Hindi and Indian Nationalism

In the chaos of social, political and economic conditions through which we are passing today in India, there is no subject on which there is nearly so much confused thinking as on the subject of a common language for the country. And no single leader of public thought is quite so responsible for this unfortunate state as Mahatma Gandhi himself–although, in every speech of his advocating the spread of Hindi, he has taken the trouble to reconcile the claims of Hindi with the importance of the various other Indian languages and their literatures. Other leaders of the Indian struggle for freedom, in striving to establish national solidarity, had also encountered the difficulty that India is a multi-lingual country. Others too had been ashamed of the necessity to use English, an alien language, as the medium of intercourse between the educated elements of our many linguistic groups. But it was left to Mahatma Gandhi to raise this linguistic problem to an equal level of importance with the problem of national freedom; to proclaim that ‘the question of Hindi is to him the question of Swaraj’; to create an impression in the public mind that Indian freedom will be incomplete, if not impossible, without the three hundred and fifty millions and more of Indians speaking a common language; to lay great emphasis on the growth of a national language not merely on grounds of political convenience but on vaguely understood cultural grounds as well; and to encourage men like Mr. Munshi to say, "India is a nation; it is becoming a mass man; it throbs with the impulse of becoming harmonious; its literary men have been dreaming of one language, one script and one literature as they never did before."(Triveni, September 1936. Italics are ours.) The prestige of Mahatmaji in the moral and political spheres is thus lent to a movement in the history of Indian languages, which confuses between political and cultural issues; which, driven logically to its conclusion, means the postponement of Indian self-government till the day when every living Indian can speak Hindi; and which slowly grows to see no way out of the diversity of Indian languages except a suppression of the variety of our scripts and also, perhaps, (impossible thought!) the gradual disappearance of the various Indian languages other than Hindi, Such, indeed, is the ultimate danger of mistaking the political convenience, which really underlies the choice of Hindi as the inter-provincial language, for some fancied cultural benefit flowing from a study of that language. And arguments about the beauty of the Hindi Ramayana by Tulsidas, and about the desirability of South Indian literary men and Hindi literary men mutually enriching the literatures on both sides are perfectly irrelevant where the issue is a common language for India, because Bengali and Japanese and Dutch must each be having at least as good a literature as Hindi, and a similar exchange of culture can be every bit as desirable even between Bengali or Japanese or Dutch and any South Indian language.

The inducements to learn Hindi thrown out to the people of South India during the Hindi Conferences at Madras some months ago were as varied and amusing as they were illustrative of a certain want of scientific thought that characterises the whole Hindi Movement today. "A mischievous propaganda is being carried on by some people in North India," said Mr. Bajaj, "to the effect that, if South Indians are taught Hindi, they will compete with North Indians in the matter of jobs and accentuate the problem of unemployment there. I for one have no such fears. After all, it will be in the best interests of the country that men with talents, from whatever part of India they may come, should be employed." This should be inducement enough, thought Mr. Bajaj, to bring within the Hindi Movement those classes in South India which create clerks and typists for the whole country! And surprisingly enough, Mr. Rajagopalachariar thought fit to endorse this view, that a knowledge of Hindi might show the South Indians a way north out of their unemployment. "There are many journalists from South India serving in North India," said Mr, Kalelkar, "and they have found that a knowledge of Hindi pays. I expect that merchants and manufacturers in the south will discover the potentialities of’ Hindi for the development of their commerce and industries." Obviously, in Mr. Kalelkar’s opinion, the best inducement to learn Hindi is not always that one has access to the Ramayana by Tulsidas! "If I write in Gujarati or you in Tamil," said Srimati Lilavati Munshi," the possibility is that we can reach only ten or twenty millions of people who speak those languages, but if literature be written in or translated into Hindi there is a possibility of reaching more than half the population of India. The radios and cinemas have found in the spread of Hindi a business proposition." And it was left to this sensitive literary messenger from Gujarat to place this profound business proposition before us!

It is time these leaders realised that the need to learn Hindi in South India should be advocated and accepted on mere grounds of political convenience, or not at all. Other arguments are invariably trivial. Extravagant, too, has been the anticipation of certain other benefits if all South Indians were to learn Hindi, "South Indians have a keen intellect," said Mr. Bajaj, "while the people of North India possess martial qualities. There should be an assimilation of these two traits, and that can be done only if Hindi becomes the universal language." It is certainly very flattering to some of us in South India to be told that we have only to acquire a smattering of Hindi to become as daring as the Pathans or the Sikhs!" The comparative lack of influence of South Indian leaders with North Indian populations," said an important morning Daily from Madras, discussing ‘India’s National Language,’ "must be attributed to their incapacity to speak fluently and with ease in Hindi." An excellent observation, of course; and, after that, all that remains to be explained is how, without knowing Tamil or Telugu, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru have achieved the tremendous influence they have over the masses in Tamilnadu and Andhradesa!

The extreme zeal of the leaders of the Hindi Movement has time and again taken very strange shapes, nothing daunted by scientific theories of linguistic development or by considerations of beauty and perfection in literary art. Mr. Munshi thinks that we can emphasise the Sanskritic element in the Dravidian languages so as to approximate these languages to Hindi–though why Mr. Munshi thinks such an approximation desirable we are merely left to guess. "Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam have so great a Sanskritic element," says he, "that if they are written in Devanagari script they could in some measure be understood by all Indians who speak the languages of the Sanskritic family. The unity which underlies all these languages is created by their common Sanskritic element, and I see no reason why we should be afraid ofemphasising the common Sanskritic element in our languages. Our provincial languages will have neither richness nor beauty if Sanskritic elements are eliminated." (Triveni, September, 1936.) We are not in a position to judge Mr. Munshi’s style in Gujarati in the light of these doctrines of his, but he ought to be told that the literary men of Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra, instead of being anxious to emphasise the Sanskritic element in their languages, are very keen on emancipating themselves from too much thraldom to Sanskrit, so as to be able to evolve a vigorous prose and verse that is not stifled in its very birth by the extravagant similes and metaphors of Sanskritic tradition. Again, in the recent Sahitya Sammelan in Madras, Mr. Purushothamdas Tandon and others of his school of thought were so violently keen on making the study of Hindi delightfully easy to their South Indian cousins that by a sort of executive fiat they wanted to introduce revolutionary changes in Hindi grammar, specially by simplifying rules relating to gender. This fantastic proposal was almost an accomplished scheme but for Mr. Rajagopalachariar’s coming forward with a speech in Tamil, urging that they "should not Countenance such radical alterations of vital rules of grammar merely to suit the convenience of a small section of non-Hindi people." Frankly, such wisdom as this was too elementary to have been administered in public by so eminent a man as Mr. Rajagopalachariar to so eminent a man as Mr. Tandon! Or, again, the desperate attempt to create one script for all the languages in India, irrespective of their Sanskritic or Dravidian origin, while the Congress resolution on Fundamental Rights agrees that "the culture, language and script of the minorities and of the different linguistic areas shall be protected," is, on the face of it, too clumsy an attempt for us to credit the present leaders of the Hindi Movement with either proper vision or clarity of thought.

The inescapeable fact is that the Hindi Movement today is vague and confused in its basic dogmas, untimely in its insistence, and unscientific in its pursuits. A sentimental dislike for an alien language is not enough. It is necessary for us to know why, when for some decades to come the most prominent leaders from each linguistic group are bound to be men with a good command of the English language, we should take immediate steps "to stop the use of English in Congress proceedings and to adopt Hindi-Hindustani as the medium of discussions." Speeches in English will not reach the masses, of course; but speeches can be translated, and translation of speeches is always inevitable in a country like ours whenever the borders of linguistic units are crossed, and whenever North Indian leaders approach South Indian masses or vice versa. Why should the energy of the entire nation in the South be side-tracked and spent in the acquiring of Hindi, at a time when more grave and fundamental issues are in the balance, and the sentimental luxury of having a common Indian language is at best but a piece of political hedonism? Why should the South Indian leaders, each time they speak in English, be hauled up for their want of national spirit by North Indian Congressmen who understand English perfectly well, and who, if they cannot understand, can always see that the Congress employs a couple of intelligent translators in all its proceedings, thereby solving the language difficulty more easily than bycompelling Mr. Prakasam and Mr. Satyamurti to mumble their speeches in broken ineffective Hindi? And why should the South Indian leaders tamely submit to these irresponsible dictatorial methods and not insist on the proposition that the Congress exists primarily for effective political discussion, in whatever language and by whatever process of translation that object may be best achieved, and that it does not exist as an inferior limb of the Hindi Prachar Sabha? Why this limitless insistence on Hindi, yielding to sentimental nationalism, at a time when we still retain the English language in almost all its importance not merely to keep in touch with modern scientific, political and economic thought, but even as the medium through which to teach all the non-language subjects in our Universities? If, as is sometimes pleaded, the object is entirely non-political and is only the emancipation of our country’s culture from its bondage to the West, why this untimely emphasis on just an inter-provincial language which cannot, after all, affect our culture as intensely as the mother-tongue, without putting all the emphasis primarily and at once on the development of the different languages in the different linguistic areas?

And what exactly is meant by a common language for India? Do the leaders of the Hindi Movement contemplate that at any time hereafter all the three hundred and fifty millions in India will speak Hindi, and specially that in the South the entire people of each linguistic area, including peasants and labourers who form the bulk, will know not only their mother-tongue but Hindi as well? The Organiser of the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha writes, (The Hindu, 20th August 1937): "The ideal of the Hindi Prachar Sabha is to make one hundred per cent of our population Hindi-minded." Today, when more than ninety per cent of Indians are illiterate, does the Hindi Prachar Sabha desire that the illiterate South Indians should first be made literate in Hindi? Or, does the Sabha intend that little children joining school for the first time should be taught both Hindi and their own mother-tongue in the primary school stage? Is the move to have the Nagari script even for Tamil and Telugu just an anticipation of a future infliction of bilingualism on the child in the earliest school-going years? These are some of the questions which have to be honestly answered by the Hindi Prachar Sabha before it seeks to make any headway in the South.

The fundamental defect of the Hindi Movement in South India is that it is anxious to manufacture a mythical Indian unity without first giving a proper and definite place in the scheme of human loyalties to the concrete unity within each linguistic territory; that it attempts to unify India without acknowledging the full importance of the preliminary need to divide India into provinces on the linguistic basis; and that it is more solicitous about the requirements of a future Federal Legislature and of the infinitesimal minority within each linguistic area who cross the boundary to face the problem of inter-provincial intercourse, than about the need of the bulk of the people who remain rooted in their own linguistic territory, and the still greater need of each linguistic area that, within such an area, the language of administration, the language of the local Legislature and of the Courts, and the language through the medium of which all education, including even the highest University education, is imparted should be the mother-tongue. In other words, the Hindi Movement suffers from an insufficient appreciation of the fact that the utmost to be expected in the form of an all-India unity is federal unity–and a true conception offederal unity in India implies ultimately the recognition of strong loves and loyalties within linguistic boundaries. Mahatma Gandhi may not have fully appreciated the strength of these loves and loyalties, but it is certain that men like Lokamanya Tilak or Desabandhu Das, without failing in the least the cause of a comprehensive Indian nationalism, would have known to answer when erring enthusiasts of the Hindi Movement attempted to meddle with local scripts or to prescribe Hindi as the language of a local Legislature where at present there are mixed linguistic groups. The entire political basis of the Hindi Movement is proved to be wrong when in trying to find a solution to the language problem of Legislatures with mixed linguistic groups as in Bombay, Madras and the Central Provinces, it tends to prescribe the use of Hindi, instead of logically proceeding from the language difficulty to the division of India into its linguistic provinces. This concentration on bringing about an artificial unity is as harmful in the beginning as it will be ultimately futile. Multi-lingual Russia had a similar problem, and the problem was finally solved otherwise than in the manner in which the Hindi Movement would have it solved in India. The following quotation deals only with the educational aspect of the linguistic problem in Russia, but it is an indication of the wise understanding in which Russia decided to solve the entire problem:

"Lenin himself as a Great Russian had little sympathy with national minorities as such, and it was Stalin, a Georgian by birth, who amended the original Communism of the Russian majority. He proposed to grant to all minorities territorial autonomy, with their own languages as the medium of instruction, on the condition that they accepted Communism. Thus he solved the problem of combining the multifarious forms of national expression into a single and uniform whole." [N. Hans, "Comparative Study of European Education." Italics are ours.]

Hindi cannot displace the other languages of the country and establish itself at any future time as the only language in India. Such a linguistic unification is neither possible nor desirable. The whole history of the world’s languages shows that dialects may grow into languages and languages thus multiply; never does it show the coalescing of many distinct languages into one. Other languages like Bengali and Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, Oriya and Gujarati, have as much right as Hindi to survive and prosper as vehicles of knowledge and culture. It is inevitable and necessary that within each linguistic area the mother-tongue should claim preeminence over every other language. Thus when linguistic provinces are established in this country, as they should be, it is clear that within each province the language of the Administration, of the Legislature, of the Courts and of the Universities should be the language of the province itself, and that Hindi cannot ever usurp the place of the provincial language in these spheres.

But Hindi has a place in the future life of the Indian nation, because, the nation being larger than each linguistic unit, and each unit having its part to play in the larger life of the nation, the various linguistic units require a common language for the purposes of the Central Government and for inter-provincial intercourse. Today, and certainly for some more years to come, the English language has largely to serve these ends. It is, however, both possible and wholesome that the common language of the country should be one of the languages of the country itself. Undoubtedly, Hindi, with the hundred and twenty millions who speak the language and the hundred millions more who understand it with ease, has paramount claims to be the common language. But in the inevitable period of transition during which the English language cannot be dispensed with at the Centre, because of the insufficient spread of Hindi in the non-Hindi provinces and the insufficient growth of the Indian languages in their capacity to convey all modern thought, both Hindi and English should be accepted as the official languages of the Centre. It should be recognised, incidentally, that apart from this political convenience or necessity there is scarcely any valid need for South Indians to learn Hindi in preference, say, to Marathi or Bengali.

The acceptance in future of Hindi as the common language at the Centre will imply, in the non-Hindi provinces, the necessity to learn that language alongside one’s mother- tongue. But it will not imply, of course, that Hindi should arrogate to itself an equal importance with the mother-tongue, or that it should be inflicted on the pupils in the primary school stage. The ideal of making cent per cent of the South Indians Hindi-knowing is not only impracticable but actually dangerous. The primary school curriculum should not be complicated with a second language, because attempting, to keep literate in two languages all the workers in urban areas and all the peasants and labourers in rural areas is attempting the impossible, and will undoubtedly lead to a quick relapse into illiteracy in both the languages! The great majority of the people within each linguistic area who do not proceed beyond the primary school stage should be left free to devote their leisure to the sufficiently formidable task of maintaining their literacy in the mother-tongue. That should be enough achievement. Besides, all those who end their studies with the primary school will be people who do not need Hindi, because they are not likely to get elected to the Central Legislatures or to leave their own province. Facilities for the study of Hindi should, of course be given as far as possible to the insignificant minority who, having stopped their education after the primary school stage, may have both the leisure and the inclination to study Hindi. And provision should also be made in the Centre for the very special cases in which people who know only their mother-tongue may be elected to the Central Legislature, by allowing them to speak in their own mother-tongue if they themselves provide interpreters who will translate their speeches–into Hindi in the distant future, or, in an immediate transitional stage, either into Hindi or into English. In the League of Nations, for instance, although the two official languages of the League are English and French, any delegate may speak in his own tongue, when it is neither of these, if he himself provides an interpreter for the necessary translation into one of the official languages. It will, however, be undermining literacy and wasting public money in the process to include the study of Hindi in the primary school curriculum within non-Hindi provinces.

In other words, Indian nationalism does not require that every Indian in the non-Hindi provinces should be bilingual. As long as India is recognised to be a federation, which even now it potentially is, of the various territorially compact linguistic units, the Federal language may be exclusively Hindi sometime hence; and in an intervening period both Hindi and English have to be accepted as the two official languages of the Federation; but at no stage will such a position imply that every man, woman and child within each non-Hindi linguistic unit should know both the mother-tongue and Hindi. Such bilingualism should be rendered compulsory only during the secondary school stage, though the exact years of the secondary school course in which Hindi should be made compulsory in addition to English and the mother-tongue, and whether it should be made compulsory at all just now when a very high standard of English is believed by many to be essential in our educational schemes, are matters involving a psychological analysis of the needs and the capacity of the average student, which analysis is outside the purview of this article. In any case, only about ten per cent at the utmost of the population within each linguistic province, and these the potential leaders of society, need be fully equipped for both the provincial and the federal principles in political life by having to study both their mother-tongue and Hindi.

Universal bilingualism is inevitable in a Federation like the Union of South Africa where the Boers speaking Afrikaans and the Englishmen speaking English do not live in distinct territories, but live as a mixed lot in almost every village, every town and every province. But in a Federation like the Swiss, where each Canton is linguistically compact, bilingualism in French and German, the Zweite Landessprache, (the two languages of the Nation) is necessary only for the very small minority who look outside their Canton and have a chance of finding themselves either in the Federal Legislatures or in the employment of the Federation. India is exactly like Switzerland and quite unlike South Africa, because India has distinct linguistic provinces, out of which should be evolved a genuine Indian Federation, and to the creation of which provinces as future federating units, the Indian National Congress stands morally pledged. And, therefore, universal bilingualism is unnecessary in India.

If, however, the Congress, acting in subservience to the dogmas of the Hindi Prachar Sabha, tries to reconcile itself for ever to the existence of mixed provinces in the South, and cannot afterwards find a better way out of the language difficulty than the push for a cent per cent literacy in Hindi in the non-Hindi provinces, as a preliminary step to making Hindi the language of the Legislatures in Bombay, Nagpur and Madras; and if the Congress loses its sense of proportion so far as to favour the suppression of the Dravidian and other non-Hindi scripts in an attempt to bring about an incomprehensible and impossible form of national unity, the Congress must be told that it is virtually going on its implied promise to groups like the Andhras and the Kannadigas, and that it is, consciously or unconsciously, rejecting the inevitable scheme of a genuine Federation of properly constituted linguistic provinces. The problem of Hindi is intimately connected with the problem of linguistic provinces, and no Congressman who genuinely believes in the creation of linguistic provinces can be short-sighted enough to advocate either the suppression of Dravidian scripts or the use of Hindi in the present Legislatures of Bombay and Madras. But such absurd counsels are daily gaining ground. And there is a growing suspicion today in the public mind that the perhaps unconscious purpose, however foolish and impossible it may really be, of the Hindi Prachar Movement is not merely to provide a common language for the Centre and for inter-provincial intercourse, but to evolve in course of time through a common script, through artificial Sanskritisation and through discreet Persianisation a single uniform language for the entire population of India. In the abundance of our fears, we may not question the motives of the leaders of the Hindi Prachar Movement, but we certainly can question their ultimate wisdom and statesmanship.