REDISCOVERING HINDUSTANI

With its Suno app for Hindi-speaking audiences, Audible is well-positioned to take advantage of a locked-down audience that a friendly virus has delivered into its lap

It is ironic that about the only place where one can engage with the shared linguistic legacy of Hindustan is in foreign South Asia departments, in London and Chicago. In nominally post-colonial India, we take the colonial legacy of Partition very seriously—and the linguistic “partition” practised by our Hindi and Urdu departments would be farcical, if it weren’t so sad. Hindi departments are anxious to free their language and its literary legacy from “yavana” contamination; Urdu departments are in a perpetual fret about how to handle the Hindi and the Hindus—Premchand and Firaq, to name but two—that must be part of any Urdu tradition.

But now, courtesy Audible’s audiobooks, there is a way in which one just might escape that deadly legacy. After all, the origins of the “Hindi-Urdu” business lie in a relatively minor matter related to the script: Nagari, or Nastaliq, so to speak? But Audible simply bypasses the script question. The Hindi audiobooks that are on offer are cheerfully eclectic—rather like a railway bookstall. So there is self-help jostling with packaged enlightenment from sundry “gurus”, happily sharing shelf space with luridly designed covers that, deceptively, promise soft porn. But alongside this, there is, unquestionably, “literature”— Premchand, of course, but also Tagore, and Khandekar from Marathi, Neelkantan, Amrita Pritam—and then, happily, Manto and Ismat Chugtai too. One is not surprised to find selections from the Urdu poets here. But there is also Kamleshwar’s collection of Urdu stories, described in words that demand quotation—“the one thing that unites all the stories is the enduring quality of the finest Hindi writing, which places them among Urdu masterpieces.” Suck on that!

Of course, it is still early days, but the canonical “Hindi” selection is rather thin: Premchand, Prasad, Dinkar. There are translations from “high” literature: Tagore, Hermann Hesse. And there is a fascinating category of “contemporary fiction” in the Hindi list. Here, one finds a conscious cultivation of triviality, an abjuring of the pompous, tight-arsed highmindedness of the Hindi canon. But there is, also in the play of dialect and colloquial rhythms, an implicit ideological subtext that the keepers of the Hindi flame—the agnihotris, so to speak—must engage with.

In bypassing the script question, Audible achieves several objects: it deprives the Urdu establishment of its jealously guarded monopoly of the Urdu tradition, and gives the Hindi reader access to the Urdu archive. Further, Audible is well-positioned to take advantage of not only low levels of literacy, but also of the emergent phenomenon of post-literacy—to say nothing of the locked-down audience that a friendly virus has delivered into its lap. The

The Hindi audiobooks that are on offer are cheerfully eclectic—rather like a railway bookstall

Suno app rolled out by Audible will work as well for twitchy adolescents as it does for stir-crazy elders, hungry for diversion. But the eclectic Audible offerings also allow us to glimpse the lost landscape of Hindustani, the dynamic and evolving language of the fertile plains of Hindustan, which has been obscured by the fratricidal Hindi-Urdu conflict.

However, there is a further, and somewhat more difficult, observation to be made. For all that one says about Hindi and Urdu being “basically” the same—and I do—there is a real, observable difference too. The “Urdu” texts, and the Urdu readers, have a kind of vivacious fluency—ravani is the technical term—that is conspicuously missing from the Hindi readings. Where the Urdu readers’ narrative voice draws on rich oral traditions, on the latifa and the dastan—the Hindi reader has only the stilted dialects of All India Radio to draw upon, the phony and melodramatic voices in which children and adults are patronised alike. Years ago, lost in the delights of Fallon’s wonderful dictionary of Hindustani, I was intrigued to find this illustrative sentence, clarifying the meaning of “bhuccha”, i.e. yokel: “Kaisa bhuccha hai, Hindustani nahin jaanta.” Hindustani was the language of urban sophistication. Modern “Hindi” is still struggling to find an equivalent that is simultaneously different from HindustaniUrdu—but is also vivid, moving, expressive.

There is an even deeper problem implicated with the matter of fluency, of ravani. This has to do with the process whereby a language acquires emotional resonance. Often, with the Hindi texts, one has the sense that the language is cold, that it is being used not by way of communication or expression, but only performatively, as ideology: this medium is, indeed, the message. And the message is still-born. There was a meme circulating on the internet recently: someone had taken the familiar lines: kabhi kabhi mere dil mein khyaal aata hai, and changed certain key words to the “Hindi” register: kabhi kabhi mere hridaya mein vichaar aata hai. It pointed up the barrenness of the ideological insistence that dil and khyaal are not Hindi, merely because their origins lie in Farsi.

It is practically a reflex to think of audiobooks in terms of a deficit. But in lieu of the reduced scope for complexity as between reading and listening, there may well be a corresponding gain in terms of eloquence. It is a truth universally acknowledged that language has become a casualty of the CBSE-ruled system of education. This defect is even more stark in the context of oral linguistic culture. Elocution used to be a regular part of traditional education—remember the poems one learnt “by heart”? But despite this, the hunger for eloquence has not abated, as is evident in the runaway popularity of the revived art of dastangoi. This is a gap that Audible-Suno is well-positioned to fill.