
