Sanjaya Baru | The politics of language: India’s unity in diversity

No other institution has played a bigger role in the popularisation of Hindi across the country than the much-maligned Bollywood cinema. When crowds rushed into cinema halls in Madurai and Kolkata, and in Vijayawada and Vadodara, to watch Rajesh Khanna romance Hema Malini, they voluntarily learnt the language in which this Punjabi matinee idol was wooing a Tam Bram beauty. No, it is not the Hindi Prachar Sabha that popularised Hindi across India, it is popular cinema that did it.

The same goes for dress. The Punjabi salwar kurta is ubiquitous in the villages of southern India because young women sought easy to wear clothes, and not because the home minister of India wanted them to.

Consider food habits. Delhi’s restaurants are full of people demanding dosa, idly and vada, while paneer has entered the cuisine of non-milk consuming Kerala households. Food, clothing and language have a way of finding their place in people’s minds and hearts without officious governmental bodies pontificating from their fancy pulpits.

Union home minister Amit Shah should relax. So too should all the Hindi-Hindu outfits that his political party members inhabit.

In response to the recent Hindi enthusiasm emanating out of New Delhi, various political leaders across the non-Hindi regions have drawn attention to the fact that Hindi is in fact not the mother tongue of a large majority of Indians, including those who may identify Hindi as their mother tongue in official surveys, shying away from mentioning Bhojpuri or Maithili. Yet, more and more Indians are learning to speak, even read and write Hindi. The growing use of Hindi is a function of a variety of social, cultural and economic factors that have little to do with the activities of the busybodies of the Official Language Committees.

On the other hand, forcing the use of Hindi in non-Hindi regions by the Central government and Central public sector enterprises, including the nationalised banks, is causing avoidable resentment. I was recently at a nationalised bank branch in Hyderabad where all the forms to be filled were in Hindi, using terms that even the bank clerk could not explain. When I asked for a form in English, I was told that despite repeated reminders to their headquarters, only Hindi forms were being supplied.

The bank manager, the teller and I were all unhappy Hindi-speakers.

At a New Delhi conference a few years back, a Hindi enthusiast began speaking in Hindi and devoted the first few minutes of her speech to how we English-speakers at the conference had no contact with India’s ground realities and how she was in touch with the heart and soul of the nation because she spoke in the language of the people. When it came to my turn to speak, I chose to speak in Telugu. Initially the audience was nonplussed and confused. Slowly my message dawned upon them and they began to clap. I persisted in my Telugu speech and asked the Hindi enthusiast if she understood what I had said. New Delhi is a stage upon which many fancy people dance and sing and pretend to govern.

In the mid-1990s, the late Mulayam Singh Yadav staged a dharna outside the premises of the Union Public Service Commission demanding that English be dropped from all UPSC examinations and that Hindi be made compulsory. His own son was to later study in Australia. In response to Mulayam’s protest I wrote an editorial comment in a national daily saying that English was in fact just another Indian language because lakhs of Indians do legitimately declare it as their mother tongue.

Why make any language compulsory, I argued, let every candidate show proficiency in at least two languages to qualify.

My editorial attracted a lot of support and criticism. For days together we were flooded by letters to the editor till we finally declared the subject closed. Language ignites passion. Which is why, following the violent anti-Hindi agitations of the 1960s, no government has sought to impose any one language. The BJP’s effort today to once again try and impose Hindi, relentlessly pushing its use in Union government offices and organisations, is bound to boomerang.

If Hindi enthusiasts are hurting the cause of their language, so are other such language enthusiasts in other parts of the country. The obsession with Tamil all over Tamil Nadu has already hurt the economic interests of that state. Compared to the linguistic cosmopolitanism of all other southern states, which are increasingly bilingual and trilingual -- mother tongue and Hindi/English -- Tamil Nadu is becoming increasingly unilingual. Tamil Nadu chief minister Stalin has become as much of a Tamil chauvinist as the Hindi chauvinists of the BJP.

Bilingual states such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Punjab have better economic opportunities to offer for their own citizens as well as to Hindi-speaking north Indians. The lack of employment opportunities in unilingual Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh is forcing people from there to migrate to the Deccan where they can find work because they can communicate in their language with bilingual southerners.

Globally too, the record shows that bilingualism is increasingly the norm.

Societies that opt for a one-language policy are paying the price for their obsession.

Most of Europe, Latin America, Africa and East and Southeast Asia is or on the way to being bilingual.

The policy of the Union government should be to promote bilingualism as well, if not a three-language policy. This means all bank forms should be in Hindi and the local language or in Hindi, English and the local language. This also means that Hindi-speaking regions actively promote the learning of a second language, which could be English or another Indian language.

There is a lesson for today’s political leaders to learn from the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly on the language issue. In fact, no other subject generated as much heat and took as much time as the discussion on the language issue. If the great leaders of the national movement and members of the Constituent Assembly could not satisfy all, and opted for compromise, who are these lesser mortals of today to impose their will on over a billion people.