Hindi has to become more like English — and the BJP: It has to adapt and adopt in order to spread
There is no doubt that Hindi is a great unifier — no sooner does someone assert its primacy (even if just a film star) that speakers of other Indian languages promptly get together and denounce its hubris. Even English, the newest entrant into India’s linguistic club, does not evoke the same degree of united opposition that even the merest mention of the possible primacy of Hindi does. That, surely, is an achievement that Hindi should be proud of.
The spat between Ajay Devgn and Kiccha Sudeep was not really about a national language (or lack thereof) but a battle of the silver screens where the supposed pre-eminence of (north India-dominated) Bollywood films was contested by a ‘Sandalwood’ (Karnataka) star on behalf of all south Indian cinematic ‘woods’. But since Devgn unwisely used Hindi as a metaphor for Bollywood, it inevitably became a lightning rod for all Hindi-hating elements.
In a way, Hindi is reminiscent of the BJP after the 1996 elections: it got the largest number of seats — 161 — but could not get the support of enough other parties to reach the magic number of 273 to form a government. But we all know how that ended, right? A clutch of smaller parties led by the Janata Dal and supported by the Congress with its 140 seats, ganged up to form the short-lived United Front government. But the BJP came to power in two years.
Opposition to Hindi seems destined to go the same way. The isolation of the BJP back in 1996 is hard to imagine now as it learnt a hard lesson and adapted. The same may be said about Hindi a few decades from now. As per the 2011 Census, 520 million people considered Hindi their mother tongue, with Bengali coming in a distant second at 97 million, and Marathi next at 83 million people. More than a decade later, those numbers have risen.
Even so, the other languages tend to gang up against it, promoting their primacy as if accepting Hindi will destroy their linguistic legacies. But what if any of these others assert that their language should be the national alternative instead? Would their fellow Hindi-haters be more willing to agree? Why is it that even now there are higher chances of all of them accepting a relative newcomer — English — rather than settling for an indigenous Indian one?
The never-Hindi brigade can justifiably point to the history of Russian in the Soviet Union to bolster their dissent. After all, Lenin was against any single national language, so the USSR did not initially have one. In fact, scripts were developed for smaller languages within the Soviet empire. But realpolitik kicked in and the Communists eventually ensured that Russian became the language of governance, which was resented in varying degrees.
So after the breakup of USSR, there is an almost comical situation wherein Russian is the common language between two warring former Soviet republics and of the five that still retain Russian as an official language, four are in Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; the fifth is Belarus. Given that Russian speakers are now seen as fifth columnists in several former Soviet states, Lenin may have been right after all.
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But the US presents a different picture. Now an avowedly English-speaking country, it has had deep links with other linguistic entities not that long ago. California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico were part of Mexico till the mid-1800s; southern US had French ties till the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and Germans immigrated there since the 17th century of whom the ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ (a corruption of ‘Deitsch’ or German) are the most well-known.
Living up to its ‘melting pot’ allusion, people came to the US from all over Europe speaking their own languages but ended up learning English. Africans forcibly brought there as slaves had no choice but to abandon their native languages and speak English too. Only 200 years after US independence is Spanish rising there now — over 230 per cent between 1980 and 2013. But imagine if this land of immigrants did not have a ‘national’ language at the outset!
Indeed, the reason for the success of English as a lingua franca is simple: it is not at all fussy or snobbish about borrowing words and is adaptable to a myriad of different accents. Practically every language in the world has contributed a word or two to the English lexicon. And regional accents from Scottish and Irish to those farther afield from Australian to West and East African to the Caribbean to Singaporean testify to English’s infinite variety.
The English themselves insist that what is now spoken across the Atlantic is American, not English so the regional variations it has spawned in India is not surprising and remain a perennial source of amusement. Hinglish, Bonglish, Punjlish, Tamlish and many more ‘dialects’ prove that our mother tongues are impossible to colonise totally. And our ‘apnaoing’ English to suit our idioms and accents indicates the way ahead for Hindi too.
Hindi can only move forward from being the isolated BJP of 1996 to becoming the BJP of 1998 and then 2014 (gaining widening acceptance) by being willing to adopt (co-opt?) and adapt without losing sight of its basic goal — Hinditva. While spoken Hindi with its roots in Sanskrit has fair amounts of borrowed words from Persian and Urdu, it needs to reach out to other Indian languages and form alliances by borrowing and adopting words.
That Hindi has not done this so far is baffling as it was mandated in Article 351 of the Constitution of India — Directive for development of the Hindi language: It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.
Also, look at how the post-1998 (and post-2014) expansive BJP expanded in north-eastern India. The ‘Hindi heartland’ party now has governments in seven out of eight states there, thanks to a policy of adopt and adapt. Hindi should take the cue. It needs to encourage and accept Bongdi, Axomdi, Oridi, Tamdi, Malayadi, Teludi, Kanndi, Gujdi and Mardi — adaptations in all Indian languages and dialects, in fact, just as English has done, willy-nilly.
Not every non-native Hindi speaker can enunciate as well as, say, our Telugu Vice President Venkaiah Naidu but instead of sniggering at, say, the fluent Bongdi of Bengal’s Didi, Hindi must appreciate her confidence and willingness to articulate in that language in the first place. Bengalis should also be encouraged to emulate her, rather than aspire to the Hindi proficiency and purity of pronunciation of Sharmila Tagore or Shreya Ghoshal.
The same should be done for any non-native Hindi speakers who take the plunge, regardless of their accent or grammar. Young Indians from across the country are already assimilating when they participate in televised singing contests choosing hit songs from Hindi films. Linguistic politics should also not stand in the way of the natural progression of Hindi as a common language — besides, if not instead of, English initially — via these cultural interfaces.
Being prissy about purity is a sure-fire way to fail in these days of cross-cultural currents and fusion. Therefore, Hindi needs to become more inclusive and adaptive as English is and as the BJP has learnt to be in order to achieve its 303 seats in 2019 if it wants to fulfil its Hinditva agenda some day. Then both Devgn and Sudeep would have no problem with marketing their ‘wood’ films in each other’s territories, dubbed or otherwise!
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed are personal.
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