6 min readMar 4, 2025 12:06 PM IST
First published on: Mar 4, 2025 at 06:55 AM IST
I am both sad and outraged by the diatribes against Hindi by those who speak in Indian English and shout against “Hindi imposition”. They include many educated Indians from the Hindi heartland. This is a cop-out. The English used here, one can see, has segued smoothly from being the language of India’s former colonial masters to being the code that identifies the UN-certified thought leaders in India, from science to the arts, philosophy to warfare.
India before the 20th century was a deeply multilingual nation. Each region had a language, each language had its own tradition of oral literature and area dialects that fed into the pool. And then there was a particularly fractious history of Hindi vs Urdu. For long, Hindi, Hindvi or Hindustani in spoken form had been the people’s language in the area.
Controversy and bitterness first began to be crystallised after the Bhakha Munshis appointed by the British carved out two languages from Hindustani. One was Hindi written in Devanagari (or Nagari for short) script borrowed from Sankrit. The other was Urdu, in a slightly indigenised version of the Persian script. Hindi and Urdu thereafter were propagated through school books and governmental correspondence as the languages of Hindus and Muslims, in that order.
The term bhasha that the anti-Hindi lobbyists are using freely to underscore its Hindu roots (backed perhaps unknowingly by the venerable JLF) is baffling. Bhasha or bhakha has always been the term for an inclusive mélange of dialects spoken in the northern plains: Braj, Awadhi, Kauravi, Maithili, Bhojpuri et al. Around the 13th century, this prototype of Hindi had begun trickling slowly down south, thanks to a two-way movement that Ramanand introduced the north to (“Bhakti Dravid upji laaye Ramanand”). No one saw it as an “imposition” either in the north or the south.
Since then, there was a regular flow of pilgrims and sadhus chanting and singing the poems of the northern Bhakti poets. Classical musicians singing the kritis (output) of a hundred poets and vaggeyakaras, the Deccani poets, gave it more muscle and as Mumbai became the capital of visual entertainment, this hybridised Hindi entered Bollywood and TV. Like Elizabethan English the Hindi-Urdu mix in films like Mughal-e-Azam and Garam Hawa has always been more of a liquid bubbling with steam, fumes and a certain fury against a system deemed divisive and supremacist.
The real difference between this easy camaraderie of the early Independence years when my generation in the north studied in the Hindi medium, and our present diglossia is that today English enters the minds of Indian children before they have finished setting down their first language. So they end up not with a mother tongue learnt at home and a language learnt simultaneously in school, but a single competence that is less optimised for picking up local lore and streetsmart phraseology and more suited for the ultimate aim — a well paid job. It is a short route for the rich, a long one for the poor. It is this diglossia that is killing local dialects, most of which had no script (except Kaithi and Maithili, now mostly dead in those areas).
The Hindi that the government today wishes to crown as the national language is a different kettle of fish. It is firmly moored to a Sanskrit with all its casteist baggage intact. And its highly associational vocabulary is being used to purge thousands of words it assimilated through the centuries from dialects, Islamic and European languages to create the ultimate template for a shuddh, sanitised Hindi.
It is ironic that while daggers are being drawn on both sides over the language issue ever since the BJP reignited it, the young in the Hindi belt are abandoning Hindi en masse for English. The parents, including most vociferous supporters of the BJP leadership and Hindi, when it comes to their own children, will root for an English medium education in relatively expensive private schools.
Critics of Hindi must talk more to Hindi writers, journalists and educationists. They will then begin to see that whatever is being made to look real and permanent today was not there yesterday and will be gone tomorrow. But India is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest diglossic speaker of English where the young are fast being reduced to a mob of cultural ignorants on social media. Many simply throw away books and talk about the Hindu faith as though they are Shankaracharyas.
It’s a pity today that most of our incisive historians, social scientists, philologists and feminists continue to write their well researched books exclusively in English. And those who are from the non-Hindi speaking areas, while cursing Hindi imposition, will not introspect honestly as to why they have failed to write their own books in their native Bangla, Tamil, Kannada or Oriya.
As for literary historians of Hindi and Urdu, they too have remained trapped in writing angry competing historical narratives for Hindi and Urdu. A calm, composite, comprehensive history of Indian literature that spans both Hindi and Urdu as peoples’ languages, differing in little but in scripts, has yet to be written.
How can the regressive and divisive policies we thought we had buried come back to haunt us and threaten to be our future? The answer lies in one of the cruellest questions Krishna asks Gandhari, as she curses him for causing the death of her sons. “Cheernam charasi Kshatriye?” Why wail, O brave Kshatriya Queen, over that which your own arrogant and deliberate myopia had pre-ordained?
The writer is former chairperson, Prasar Bharati
It's a pity today that most of our incisive historians, social scientists, philologists and feminists continue to write their well researched books exclusively in English. 
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