G.N. DEVY ON THE PLACE OF HINDI

There is a widespread misconception about the place of Hindi in India’s linguistic spectrum. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages. It is also the language with the highest number of speakers as per successive census data. However, it is also true that Hindi is not the natural language of a majority of Indian states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Puducherry in the south; Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat in the west; Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir in the northwest; Odisha and West Bengal in the east; Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya and Assam in the northeast. These make 21 of the existing 30 states. Hindi is believed to be the only or main language of states like Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, but a closer look at their linguistic composition shows that they all have their own native regional languages, and Hindi functions there as a shared pan-state language. Often, as Hindi becomes the second language for communication with people living in these states or travelling through them, the impression of it being the primary language of these states gets reinforced. But this is not factually accurate.

After Independence in 1947, the question of imagining a single language as our ‘national language’ has cropped up again and again. Political parties have brought it up for obvious political gain. But, if one were to compare Hindi’s claim to that status with other languages in a logical framework, it does not look entirely tenable. In terms of heritage value, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Oriya, Bangla, Nepali and Assamiya have a longer legacy than does Hindi. And in terms of fast growth, Hindi is surpassed by Bhojpuri as well as the tribal language, Bhili. The makers of our Constitution had a much clearer view of the complexities involved in tangling with the language question. They imagined India, both through commission and omission, as a multilingual country and not as a monolingual nation. The fact that the Constitution decided to list 14 languages in the Eighth Schedule clearly indicates the unwillingness to tether India to a single language. However, all these factors need not be employed to diminish the increasing importance of Hindi in our composite national life. At present, the increased crossstate migration requires an effective link language. Hindi fulfils that need very competently since the grammatical features of Hindi allow a remarkable flexibility in syntax. This is also because the word stock in Hindi and in languages such as Telugu and Kannada have a considerably high share of common origins. Besides, from the perspective of other nations, Hindi starts looking like India’s main language. Moreover, in the sociology of urban spaces, Hindi has been acquiring a greater functional utility.

While all these functional and structural features may compel one to propose Hindi as the lingua numero uno for India, it would be far more realistic to name it as the ‘National Second Language’ for a variety of reasons. Technically, a ‘second language’ is the language one speaks not at home but in markets; at the workplace and in cosmopolitan social contexts, but not at home or in the intimate spaces of one’s cultural transaction. Currently, India has nearly 800 living languages. Though not so in practice, in theory, the speakers of 799 languages use Hindi with a varying degree of competence. Thus, Hindi is the primary language of those who claim it to be their mother tongue and the second language of those who claim some other language(s) as theirs. If 799 out of 800 language communities claim Hindi as their second language, at best it can be our National Second Language, but nothing beyond that. The transgression would be fundamentally undemocratic and hurt the deeply multilingual past and present of India.

If 799 out of 800 language communities claim Hindi as a second language, it is at best our National Second Language