The new union government of the Indian union seems hell bent on Hindifying the government and its activities. From directives to bureaucrats to polish their Hindi skills to prioritising Hindi as the social-media language of the Home Ministry, it has been quite an eventful start for the new government, as far as its Hindi policy is concerned.
The original party of the upper Gangetic plan bazaar class is back at doing what Hindiwallahs used to do regularly before Tamils showed them some serious spine. The Union government’s insistence of Hindi promotion by any means necessary and other unnecessary means suggests that it is at its mischievous game once again. Anxious Englishwallahs are shedding crocodile’s tears, hiding behind the vernacular majority, who they detest otherwise.
At this juncture, one must again question the relationship between people, power, and language in a multi-national state like the Indian union. And if that state wants to be humane and representative, what should its language policy look like? Can one be “fully Indian” without any knowledge of Hindi and/or English (It is sad that some brown people in the Indian union who are most comfortable in English are increasingly defining what it means to be brown in this part of the world, but that is a sadness I will explore some other time)?
How does one fight this “rajbhasha” language monster that haunts the majority? On the question of certain myths of “full Indianness” and how to go about dealing with it, we need to turn to Gujarat, the state that has produced the most recent prime-minister. Apart from Jinnahbhai, the other famous Gujarati was Mohandas Gandhi. His method of sticking to truth or satyagraha is part of anti-British struggle folklore. That method has present day relevance too. This first requires finding out the truth and then asserting one’s rights in the face of marginalisation.
In 2010, the Gujarat High Court let people know the obvious – Hindi is not the national language of the Indian union. Hindi is the mother-tongue of only a quarter of the population, while the staggering majority speak Sindhi, Bangla, Tamil, Kannada, Konkani, Santhali, etc, as well as languages like Maithili, Marwari, Mewari, etc which “census Hindi” enumerators cunningly classify as “Hindi” to give a false impression of Hindi’s numerical might.
Certain rootless urban classes of people born in non-Hindi/English homes earn cosmopolitan brownie points by their “inclusiveness,” which basically means shunning their mother-tongues and birth-culture. The Indian union government is only too happy to promote this brand of “Indianness” where Hindi/English is the “mainstream” and the rest is pejoratively “regional” (that Tamil is not a “national” language is an artifact of the British-forged administrative unity of the subcontinent). This is why it increasingly has the gall to communicate to non-Hindi people in Hindi.
Fortunately, there are still many such people in the subcontinent who do not think that their primary goal in life is to make Hindi and English speakers feel “at home” everywhere by switching from their mother tongue. They also assert the right of being spoken to in their home state in the language of the state.
Again in 2010, villagers in the Junagadh area of Gujarat challenged the land acquisition made by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). The NHAI had issued a notification for acquisition in Hindi. The villagers did not understand Hindi and hence they were not notified. The Gujarat High Court termed the notification and the land acquisition as null and void. While doing so, it also observed that for the villagers, the “Hindi language used in the notification is a foreign language.”
Guess what, Junadagh is not Delhi, Coimbatore is not Gurgaon, and the subcontinent has many linguistic nations (Punjab, Tamil Nadu, etc.) as foreign to each other as Nepal is to Tamil Nadu, cohabiting within a common administrative framework called the Indian union.
This term “foreign” is particularly painful for the Hindiwallas who never tire asserting English’s foreignness vis-à-vis Hindi indigeneity. By creating a Hindi versus English divide, they seek to obfuscate the greater divide of power versus powerlessness, in which English and Hindi are languages of power. The villagers of Junagadh have shown the way to challenge the language of the powerful at every step – every notification, every advertisement, every tele-caller, every public signage, every central policy that accords special status to Hindi and English.
In the Indian union, there is no majority language, but many minority languages. This false majoritarianism of Hindi is fuelled by public money, Bollywood, and a Hindi-nationalism-inspired yard-stick of “broadness” and “parochialism” that has been brain-washed into the affluent classes who live or migrate to Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore.
For peoples and languages to be treated equally, the first step is to break the pedestal that the Indian union has accorded to Hindi and English. Only then can we talk and live as equals. The language question is not merely a question of ethno-linguistic pride and autonomy, but fundamentally a question of livelihood, democracy, justice, dignity, and equal stakeholdership in a federal republic.
The Indian union has no heart near Delhi, nor is its soul near Varanasi. The sooner some people snap out of such self-important and self-serving delusions, the better. Otherwise, they must be prepared to listen to an old Hindi song from non-Hindi regions: “Mere angne mein tumhara kya kaam hai?” (What business do you have in my courtyard?).
All that the non-Hindi/English people want to say is: Speak to us in our languages, devolve power to states so that one doesn’t need to speak to a centre insistent of an exclusionary language policy. People with pasts much older than the Indian union or the lifetime of Hindi and English languages in the subcontinent, can manage their affairs perfectly.
In this republic, we must never forget which region’s revenue, minerals, and resources subsidise which regions and who needs whom. When these lessons are not heeded, they can take forms that people in the subcontinent know too well. The People’s Republic of Bangladesh is a prime example of what a linguistically marginalised people can do, when an imperial centre gives preferential treatment to certain languages and cultures. But if the assault is subtle, then the marginalised might actually see their oppression as liberation and the hold-outs are nut-cases. Any haughty central authority harbours such dreams. The people are left with nightmares.
