Shiya was lost in a sea of words. Hindi words. She thought of the Doordarshan days when most of her friends at home in Kerala were stuck watching Hindi programmes, but her parents had cable television. So while her friends picked up the language, she didn't. Years later, she went to Mysuru for her first job, with hopes of a new freedom. But on the first day, she felt disconnected. Shiya blinked as her new colleagues stuck to Hindi for group discussions, as part of the job training. They were simply comfortable in Hindi, they told her, when she asked if they could switch to English. She knew they were comfortable in English, the medium of their training, but realised that the idea of inclusivity was just too alien. "Why don't you learn Hindi?" one of them asked politely. Would you learn Malayalam, she imagined asking back.
A month ago, when Union Home Minister Amit Shah – also the chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language – insisted that people from different states in India should speak to each other in Hindi and not English, it rekindled a long ongoing debate on language imposition. In the days that passed, the issue refused to die down, a clash of tweets between Kannada actor Kiccha Sudeep and Bollywood actor Ajay Devgn over Hindi as a national language widening the discussion. Soon, singer Sonu Nigam joined the debate, speaking against Hindi imposition.
There is a lot of history here and unresolved questions regarding language in a country that speaks hundreds. Officially there are 22 languages in India, and in the south of the country, many like Shiya have barely learnt Hindi.
Chenthil Nathan, a history enthusiast and avid translator of Tamil poetry into English, has written in TNM about the history of Tamil Nadu’s fight against Hindi imposition, even before India won freedom.
When India became free in 1947 and hundreds of princely states joined into the Union to form a new country, there was no common language to bind them. It was decided that the Indian Constitution will not mention any national language but use Hindi and English as official languages for 15 years. When the 15 year period ended, efforts were on to bring Hindi back into the picture, through the Official Languages Act of 1963. Annadurai of the DMK opposed the Act in Rajya Sabha and demanded the continuation of English and Hindi as official languages. After an agitation and an arrest, then Prime Minister Nehru promised that English would continue to be one. But Nehru passed away in 1964 and people in the south worried if Hindi would be imposed again.
Chenthil writes, “Anti-Hindi imposition protests spread across the state [of Tamil Nadu], with college students at the forefront. Chinnasamy of Tiruchi was the first person to immolate himself against the imposition of Hindi. This led to a spate of self-immolations against imposition of Hindi.”
There were weeks of riots, when Anna and thousands of DMK members were taken into preventive custody and 70 people died in protests. Prime Minister Shastri finally agreed that Nehru’s word would be kept and English would continue as a language for interstate and Union-state communication.
“It is not that Tamils will not learn Hindi when they go to another state,” Chenthil tells TNM, “In the 1950s and ‘60s, a lot of Tamils moved to Mumbai for economic reasons and they learned the language, not just Hindi but Marathi too. Even in Bengaluru today, people from other south Indian states will learn Kannada and speak it. Similarly, unskilled labourers who come to the south for work, learn the local language and speak it. The question that the people ask is why should they learn Hindi when they are in Tamil Nadu? Why should they be forced to learn a language when there is no need?”
Chenthil says that this argument is often twisted and conveyed as people in the south are insular to learning new languages. Those who have been living away from their home state, beg to differ.
Megha Rajeev, a marketing professional from Kerala who has worked in different corners of the country, says that it is a fact that you may need to resort to Hindi if you go to the non-south places. “In Pune, Ahmedabad and Ludhiana (the non-South places I've lived in), you have to resort to Hindi and hand gestures to communicate with vendors. People who know English are definitely comfortable to talk in it. But relying on only English restricts a lot of ways to experience a city,” she says.
Even in the south, in cities like Hyderabad, Megha has sometimes found it easier to communicate in Hindi. “In Chennai, it's definitely important to learn Tamil. Despite being a Malayali, it has been difficult but people are definitely helpful when you make an effort (and speak Malayalam disguised as Tamil). I think, when you move cities every two or three years, it becomes difficult to pick up a local language, so there have to be common languages like Tamil and Hindi. But that's a cultural and human thing, and definitely not something a government has to impose,” she adds.
Karishma VP, the content team lead of a finance company who has worked in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, has also had similar experiences. She says she had to use Hindi where English didn't work, but adds, "It isn’t right to impose Hindi on the whole country when it’s just one of the 22 official regional languages. People in India have gotten along beautifully all these years even without Hindi being made mandatory, so let us continue to choose ways to communicate that are most convenient for us.”
For Shradha, a nonprofit management consultant, it was easy to get by with English, when she went from Kerala to Puducherry for work. But she admits it got better after she attempted to pick up the local language. Like Megha, she too resorts to ‘signalling’ and getting a local contact to help when language pulls a barrier.
She narrates a bad experience in a night bus when simple gestures helped. “I used to take a lot of night buses on the Puducherry-Chennai route for work, mostly alone. There was a particular night trip where I felt uncomfortable with a drunken man leaning over me, and it was just with one shrug that the woman sitting next to me woke up, sensed the tension and intervened. After I learned to speak Tamil, getting help while travelling got a lot easier,” Shradha says.
Arun Murali Manush, an IT professional who moved to Bengaluru from Kerala six years ago, says he was happier to pick up Kannada than try and communicate in Hindi or English. It made the taxi drivers and the grocery shop owners happy when he made the attempt, and it cheered him up too, he says.
Mohandas Gandhi’s original idea was to make Hindustani the language of India, a mix of regional Hindi and Urdu, says Sunil P Ilayidom, writer, critic, orator and Malayalam professor. “His idea was that two different communities will merge and form a ‘national language’. But it did not succeed. After India’s freedom, several attempts were made to make Hindi the national language. The Constituent Assembly did not allow it, not giving that recognition to Hindi. The official language for communication continued to be English,” he says.
He points out that India is a union of states, and pushing Hindi as a national language is not right. “India has different languages, different cultures. Imposing a single language is a Hindutva agenda, coming from their idea of one country, one language, one culture and one religion. It denies the country its diverse culture, promoting a mono culture. This imposition can be used as a political slogan to polarise the country further, now that the Ram temple work is nearly done. Imposing Hindi as a single national language, despite the strong opposition from several parts of the country, may pave the way for another kind of communal division,” Sunil says.
There is also an opinion among people that Amit Shah’s announcement is an attempt to drown the tribal and indigenous languages spoken in remote parts, in the name of integrating communities with 'mainstream culture'.
Another aspect of the English-Hindi argument is the struggle of students who are not proficient in English taking up higher studies and finding the medium of teaching difficult. Babitha Marina Justin, academic, writer and artist, talks about the struggles of students who come from different parts of the country and different backgrounds. “Many of my students come from various parts of India to learn space science and technology and English communication skills are a compulsory course in their curriculum. Most of the syllabus is taught in English and many of the technical terms are untranslatable. The students from marginalised backgrounds do struggle initially with this heavy load of technical English, but often, I have seen them catch up on the terms soon and some very determined ones learn excellent communication skills along the way," she says.
“Practically, any student needs good English to get through job interviews and campus selections. Especially young aspiring students who want to go overseas. The language chauvinism in enforcing Hindi has a disturbing agenda of barring the underprivileged from climbing social, professional, and academic ladders, and that is subtle social engineering which would keep all kinds of social hierarchies alive,” she says.
Aswani Dravid, who has been living and working in Dehradun for the past five years, echoes a similar sentiment. It took her time and effort, she says, to pick up English after doing her primary education in a Malayalam medium school. Aswani, who is an assistant professor at a university, talks about students who picked up English by talking to her. “There was a student from Rajasthan who couldn’t take part in the debates in class because he didn’t speak English. He began to learn the language only to talk to me. He took a major effort to learn, writing pieces in English and bringing them to me. And finally he cleared his interview with TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences). So it did him good, talking to me. It just shows diversity can be maintained and is a basic part of a democracy,” Aswani says.
Indian states were reorganised on the basis of language in 1956. A three-language formula was written in the National Education Policy 1968 – making it compulsory to have Hindi, English and one modern Indian language in schools for Hindi-speaking states; and English, the state language and Hindi in non-Hindi speaking states.
In south India, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Telangana accepted the formula, while Tamil Nadu didn’t. Suja Susan George, former director of Malayalam Mission, points out that Malayalam is only a second language in many schools and colleges, while English continues to be the first language. She attributes it to many in Kerala seeking job opportunities outside the state for decades, prompting the need to teach English in schools. “The language of the rulers is often seen as the superior one. That’s what happened back when the British ruled the country, bringing English education everywhere. And that’s what is happening now. By promoting Hindi, which only 40% of the country knows, as the single language, what will disappear is the mother tongue,” Suja says.
Not that Kerala didn’t fight for Malayalam. At the time of the debate over making Hindi the official language in 1948, EMS Namboodiripad, who would become the first Chief Minister of Kerala in 1957, wrote Keralam Malayalikalude Mathrubhumi, raising the importance of Malayalam as a way to unite the people of the state. In 1948, Kerala was still split as three princely states while being a part of the Indian Union. It would take another eight years for the state to form. Turning into the most literate state, Kerala didn’t have any qualms about accepting new languages. Malayalis also picked up Hindi from the Doordarshan programmes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when cable television was yet to emerge.
As Megha puts it, “Trying to speak in other languages, even Hindi, can be fun when you don't do it under compulsion. Once my roommate and I went to buy mustard and we couldn't remember what it was called. I tried to reenact SRK and Kajol in a mustard field. We eventually got the mustard and everyone was happy.”