Though I was born in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, I grew up abroad and was fluent in English before I was in Hindi. Our local dialect, vajjika, felt foreign to me though I understood my elder relatives when they spoke it with one another. As a young adult, I met an Assamese who eventually married me. We spoke in English; I spoke Hindi with my relatives and she spoke Assamese with hers.
She and our three children in their early years spoke to one another in Assamese (making me think there was a conspiracy afoot because they all spoke very fast, and in cryptic fragments) though they also became proficient in Hindi since we lived in Delhi. (When we lived in Chennai for four years, the kids also picked up enough Tamil to boss the paavam autorickshaw drivers.)
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A year or two ago, a cousin’s wife who often phones with my spouse, mentioned to the latter that her Hindi had improved. I was incensed. First, I wanted to roar, my wife can speak in three languages, whereas my relatives are all proficient in a grand total of one: Hindi. They see no shame in this.
I, therefore, sympathise with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin when he accuses the Central government, run by the north Indian regional party otherwise known as the BJP, of trying to impose Hindi on the non-Hindi speaking States by linking certain funds—passed by Parliament—to the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP, 2020), of which one objectionable aspect is the requirement of a three-language curriculum. The controversy has snowballed into ugly exchanges with BJP members whose unparliamentary words had to be expunged from the record.
One must sympathise, then, with Stalin when he says that the “North Education Policy”, as he calls the NEP, is a trojan horse for “Hindi imperialism”. No doubt the RSS and the BJP want to impose Hindi up and down the country; but why, you may ask. Their ideology has always had as its foundation the erasure of diversity.
The Sangh Parivar feels that the nation cannot become powerful and fulfil its destiny as a world leader (though US President Trump and the other two “big powers” may have something to say about that) unless it imposes uniformity in India (and they also have a fetish for uniforms, incidentally). To this end, diversity undermines unity. This is why the BJP and RSS want a linguistic unity: and Hindi, above all.
When I moved to Chennai for work in 2007, I did not begrudge the fact that Tamils seemed not to know Hindi. I was impressed by their pride in their script. We even went out to see two Tamil films, and I can say that our enjoyment of Mani Ratnam’s visual vocabulary was enhanced by not knowing the details of the dialogue in Raavanan. And by the time we arrived at its climax, Rajinikanth’s Enthiran was a headache in any language.
My late father came to Vellore in the late 1950s for a lung operation—he had come down with tuberculosis in medical college—and he related how he asked a vendor at the railway station, in Hindi, for the prices; the vendor gesticulated that he did not know Hindi. My frustrated father mildly abused the vendor, who retorted (to my father’s surprise and embarrassment), “Why do you give abuse?” in Hindi.
In Chennai, we had a driver with whom we communicated in English. Once I went to the collectorate and I went in one gate and came out another. As I walked to the car from behind, I heard the driver listening to the radio–to the cricket commentary in Hindi. “You know Hindi?” I asked, surprised. “Just to follow commentary, sir,” he replied. People might know a smattering, but no one likes to be forced.
Need for NEP
My wife did not need NEP to know three languages. I, like most of my relatives, learned a bit of Sanskrit in school, but none of us knows much beyond “tathasthu” (though I really enjoyed G. V. Iyer’s Adi Shankaracharya, which I have seen more than twice). English was also taught in Bihar’s school but the standards have fallen since the time of my maternal grandfather, the late JKP Verma, who went from a village in the early 1900s to the local courts thanks to his proficiency in English. Thanks to colonial magistrates who came to rely on him as most lawyers had to speak to (and tutor) their clients in vajjika, he eventually became north Bihar’s pre-eminent criminal lawyer.
Vajjika could have flourished and been preserved for its cultural heritage. It languishes, however. One reason is that speakers of Maithili, a neighbouring north Bihar language, wanted the language of instruction in schools to be in their dialect and not in vajjika; naturally, the latter’s speakers opted for Hindi in the curriculum, rather than suffer a rival.
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As a result Hindi, which was not a natural language, has been forced upon generations of Biharis (even if they don’t want to admit it). It is a descendant of Khari Boli and competed with Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and other dialects, as Stalin pointed out in a tweet last month. (When I did a course in my MA in poetry, it was in Braj Bhasha; not Hindi.)
Modern Hindi becomes more bureaucratic and unpoetic with each passing day. Instead of using commonly known English for uncommon words, its proponents seek out bizarre relics or invent new tongue twisters. Often words are stolen from Sanskrit, in the way that Pakistanis keep mixing Arabic into their Urdu. Yes, right-wingers in our two nations countries ape each other; or to put it pithily, are apes.
To insist that other people from proud cultures speak in Hindi is like Guptaji from Uttar Pradesh visiting Thailand and waving his dirty underwear from a boat off the Pattaya coast. No one should be forced to learn anything. When it comes to Tamil or other non-Hindi languages, I am all for DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.
