Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu recently waded into the language row, stating that former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, a scholar, knew 17 languages. Without mentioning any of the states that have been alleging Hindi imposition by the Centre, Naidu said on July 15 in Delhi, “Now we are asking — why should we learn Hindi?”
The governments of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala have in the past called the three-language formula proposed by the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020, a covert move to impose Hindi on the southern states. They allege that the Centre’s Hindi push goes against the idea of a federal polity.
While the debate goes on, with the southern states often pitted as anti-Hindi, away from the noise of political debates, the language and its speakers have had a long history in the region.
Scholars say Hindi actively began to make its presence felt in the South around the Independence movement, with Mahatma Gandhi establishing the first Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha in Madras (now Chennai) in 1918. The objective was to teach Hindi to a non-Hindi-speaking populace as a link language for the freedom movement.
“Learning Hindi was one way of feeling that one is participating in the Indian national freedom movement,” says Prof J Atmaram of the University of Hyderabad’s Hindi Department.
In 1922, the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha conducted its first preliminary exam to test basic Hindi proficiency. The first undergraduate examination, Rashtrabhasha Visharad, was conducted in 1931. In the other southern states where the Sabha had its regional centres — Hyderabad, Vijayawada, Kochi and Gulbarga — Hindi learning gained in popularity. “For example, Andhra Pradesh acted as a corridor between Hindi and other southern languages. The state welcomed Hindi learning, be it in Hyderabad or Vijayawada,” says Atmaram.
In Karnataka and Kerala too, there wasn’t much opposition to Hindi. “Tucked away in Ernakulam south stands the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, active since the 1930s,” he said.
Hindi grew more organically with the advent of mass media — radio and TV. “At radio stations in Madras and Trichy, Hindi programming, along with regional languages, continued in independent India,” said Atmaram.
By the 1970s, Doordarshan had reached homes in the South with its Satellite Instruction Television Experiment (SITE). The experiment, which began in 1975, focused on Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, where instructional programming with shows dedicated to agriculture and education would have one visual component and two language components. For instance, a person in Andhra watching one of these programmes could opt to do so in Telugu. “But while instructional programming had a language option, mass media programming, including news and entertainment which were aired through SITE, were mainly in Hindi,” says Prof B P Sanjay, who worked on SITE and was former director of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.
The popularity of Doordarshan’s blockbuster TV shows — Ramayana, Mahabharata, Chitrahaar, etc — meant that while few homes spoke Hindi, the language wafted uninterrupted into their homes and hearts. In the 1970s and ’80s, another phenomenon contributed to the spread of Hindi — magazines published in Hindi. For instance, Dakshinanchal Hindi Samiti translated Bhakti literature into southern languages and vice versa.
“Also, there were famous Hindi language magazines, Kalpna and Golconda Darpan, which were being published from Hyderabad. These magazines were popular even in the North,” says Atmaram.
These magazines gave writing in Hindi a push. The focus was on schooling students in Hindi and the NEP of 1968 paved the way with its recommendation of a three-language policy which foregrounded Hindi and English along with the regional languages. Except for Tamil Nadu, which followed the two-language (English and Tamil) policy in government- and aided-schools, all other southern Indian states had adopted the three-language policy.
In recent times, with migration, the language and its dialects spread faster. In certain Kerala districts, there are bus boards displayed in Hindi to cater to migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.
Operating out of Erode’s Periyar Nagar — a neighbourhood named after Tamil Nadu’s social reformer E V Ramasamy, who spearheaded the anti-Hindi agitations of the1930s — is the Tamil Nadu Hindi Prachara Sabha, an NGO run by M Krishnamurthy, 60, which conducts spoken Hindi classes. “In Tamil Nadu, no one will stop you from teaching or learning Hindi. We have been running the institution from 2009 onwards,” he said.
His institution caters not just to school students and civil service aspirants but also to Erode’s turmeric traders. “They need to converse in Hindi for their business interests and we help them,” he says.
The writer is Assistant Editor, The Indian Express
In 1918, Mahatma Gandhi (left) estabalished the first Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha in Madras in 1918 
Share
