Right now, you are reading in a language that feels as Indian as the coffee you are sipping. Vernacular sanyasin Uma Bharti will not approve. Last week, she held forth that English is a mental illness. “It is very sad and shameful that we have not freed ourselves from the slavery of English 68 years after British left India,” she said at a meeting of a Hindi Committee. Bad idea.
At a time when the BJP is trying hard to junk its cowbelt party tag, Bharti’s epiphany couldn’t have come at a worse time. In non-BJP states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Odisha, regional pride has the last word. But then, Hindi is not the language of India. Not of the Kashmiris, Gujaratis, Bengalis, Oriyas, Marathis, Malayalis, Telugus, Kannadigas or Tamils. Most in the Northeast hardly speak it.
The Constitution does say the official language of India is Hindi, but it has also given state governments the option to function in the language of their choice. A court decision in January 2015 clearly stated that there in no suggestion in the Constitution that Hindi is India’s national language. Hear South India clapping?
In the current cultural subtext, Hindi’s national carrier in the non-cowbelt is Bollywood. In urban India, vernacular Hindi has become Hinglish—the bastardised patois of neo-nationalism. ‘Lock kiya jaaye’, is identified with Amitabh Bachchan, himself the son of a venerated Hindi poet. ‘Love jihad’ is a mongrel mix of English and Arabic. ‘Tandoori chicken’, a rage in South India, is a Punjabi-Hindi derivative. Official Hindi, which purists extol, is not the vernacular spoken in India at all. The official version mostly twists the tongue and will bemuse even the residents of the Hindi heartland. Going by the rules of Internet satire, ask a Mythili Brahmin watching IPL on his Sony TV how many runs Virat Kohli scored in the ‘Gol guttam lakad battam de danadan pratiyogita’ against Pakistan, and see his jaw drop. I kid you not, the translation is how many runs did Kohli score in cricket? You wear a ‘kanth langoti’ (tie) with a suit. At Wimbledon, Leander Paes plays ‘Harit ghaas par le tada tad, de tada tad’ (lawn tennis). The train has stopped at the ‘Bhabhka adda’ (railway station). Maybe one should consult the... er... Oxford shabdkosh.
Hindi is, of course, an undeniably powerful voice, with great literary and cultural wattage. But language politics abuses nationalism. As an internationally ascendant cultural and economic power, India cannot be caught in a linguistic time warp. It is a matter of national pride that Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi spoke in Hindi at the United Nations to assert India’s singular identity. But neither rejects English. Besides, nobody in England today will understand the English the British brought to India. Stop an Etonian in Bond Street and quote Chaucer, “A long castel with walles white/Be Seynt Johan, on a ryche hil” and he will in fright think you are a suicide bomber speaking in Arabic and call the cops.
India’s regional languages are a sign of its multicultural pride. Hindi is just one of them. And English is the mark of the global Indian —the IT professionals, scientists, doctors and chefs who make the country a power to reckon with. So, kya problem hai?