If religion has openly divided people in the Indian subcontinent, language has divided us through the paradox of purported unification. The divisiveness the former has perpetrated has been direct; the conflicts created by the latter have been shaped by attempts at artificial homogenisation. Both have been put in place by the British; both suited their administrative needs. Their strategies on religion, obviously divisive, have been easy to vilify. Their impact on the linguistic destiny of the subcontinent has been lauded as a mark of modernity, with its costs and benefits, but mostly benefits as modernity is inevitable, irrevocable, and the ultimate object of desire. But the invisible cost of this linguistic modernity has been a series of conflicts no less bitter than the ravages of religion. The bloody separation of India and Pakistan on the basis of religion is bludgeoned on our memory; the formation of Bangladesh on the quest for linguistic freedom is remembered with a memory far more anaemic, particularly while stretched beyond the Bengali sensibility.
This is the scripted fate of colonial rule. Few have articulated it better than the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe. In his polemic about English in Africa, Achebe reminded us that the British did not want to impose English in the continent. In fact, their goal was to indigenise Christianity, pushing the spread of the Bible in local languages. But they also pulled a vaster trick. They introduced a new concept in a land of tribes and villages, a concept nascent in Europe then — that of the nation. The nation required communication that went far beyond the tribe and, hence, English triumphed over Igbo and Yoruba in the formation of the nation to be called Nigeria, just the way it overpowered Gikuyu in Kenya and Shona in Rhodesia. It is the nature of modernity to melt smaller units into larger and larger ones, and provide economic and cultural glue for the enlargement. The nation was such a unit, as the globe would be decades later, in the sequel to colonialism that would come to be known as globalisation.
Notwithstanding a shared reality of mind-boggling multilingualism, the Indian subcontinent is different from the African continent, or the sub-Saharan stretch of the British Empire. Kingdoms of the past have given India different versions of communities far larger than villages, clans, and castes, even if they did not quite acquire the modern dimension of the nation that dawned on Europe after the French Revolution. And Sanskrit and Persian wore the garb of State languages of kingdoms that spanned great distances. But the nation as we know it now was still the work of the British Empire, and the force of English contingent on the formation of this new unit.
Today’s conflict is a direct legacy of colonialism’s divisive unity. Once English became the linguistic logic of the new unit of the nation, the independent nation had to find a post-colonial inheritor of that logic. The continued failure of Hindi to become that inheritor speaks of an Indian diversity that the British Empire couldn’t tame or stifle. But the logic of colonial modernity, once set in motion, cannot be reversed. Hence the quest for a national language must continue. That this quest continues to fail, not so much from fragmented indifference in the East/Northeast but from active opposition from the South, reveals the indigenous vitality of our subcontinent that refuses to respond to the name of the nation that follows the language logic of national sovereignty in Western Europe. There are great prices to pay for this refusal, and not a little blood. And since we must become a nation in the modern, Western sense of the term, we cannot give up our quest for a national language.
This quest was fated to gain peak momentum in the regime of a party that believes in the equation of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. This party is a devoted follower of the principles of British colonialism in ways it would shudder to recognise. Its notion of Hindutva is fashioned by Protestant Victorianism, which makes it intolerant of the cultural, social, and sexual fluidity of the Hindu way of life. Equally unacceptable is the plurality of Hindustan, or the Hindustani language and its deep founts of inspiration in Urdu and Islamic cultures.
Tamil Nadu has always been the strongest resistor of the national ambition of Hindi. But its recent resistance to Hindi hegemony, following the Union government’s attempt to impose the three-language formula of the National Education Policy 2020, has brought up the pain of language deaths of all stripe. Nowhere has this been evoked more poignantly than within Hindi itself, as Apoorvanand, professor of Hindi at the University of Delhi, has shown recently in an article in Frontline magazine. Even in a university classroom of Hindi literature, the students gathered from various parts of North India do not come from homes that call Hindi their home language. Their families speak Braj, Maithili, or Marwari, and for them Hindi is a ‘language to be learnt’. The current ruling party’s fetish for ‘shuddha’, Sanskrit-inflected Hindi, derived from a high-Brahminical past, is a fabricated fantasy, as fundamentalist utopias inevitably are.
But the legitimacy of Hindi as a national or official language, as the shifting designations have indicated, has foundations far deeper than this fantasy of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. This is the very legacy of colonialism that has left us with the irrevocable reality of the nation which has worked in independent India for the most part barring the occasional spurt of blood along the frontiers and neglected hinterlands. But the quest for a unifying language for this nation has failed beyond its organic popularity in the Bombay film industry, television and web series. Attempts to unify us with a sterilised Hindi from above will only divide us further. Bengalis need look no further than Bhasha Dibas — the liberation on February 21 — for a reminder of how fragile national sovereignty can be in the subcontinent before the force of nature that is the love for one’s mother tongue.
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony