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<h1 class="">Indian Union government’s official language policy flawed</h1>
<span class="">— By <span class=""><span class="">Garga Chatterjee</span></span> | Jul 09, 2015 12:04 am </span><br>
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<p style="text-align:justify">Hindi in Devanagari script is the
official language of the Indian Union government and some state
governments. It derives its primacy from numbers. According to the 2001
census, 41.03 per cent of the population was Hindi speakers. However,
the census definition of Hindi is extremely wide and people are counted
as Hindi speakers even if they don’t call their language “Hindi”. Census
Hindi includes Western Hindi (but not Urdu), Eastern Hindi,
non-Maithili Bihari languages (including Bhojpuri), Pahari and
Rajasthani languages – even if the speakers did not report their
language as “Hindi”. These numbers don’t do justice to the real
diversity of the languages that are counted as “Hindi”. Let me recount
an example.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">As a researcher in human vision, I am
associated with a project that brings congenitally blind children from
the interior villages of North India to Delhi. Many of them come from
the Gonda district of Uttar Pradesh. Since these children are blind from
birth, they remain almost exclusively at home, are poor without access
to radio or television, hence exposed mostly to their mother-tongue and
not the Hindi that operates in larger towns, schools and government
offices. When Delhi natives asked these children questions in Delhi-area
Hindi, they vaguely understood. Communication became smooth through
interpreters who in this case were relatives of the children. They had
visited big towns at long distances from their village homes and had
some exposure to Bollywood films. The blind children spoke Awadhi.
Awadhi speakers are at least 38 million strong, according to 2001 data
and are by themselves the 29th largest linguistic community in the
world. According to the census, these blind children and the Delhi
natives, both speak the same language – Hindi.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Among the top 10 census languages of
India, Hindi is the only one whose proportion of speakers in population
has increased every decade, for the last four decades. For all the
other nine languages, the proportion of speakers has gone down between
1971 and 2001. While this may signal the success of “Hindi”, the biggest
casualties have been those languages which are now classified as
“Hindi” but were not called “Hindi” even 150 years ago.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">While speakers of non-Hindi languages
like Tamil, Bangla, Kannada, etc have official language status in
various states with strong and widespread education infrastructure in
those languages, Awadhi, probably the single-largest linguistic
sub-group within census “Hindi”, has no such distinction. This is
unfortunate for a language that had, for centuries, produced some of the
most widely read and cherished works of literature that remain alive in
the popular culture of a wide tract of northern India. Ironically,
Awadhi comes closest to official recognition in the form of Fiji Hindi,
the language of the indentured labourers from the Awadhi heartland who
were shipped to Fiji before Awadhi and Hindi were conflated.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Bhojpuri, also classified as “Hindi”,
has fared slightly better than Awadhi in garnering infrastructure like
textbooks and TV channels for its charcha among its speakers. Even then,
that is miniscule compared to its size (about 40 million) and does not
do justice to its rich long tradition of producing literary works of the
highest grade. In Delhi-centric Indian imagination, speaking Bhojpuri
has become associated with being comical, rustic and backward. Outside
its native speakers, contemporary Bhojpuri music is largely known for
being the medium for sexually explicit songs for male consumption.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">With rural to urban migrations being on
the rise and schools being the primary sources of literacy, these two
forces synergistically serve as great transformers of the diverse world
of northern Indian languages into a more homogenous form of Hindi that
combines elements from Khariboli (the language around Delhi), Bollywood
and the highly Sanskritised official “Hindi” – a transformation that may
be happening slowly but surely. In the face of continuous official
Hindi imposition, the continued survival of Awadhi, Bhojpuri and other
people’s languages are a testament to their immense resilience and the
depth of their roots in their speaker’s lives and dreams.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">There is a method to the assault on
these languages and their slow destruction follows a well-known pattern.
At first, it starts with people’s languages being replaced by imposed
languages in education, official work and big money commerce. Then it
starts affecting all other aspects of life outside one’s home. And then
it invades homes and communities. The assaulted languages survive in
domestic space and then go on to become the language of older people and
of very intimate emotions. And then one day they are gone. With that an
alternative way of living and dreaming disappears. Destruction of a
language is a crime against the whole of humanity.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">The politics of jacking up the number of
Hindi speakers started in the colonial period when the Hindu-Hindustani
was in contest with Muslim-Hindustani. The call for distinctiveness
between these two variants reflected the political fissures of the time.
The need to recruit Bhojpuri and Awadhi speakers and many others like
speakers of Pahari resulted in the steamrolling of real distinctions at
the grassroots. Hindu high-caste domination of ‘Hindi’ language politics
ensured lower-caste rural voices being shut out when language
enumeration rules were set-up.</p>
<p style="text-align:justify">Simultaneously, there was a conscious
process of Sanskritising Khariboli by expunging it of Persian influences
and then imposing it on the large mass of passive recruits. The
resulting Hindi is what one reads in Government of India circulars and
Indian state radio. That ‘Hindi’ was so alien to Balraj Sahani, the
legendary Hindi-film actor, that he had once commented that radio
newsreaders typically said, “Ab Hindi mein khabar suneih” (Now hear the
news in Hindi), but what he heard was “Ab khabar mein ‘Hindi’ suneih”
(Now hear Hindi in the news). (IPA Service)</p>
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