Why Hindi draws flak

After stating that Hindi will help unite India being a common language, Home Minister Amit Shah got criticised and then clarified that he never stood for its imposition.

Between his two comments, there was immediate push-back from the southern states, including from his own party members in Karnataka.

While the nation conversed on it from many perspectives, ranging from cultural and language domination to north Indian hegemony, not much time was spent on some other underlying messages.

For language may be one issue, but the social reality of the society of its speakers is another matter. There are some unspoken codes encrypted into it that need thinking through. They might not make for pleasant reading.

Hindi and its many dialects are as beautiful as any other language on the planet. But Hindi cannot paper over the poor public image its native speakers have in the eyes of the rest of Indians.

The reaction against the home minister is a collective disagreement with what the Hindi belt stands for. A study conducted by the Bengaluru-based Public Affairs Centre in 2013 said that to a large extent, the north-Indian states have a poor social track record. Law and order, justice, gender equality, poverty alleviation and many other indices, paint an abysmal picture.

These may be true for other parts of India; but in large parts of the north, they appear to be the norm. For long, it’s been a truth universally acknowledged that the capital of India has a bad name in India and abroad. Because of the veracity of these realities over generations, it’s tough to make Hindi appealing to others.

Better leadership and quality of governance have led to southern states surging ahead and widening the gap in terms of per capita income and poverty between the south and north.

The non-northern regions have better schools, public services, and local governments. There are more north Indians working there than the reverse. Indeed, being linked as Hindi-speaking states of the north and getting conflated with the Hindi belt does injustice to Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, which have seen more progress as compared to the Hindi heartland.

This brings us to the biggest elephant in our political room: Uttar Pradesh. No state has such size, power and a say over what India does.

It is Hindi chauvinism’s seedbed. How does it fare in human development markers? The Giri Institute of Developmental Studies conducted a research, published in 2018, which said UP had the lowest quality of life, and its size is its problem.

Uttarakhand was carved out due to long agitation among the otherwise feuding hill tribes who united as their opponent was common. There are long-standing demands for statehood in water-scarce Bundelkhand, and in the sugarcane and industrial belts of Purvanchal and Harit Pradesh.

Given its hulk, Uttar Pradesh is keeping India backward, and denying its own people rights and services as citizens. If the state with the largest number of Hindi speakers is the bellwether of so much that has gone awry in India, how can its language become the national one? Any language cannot become an important one until it hasn’t earned public approval.

With his comments, the home minister may have eroded any toehold of legitimacy Hindi may have had with non-Hindi speaking peoples of India. He might have also played a cruel joke on Hindi’s first-born speakers. For they too aspire to move to English.

Powerful languages

Pride in one’s language is of no value until it rewards its communicators. This applies to every tongue in the world. If the home minister and our political ancestors were serious about Hindi or any other language, we would have seen an industry develop around it that sustained its speakers.

Spanish, Standard Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic and of course English, are some of the most powerful languages of the world, as to a great extent its speakers can get better chances to earn better livelihoods.

Not many Indian languages offer that opportunity. For all their cultural capital, what’s the future for an individual learning Sanskrit or Urdu in today’s India? Have these languages been empowered to generate sustainable employment? How does one make an ancient or old language germane in the current day?

Perhaps, it would be pragmatic and advisable for India to develop the means to master the English language and become its world champion. The economic and other incentives will be aplenty.

Our current political masters hail from India’s most trade savvy regions. If they plan it well, they can leverage the chance to make India the best English communicating country in the world, to great ends.

Language and culture are also a form of capital. The subcontinent’s many languages prospered due to state patronage. So, let’s leave Hindi aside for the moment. Can we focus on English?

(The writer is Associate Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts & Humanities)