There’s continually the threat of a little indifference in language debates in India. The ardor, anger, and arguments all have a long history and might be unfamiliar. However, as I comply with the current uproar at the perceived attempt to impose Hindi in the first draft of the National Education Policy (NEP), one component is clear: the quarrel has nothing to do with Hindi. The desire to impose or reject Hindi is set in many ways – Hindu nationalism, religion, caste, and an uneasy attachment to English – but it isn’t about the language named Hindi.
For example, there was a Tamil rally of irritated and conciliatory tweets by Nirmala Sitharaman, S. Jaishankar, P. Chidambaram, A.R. Rahman, and others. The information channels informed me that Sitharaman’s and Jaishankar’s tweets were nearly identical. I wouldn’t recognize it because, growing up between Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi, I am an Indian who speaks the handiest languages: a mash-up of Hindus and a mash-up of Englishes.
As someone who spent all my youth in Delhi, I understand numerous other languages. I can eavesdrop, make jokes, and swear in several of them. However, I am now not functionally literate in any of them. Just as nicely, even though. Sitharaman’s and Jaishankar’s tweets were now not meant for me. In reality, they have been specially crafted to defuse the looming threat posed with the aid of the “north Indian Hindi audio system,” which includes me.
As I scanned the Tamil tweets embedded in nearly all informative articles on the NEP, my interloping non-Tamil-studying eye observed something. While announcing something it becomes saying in Tamil, Sitharaman’s tweet carried a Hindi-language hashtag inside the Roman script: #ekbharatsreshtabharat. This hashtag has been part of the technoscriptural arsenal of the BJP’s marketing campaign, just like #betipadhaopetibachao and #swachhbharat. But in this unique example, the hashtag struck me as devious for resituating Hindi while performing its removal. The important Tamil of Sitharaman’s and Jaishankar’s tweets turned into a reassurance to Tamil speakers that fear no longer, and the government does not intend to erase your Dravidian linguistic identification and background. It became a manner to ease their acceptance as true by demonstrating right away a line of conversation between the allegedly Hindi-selling authorities and its Tamil-speaking humans. It was a political pass to speak the language of humans. But the hashtag labeled this message under the Hindi signal. If the DMK and AIDMK have been pushing the three-language formulation, Sitharaman’s placatory tweet modeled that contentious system.
What is it about Hindi and the three-language formulation that they show so insufficient and so necessary to the idea of India? Statistics and information inform us that Hindi isn’t always India’s most extensively spoken language. Hindi audio systems from the Hindi belt would scarcely recognize the language, even though it’s far spoken at 30,000 feet or written in Sarkari drafters. So, what gives? According to the revised draft of the NEP, the 3-language method is about cognitive improvement and national integration: “A multilingual India is better educated and also better nationally included.” India is richly multilingual. This is a boon for our minds but a bane for countrywide integration. Everyone in India can’t analyze all of the languages within the USA.
The NEP proposes that all Class 1 and beyond college students analyze three languages to manage subjects. In the preliminary draft, students might learn English as global and Hindi as national. While the revised draft sno longer stipulates which three languages to study, it does advise three degrees of language studying that map directly to the region, countrywide, and worldwide. The championing of Hindi as crucial to the three-language formula is ready what it approaches to belong to the nation of India and who receives to belong. The language isn’t always richer or older or more scientific or extra true than another language in India to benefit representative reputation. As students have proven lately, it’s far objectively none of those matters.
In its politically engineered existence, however, Hindi is Sanskritic, Hindu, and ‘upper caste. As such, it does essential political paintings. Consequently, any perceived or real preference to push Hindi has nothing to do with the splendid qualities of the language but has everything to do with identification and power.
1. Hindi erases Urdu
The institutional push for Hindi erases the shared cultural histories of Hindi and Urdu. Hindustani (an extra populist “Hindi-Urdu” with Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit phrases) was long a strong contender for the function of unbiased India’s “countrywide language.” Gandhi himself changed into a vocal suggestion for it. But the already complex question of India’s potential national language (and later, “reputable language”) got trickier with the likelihood of the formation of Pakistan. A newly independent India desired to define itself not only in opposition to the shadow of the British but also towards Pakistan. Urdu become typecast as Muslim and Muslims as a minority. Hindi became purged of its Arabic and Persianate vocabulary from Urdu and presented as greater Sanskritic. The revised NEP draft includes two references to Urdu that further this mischaracterization of Hindi-Urdu. In one example, the file calls Urdu a variant of Hindi, and inside the difference, it refers to Urdu as the language of the Muslim minority.
