Hindi - the Indian national language

Originally written Apr-2002 for Infosys Bulletin Board

In a world where the opinion of others doesn't amount to anything and where all of us will keep on believing what we have already decided to believe, I am also tempted to put in a small story of mine.

A small boy hailing from a northern province of Bihar and staying in Delhi is told by a friend that Madrasis hate Hindi. He wonders why? It is such a beautiful language. A thought occurs to him, "Probably Tamil is even more beautiful". But then he realizes that beauty of a language cannot be a criteria for ignoring other languages. He has learnt Hindi, though his mother tongue is Maithili, which is a very sweet language. He has learnt English. There is a beauty in all of this, and he does not see a reason for beauty to cause a conflict. So there must be some other reason.

He goes to his native place for summer holidays. And he comes across an interesting scenario. He is told that Maithili is a language, it has its own script (tirhut) and its own grammar and its own ancient literature, but due to certain political pressures, the official line is that Maithili is a dialect of Hindi. He is shocked. How can a language be affected by political pressures? What does it cost anyone to classify Maithili also as a language? Its a matter of classification for people who are not interested, and a matter of joy for people who are. At this stage, the boy obviously does not understand politics at all.

As he grows up, he learns a bit more about politics. For a period, he just believes politics is something for politicians and that its just something bad thrust upon good, nice, common people. That belief does not last, of course. The political issues are on the whole the issues of people. Its people who believe in those issues, who take sides in those issues and fight along those issues, whoever and whatever be the influencer.

So he thinks of this "Madrasis hate Hindi" thing again. What he realizes first that his friend was being an idiot in calling all South Indians as Madrasis. Second, he realized that the opposition to Hindi is not uniform in South India, it varies from state to state and region to region. Third, he realized that most of the human beings need generalizations as some sort of psychological pillars to rest their thoughts on. Fourth, and this he realized quite late, is that generalizations are usually true, at least on a general level.

What he could not realize, and has not realized till date, is why do some people call Hindi a regional language only? Why do some people think that learning Hindi as a third language (English and Mother tongue being the other two) happens only in South India? Most of the north Indian states have their mother tongues different from Hindi, and not all of these can be shoveled under the banner of dialects. Gujarati, Marathi, Bangala, Oriya, Punjabi - to name a few - are also languages, aren't they? Don't people learn Hindi in the states where these languages are mother-tongues? Do they oppose Hindi as it is done in South India?

The "why" of this whole issue pained him, because all the south Indians he had met were people just like him. What he realized when he asked these questions to himself is that he is committing the same crime of generalization. But then, even if he replaced the phrase "South Indians" with some specific state or region or even individuals, the question still remained. So he turned again to politics. The answer he came up with was "Hindi was forced down the throat of these people, hence the opposition". This was not really correct, because if was true, all the states can say that Hindi was thrust upon them, as Hindi is not the mother tongue to only a very few states. But he still let this answer remain, thinking that probably it was a matter of handling of the issue.

As this is a story of realizations, I'll tell you some more of the boy's realizations. As he further grew up, he went to various states on India for his education and his jobs. What he realized was that there was the feeling of "Hindi is not mine" at a lot of places, but while north Indian states seem to have accepted it as a unifying language, south Indian states did not. He had also realized that all his "why"s will not be answered in life, because life is not governed by "why"s, human beings don't have a reason for everything they do, and he had come across a beautiful statement ,"Insanity in individuals is something rare but in groups, nations and epochs, it is the rule".

What he also realized is that people will often accuse others of the mistakes they commit themselves without even realizing. Like when he went to Mumbai, he found that his Maharashtrian friends started speaking to each other in Marathi even when they were in a group where not everyone is a local, thus alienating some people in the group from the conversation without consciously meaning to do so. With his background of speaking in Maithili at his hometown, Hindi in Delhi and English in office, he found that the switch of language depending on the people around him is quite natural and he could not understand why others can't do it. He realized that people don't have decency to say "Excuse me, we have to share something which can be done only in Marathi", they don't have the decency to use Marathi as only an exception, they don't have the decency to be aware that they are alienating people by their actions, they don't have the decency to involve everybody in the group. He realized that he will have to live with this attitude. After all, who is he to complain, doesn't he have his own inefficiencies?

What he found equally interesting was when a Bengali friend of his complained of this Maharashtrian attitude, but started speaking in Bangala when he took this boy to meet some of his Bengali friends. And when he came to Bangalore, he found people complaining of South Indians behaving in this manner. What he realized was that people are inherently insensitive on the "involving people around you in conversation" issue everywhere, of course the degree of this clannishness and insensitivity varies.

What he realized, mainly, is to let things be, though he also realized that that's the defeatist way of looking at things.