Walking backwards on an important issue that has preoccupied Indians since long before 1947, Home Minister Amit Shah set off another unnecessary contretemps last week with his declaration at the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee that Hindi should replace English as the “official” link language of the country.
Shah said Prime Minister Narendra Modi “has decided that the medium of running the government is the official language, and this will definitely increase the importance of Hindi. Now the time has come to make the official language an important part of the unity of the country. When citizens of states who speak other languages communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India.”
Predictably -- and almost certainly to plan -- Shah’s declaration caused considerable consternation across the country with 22 official languages, and -- according to Ethnologue -- an astonishing 418 “living languages.”
In this veritable Babel, native speakers of Hindi are in the decided minority (at just over 40%) and hundreds of millions of citizens cannot understand it at all.
Thus, as you would expect, leaders from states where Hindi is not widely spoken responded in a cascade of anger, like Siddaramaiah of Karnataka (he is from the Congress) who tweeted that the BJP was “trying to unleash its agenda of cultural terrorism” and “history clearly shows that any attempt to impose Hindi in other states has not gone well.”
He added, rather pointedly, that “It is disgraceful on the part of @AmitShah to betray his mother [s]tate Gujarat and mother-tongue Gujarati for Hindi for his political agenda. I wonder how a person who betrays his motherland can ever work in the interest of India. #IndiaAgainstHindiImposition.”
From Tamil Nadu, the brilliantly outspoken finance minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan also responded: “Why should I have a three-language formula? It makes no sense. Hindi is not intrinsic to at least 60[%]-70[%] of [the] country…Not only is it chauvinism but it is economically inverse logic.”
And writing on Facebook, the Shillong-based documentarian and cultural activist Tarun Bhartiya articulated other distinct concerns: “If Hindi is made compulsory in [the] North East, where are the Hindi [s]hikshaks/teachers going to come from? Obviously, from the communal [and] conservative states of North India. [The government’s] plan is to plant these fifth columnists of [H]induisation and [H]indutva in all the villages of the region. So on one hand you have Indian army and paramilitary, on the other you are going to have [H]indu pujaris...”
What is the logic in Amit Shah roiling the nation over an antiquated idea that is destined to fail? The answer is, of course, political calculation.
As the veteran editor Sidharth Bhatia pointed out in thewire.in, this ostensible championing of Hindi “will give Hindutva mobs another handle to go after anyone they wish to in the name of promoting the language.” He says there is “no reason to feel sanguine that Shah’s statement is yet another election jumla, which will disappear quietly when it achieves its purpose of polarization. This time round, there is deadly intent to ensure there is communal mobilization on a large scale.”
Can that happen? Yes, the possibility does exist.
But there’s another much more useful, meaningful, and satisfactory way to think of India’s language turmoils, that derives directly from the age-old Upanishadic wisdom of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.
As the wonderful author, translator, and academic Rita Kothari wrote in Indian Express earlier this week, “The frequent move to be swadeshi and have an indigenous national language has been based upon a videshi (foreign) idea of nationalism in which nations cannot be imagined without a national language.”
Kothari clarifies with great insight: “There is very little resistance to bolchaal ki (colloquial) Hindi, especially when made out of necessity and not inherent imperialism. Left to their own resources, the people of India manage to communicate across linguistic divides. It is when they are besieged that they ferociously proclaim the superiority of their languages.”
Thus, the mis-step is not in what Shah actually said, because “his point of view [is] he has advanced what seems to him a more flexible approach, which is that Hindi needs to take words from “local” languages so that it is not set up against “mother tongues.” This is also a move to diffuse the fear of an incomprehensible and turgid sarkari Hindi which did a historic disservice to the language.”
“The point” says Kothari, “is not about Hindi as a language, but Hindi and its state-sanctioned register as symbols of who gets to define the nation and its terms today. India has a unique history of being a nation without a national language, a position not of lack or absence, but of a different model. The rest of the world stands to learn from this model; we don’t need to imitate the one-language-one-nation model.”
Vivek Menezes is a writer and photographer based in Goa, India.