(Excerpted from Roshan Kishore’s article ‘How a Bihari lost his Mother Tongue’)
‘Much has been written on the pitfalls of forcing the use of Hindi as the national language on non-Hindi states. But what about the hegemonic project which is threatening to subsume the likes of Magadhi and Bhojpuri? Is this yet another aspect of the politics of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan, which is associated with the political right in India? A slight digression on the history of Hindi nationalism would be useful here.
‘Hindi Nationalism’, by Alok Rai, can be a good primer for those who want a grounding in the topic.
Orient BlackSwan’s Hindi Nationalism by Alok Rai, who has been a professor of English at the Allahabad and Delhi universities, can be a good primer for those without any grounding in the topic.
Rai happens to be the grandson of the legendary writer Munshi Premchand, who wrote in both Urdu and Hindi. The book gives a detailed account of how Hindi, as we know it today, gained dominance in India. Persian was the official script in India in the pre-British period. This acted as a natural disadvantage for the non-elite, especially Hindus, who did not know the script. It was only in 1900 that Sir Anthony MacDonnell, lieutenant governor of North-Western Provinces and Oudh, allowed Devanagari—the script in which Hindi is written—to be allowed in courts. Rai argues that two factors were behind the decision. They wanted the language of administration to be accessible to the common people. Also, the Muslim elite had played an important role in the 1857 mutiny. By ending the dominance of Persian in the British administration, their socio-economic position could be weakened. The Hindus who lost out for not knowing Persian had no reason to complain. What was settled by decree in the matter of script was not so easy when it came to language. The British wanted a standardized Hindi to be developed in India. Hindustani—an eclectic mix of Hindi and Urdu—was ill-suited for the job.
An anecdote in Rai’s book shows that the British quest for a standardized language predates 1857. The then government’s education department’s annual report of 1846-47 talks about the principal of Benares College, J.R. Ballantyne, admonishing the students for leaving “the task of formulating the national language in the hands of villagers". Ballantyne asks them to “get rid of the unprofitable diversity of provincial dialects" and create a standard literature. His remarks were a response to a student’s argument that they did not clearly understand what the Europeans meant by Hindi as “there are hundreds of dialects, all in our opinion equally entitled to the name".
Soon the question of language spilled into the domain of politics. Competing Hindu and Muslim elites wanted to purge their standardized languages of Persian and Sanskrit words. Herein began the communalization of Hindi and Urdu. Once this binary gained momentum, hundreds of dialects “which were entitled to Hindi" became collateral damage. Anybody who opposed this was branded a traitor. Rai cites Nathuram Godse’s final testimony, where he lists Gandhi’s opposition to Sanskritized Hindi as one of the reasons for killing him.
This history is extremely relevant today. Attempts and proclamations to impose Hindi are threatening to rekindle the fires of anti-Hindi agitations of the 1950s and 1960s.
There is not enough opposition to these sectarian ploys from within the cultural and intellectual world of Hindi. As a result, the entire Hindi-speaking population is being branded as language chauvinist.
This is not surprising in the context of the preceding discussion. The biggest victim of a monolithic Hindi project has been Hindi itself. Under the garb of building a mega narrative for nation and culture, our inherent diversity has been pushed to the margins. Rai quotes Hindi poet Sudama Pandey Dhoomil’s powerful articulation of this tragedy, which was written in the 1960s:
Tumhara yeh Tamil-dukh
Meri iss Bhojpuri peeda ka
bhai hai
Bhasha uss tikdami darinde ka kaur hai
(Your Tamil pain
Is brother to my Bhojpuri pain—
Language is merely a morsel for the deceitful beast...)
Of course, the problem is easier to discuss than solve. Within the Hindi academia, there is a polarized debate on whether advancing the cause of languages, such Bhojpuri and Magadhi, would weaken the status of Hindi itself. The hegemony of Hindi is useful when lobbying for more official patronage.
I, personally, am not sure whether including Magadhi in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution (Maithili was added in 2004) or opening a couple of university departments would address the problems which were discussed at the beginning of the piece. Can such policy changes solve the growing demographic alienation from the language?
Will somebody make a Bhojpuri or Magadhi film which would be screened in a south Delhi multiplex in the next five years? Can the Hindi-belt elite rise above caste politics to promote a secular, yet vernacular, popular culture? What does Hindi-speaking India stand to lose if this diversity is allowed to erode with time? Is our political class worried about it?
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