Sanjaya Baru
OFTEN DISPARAGED BY INTELLECTUALS, no institution has played a bigger role in the popularisation of Hindi across the country than Bollywood cinema. When crowds throng cinema halls in Madurai and Kolkata, Vijayawada and Vadodara to watch Rajesh Khanna romance Hema Malini, they voluntarily learnt the language in which this Punjabi matinee idol was wooing a Tambrahm beauty. No, it is not the Hindi Prachar Sabha that popularised Hindi. It is popular cinema that did it.
Same goes for couture. The Punjabi salwar kurta is ubiquitous in rural south India because young women prefer easy-to-wear clothing, not because the home minister of India wanted them to. Ditto for cuisine. Delhi’s restaurants are full of people demanding dosa, while paneer has entered the cuisine of non-milk consuming Kerala households.
Food, clothing and language are uniting people countrywide without officious diktats from elevated pulpits. Union home minister Amit Shah should relax. So too should all militant Hindi-Hindu organisations that are insistent upon legislating Hindi as India’s national language.
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In response to a recent Hindi promotion order emanating from New Delhi, several political leaders across non-Hindi speaking states have highlighted the reality that Hindi is not the dominant language of the majority of Indians, since many who may profess Hindi as their mother tongue in census surveys, speak Bhojpuri or Mythili. Yet, a rising number of Indians are learning to speak and even read and write Hindi. Incremental usage of Hindi is the outcome of several social, cultural and economic phenomena which have little to do with the activities of busybodies of the Official Language Committee.
On the other hand, imposition of Hindi upon non- Hindi states by the Central government and Central public sector enterprises, including nationalised banks, is causing needless resentment. I was recently at a nationalised bank branch in Hyderabad where all forms were required to be completed in Hindi, using terms that even the bank clerk couldn’t explain. When I asked for an English language form, I was told that despite repeated reminders to head office, only Hindi forms were supplied. The bank manager, teller and I were all forced to transact in Hindi.
I also recall a New Delhi conference a few years ago at which a Hindi-enthusiast began speaking in Hindi and devoted the first few minutes of her speech criticising English-speakers at the conference for having no contact with India’s ground realities, whereas she was in touch with the heart and soul of the nation because she spoke the language of the people. When it was my turn to speak, I addressed the conclave in Telugu. Initially, the audience was nonplussed and confused, but as my message dawned upon them and they began to applaud. I persisted with my speech in Telugu and asked the nonplussed Hindi enthusiast if she understood what I had said. New Delhi is a stage on which many fancy people dance and sing, pretending to govern.
However if Hindi enthusiasts are hurting the cause of their language, so are language enthusiasts in other parts of the country. The obsession with Tamil in Tamil Nadu has already damaged the economy of the state. Compared with the linguistic cosmopolitanism of other southern states, which are increasingly bilingual and trilingual — mother tongue, Hindi and English — Tamil Nadu is becoming increasingly unilingual. Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin has become as much a Tamil chauvinist as Hindi champions of the BJP.
Bilingual states like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana and Punjab have better economic opportunities to offer for their own residents and Hindi-speaking north Indians. The lack of employment opportunities in unilingual Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is forcing people 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 becoming normative. Countries opting for one language policy are paying a heavy price for their obsession. Most of Europe, Latin America, Africa and East and South-east Asia is, or on the way to bilingualism.
In the interests of national unity and improving the ease of doing business, the Union government should promote the three language policy. This means, all bank forms should be in Hindi, state language and English. This also means that Hindi speaking states should actively promote the learning of a second language, preferably English or another Indian language.
Contemporary political leaders should learn from the debates in the Constituent Assembly which drafted the Constitution of India. In fact, no subject generated as much heat and took as much time as debates on the national language issue. If the great leaders of the freedom movement and members of the Constituent Assembly could not satisfy all and settled for compromise, why should contemporary lesser mortals attempt to impose their will on 1.4 billion Indians?
(Sanjaya Baru is former media advisor to the prime minister and author of The Accidental Prime Minister)
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