Mahatma Gandhi wanted Hindi to be the national language of India. Thus, in 1937, when Congress took power in Madras Presidency, Hindi was made a compulsory subject in schools. Karunanidhi- who was 14 years old at that time- took the lead in the local student agitation against this measure. 30 years later, another anti-Hindi agitation would gain him the Chief Ministership. But, meanwhile, he had dedicated himself to writing in a chaste Tamil- which sought to throw off foreign influences and return to the pure language of the Sangam age- on a variety of topics. One reason for this was that some 20 years before he was born there had been some talk of getting rid of the Tamil Dept. at the University. Tamil scholars came together to insist Tamil was a classical language just like Sanskrit. Since the claim was true, the people supported it. Telugus, no doubt, wanted their own State but they had no animus against Tamil. They too wanted to return to the classical language which prevailed in their age of glory.
Karunanidhi's scripts for great films and his songs and poems won him mass adulation. Thanks to his leadership role in the anti-Hindi agitation in the mid-Sixties, he was elected Chief Minister five times over subsequent decades. His son, Stalin, now rules Tamil Nadu. Language politics can be the path to gain and retain power. But only if you have something interesting to say and can do so using impressive, memorable, language.
Hindi did become the national language. Even when not required to do so, many people from all over the country found it worthwhile to gain some degree of proficiency in it. But it had no great or even good writers. It had miserabilist shitheads who were clearly as stupid as the cows whom they lived amongst. Still, as a lingua franca, Hindi worked perfectly well. Also, it was easy to learn to write shuddh Hindi correctly. True, what you wrote would be turgid shite but the true Hindu has no great objection to turgidity providing he gets to write it rather than read it. This is also the reason so many of us write in English. I have published over 17 books in the English language. This excuses me from ever having read anything more challenging than an Archie comic.
A grandson of Premchand- a miserabilist Urdu & Hindi writer of the pre-War period- Alok Rai, whom I once met in the office of Siddharth Vardarajan's father, is very well educated. He may actually have read some books. UP-wallahs often do because they get tired of talking to cows and getting the worst of the argument. Pankaj Mishra is a case in point. But can they write anything sensible? No. They are true Hindus even if they pretend to hate that religion.
Consider the following essay, by Rai, on the
The Persistence of Hindustani
i.e. the fact that Hindi is a lingua franca because...urm... that's how lingua francas work. Whatever is Hindustan's lingua franca will persist so long as it is the lingua franca.
One may also speak of the persistence of Indian English. One may say it is descended from 'Hobson-Jobson'. Why was it not adopted as the official language of India? Was it because it was shitty compared to the English used by Oxbridge dons and London barristers? Yes. Both GV Desani & Niradh Chaudhuri were broadcasters during the War. Both wrote books- 'All about H.Haterr', written in Eurasian jargon, was praised by TS Eliot as 'modernist'. It was by Desani who had been with the BBC in London. 'Autobiography of an unknown Indian' was by Niradh Chaudhuri who had been a broadcaster in Delhi. Chaudhuri's book was relished by Winston Churchill and greatly praised by E.M Forster & Sir John Squires. Why? The man wrote like Macaulay not a Mumbai pimp. Tardean mimetics- imitation of the superior- prevailed in language in so far as it was used for important purposes. For unimportant purposes, you may always use the language of the gutter or lowest common denominator. This was the reason that people who used Hindustani when abusing each other switched to shuddh Hindi or chaste Urdu or Macaulay's English when speaking or writing for some purpose of personal, professional, or political advancement.
The ghost of Hindustani continues to haunt the language debate in our country.
No. It is done and dusted. States determine what languages will be used and taught in Governments offices and schools. Both Hindi and Urdu may be recognized. Neither may be permitted. However, it is the market which has increasing salience. If learning Korean can get you a good job, people learn Korean. But people may also learn it just to be able to watch Korean TV serials or to sing along to K-Pop.
Whenever the matter of Hindi and Urdu is discussed, it has been observed, tempers fray and voices rise—and then, inevitably, the name of Hindustani is brought up as a pacific compromise.
No. Nobody gives a shit. True, if your cows keep defeating you in argument you may want to fight with somebody about Hindi and Urdu. But this is because you have shit for brains. Not the good sort of shit- like the type cows produce. No, what is crammed into your cranium is the nasty, smelly, sort.
It has been playing this role, unsuccessfully, for a long time now. This essay is an attempt to see whether this ghost can finally be laid to rest, if only to free ourselves to attend to the real issues for which the name can only be, after all, but a nominal solution.
Real issue is Hinduism. It should be abolished. Did you know Modi is a Hindu? Only if we get rid of Hinduism will we get rid of Modi.
A ghostly continuity implies a prior unghostly existence, but with Hindustani, its being appears to have been, at best, ectoplasmic from the very outset, always hovering on the edge of existence and, indeed, frequently falling off altogether.
No. It was a name not a thing.
Thus, on 9 November 1948, in the Constituent Assembly, Ghanshyam Singh Gupta reported: I was in search of simple Hindustani. I could not find it in the constitutional proceedings, I could not find it in the law books…. The official proceedings of this House are published in 3 languages: English, Hindi and Urdu. I read English, I read Hindi and I got read [sic] Urdu with the idea that I might be able to find what they call simple Hindustani. I could not find it. Urdu was Urdu and Hindi was Hindi. There was no such thing as simple Hindustani…
Fauji Hindustani written in Roman script and used by the Army was simple enough. But the Assembly decided to back the Sanskritised Hindi written in Devanagari which had been promoted assiduously for the previous forty years. The creation of Benares Hindu University was a turning point. Shudh Hindi was seen as a learned language in that you could be proficient without actually speaking it whereas Hindustani was a lingua franca in which you could make yourself understood but which would not do for any official, ceremonial, or scholarly purpose.
It may be argued that Hindi, in seeking to Sanskritize itself, was emulating Urdu. When Ghalib switches between Persian and Urdu, he is asserting his ancestral claim to both. When Iqbal switches from Urdu to Persian, it is a reflection of his scholarly success achieved under the British educational system set up in the Punjab. Few Muslims were 'Mirzas'- i.e. descended from aristocratic Turkish or Persian warriors. But they wanted their children to attend the new schools and colleges. If they couldn't become Doctors or Engineers, at least they could talk like Iqbal to signal their superior education. Better yet, if your son rises as a lawyer or civil servant, he can forget the vernacular and start speaking English at home. He will still be able to read out an orotund speech written in Persianate Urdu or Shuddh Hindu on some ceremonial occasion.
From the seventeenth century onward, English- and other European languages- had created a prestigious, scholarly, version of their language which was taken to be the standard. More and more books were written published in this somewhat artificial register. A German Professor may be proficient in English- in that he can write a learned essay in that language- but he may not be able to speak it intelligibly. A Cockney chimneysweep would be in the reverse position. But we wouldn't call his language 'Cockney'. He would be an English speaker- albeit one with a non-standard accent and idiom.
Like another famous ghost, Hindustani too might have something important to tell us.
Was it ghost of Patrick Swayze? I am convinced Alok is in love with Swayzeji's ghost and have written extensively on the topic. This is because I don't have any cows to talk to.
Scholars of nationalism distinguish between two broad kinds: the first of these may be characterized as geographical-territorial; the second, associated primarily with the name of the nineteenth-century German thinker Herder, is cultural-linguistic.
But what we have in South Asia is religious nationalism. Sri Lanka is Buddhist. Bangladesh and Pakistan are Islamic. India holds together because it is Hindu.
There is a further distinction to be found in the literature—that between patriotism and nationalism proper.
Thus, if there are a number of city-states or principalities which belong to the same Nation- e.g. Prussia and Bavaria both of which considered themselves part of the German nation- a patriot of Prussia might be happy to give his life fighting a patriot from Bavaria.
Thus, patriotism is the affective commitment to a particular place and its ways of being;
Not necessarily. A patriot may hate the 'ways of being' of the place for which he feels patriotism.
and nationalism, on this account the bad sister, so to speak, is the assertion of the superiority of one’s own particular “nation” against other competing “nations.”
That is chauvinism. An Imperialist or a Communist may be a chauvinist but opposed to Nationalism- i.e. the creation of a Nation State.
These “nations” may be, and often are, found (discovered/invented) within the same geographical-territorial domain. Then again, these categories are both fluid and overlapping, and there is the residual and inescapable ambiguity of the term “nation” itself—is it something “given” or something “achieved”?—which renders this terrain both intellectually and politically treacherous.
Nonsense! A Nation is a bunch of people who assert a common nationality even if they are currently divided between other countries- e.g. the Kurdish nation. The Jews are a nation just as the 'goyim' (non-Jews) belong to various nations (the word goy means Nation).
With that proviso, therefore… The inherent “naturalness” of the Indian landmass lends itself easily to illusions of divine ordination.
No. Some nations have 'natural frontiers'. Others don't. India doesn't. Religion is the barrier which created the boundaries with Pakistan and Bangladesh. You may say this was Allah's ordinance.
After all, one has only to look at the rhythmic elegance of the Indian subcontinental landmass—clearly demarcated from the rest of Asia by high mountain ranges and, somewhat messily, by the northwestern deserts; washed by three seas, by the dark waters of the Bay of Bengal and the blue waters of the Arabian Sea—to fall prey to some version of the thought that God “intended” India.
Only if you are as stupid as shit. What happened was that Brahmans and Shramans and various other religious sects spread across most of what is now India. This created the sense of a common oikumene. Indeed, the Vedic religion had a notion of where it was permissible to settle without loss of caste. Hinduism, in its broad sense, created India as we know it. There are separatist movements in non-Hindu majority areas on the borders. Rai won't accept this simple fact. That is why he is troubled by ghosts though, sadly, not always that of Patrick Swayze.
Variations on this theme may be found all the way from the Vishnupurana to modern times.
Nepal and Sri Lanka would have been considered part of Arya-varta or the common oikumene. Burma probably not. Still, India has no designs on Nepal or Sri Lanka.
From this purely aesthetic point of view, the violence of Partition was more than merely physical—it rent asunder that which God had, manifestly, formed.
From the practical point of view it got rid of the Muslim League. For Nehru, this was cheap at the price.
In the course of history, however, this, and such, “naturalness” has had little persuasive appeal, except for those who are its beneficiaries. Thus, our colonial masters, for instance, were unlikely to abandon the colonial enterprise of “civilizing” India merely on the aesthetic grounds that their presence here was an intrusion into something that was already sufficient and complete.
I don't get this. The Brits created an Empire in India. They did look at 'natural borders' because those are more defensible. But they also had to look at the economic resources of different territories. Burma could be made profitable if you brought in Indian labour. But Burma was different from India. The Brits did not resist its going its own way in 1937.
Even as God rested, satisfied with his handiwork, having pared his fingernails, the mischievous Brits stole in.
They should have let the French take over the territory.
In other words, the geographical-territorial version of nationalism had to be supplemented, during the course of the Independence struggle, by other linguistic and cultural forms, which drew on more immediate loyalties, and therefore commanded greater mobilizational force.
No. The 'geographical-territorial version' was wholly irrelevant. All that mattered, after 1920, was how people would vote. Alok doesn't get that it was the 1946 election result which triggered partition.
Thus, the emergence of the freedom movement is also the period during which different cultural and linguistic regions begin to acquire a self-conscious regional awareness.
This was already happening. The more newly acquired territory resented the influx of clerks and lawyers from the regions which had been longer under British rule. Thus Bihari Kayasths were against Bengali domination of the administration. But caste associations soon merged into Provincial associations which in turn merged with either the INC or the Muslim League. Why does Alok not know this? The answer is, he prefers to live in a fantasy world where ghost of Hindustani is lingering like a bad smell. If only it would fuck the fuck off, ghost of Patrick Swayze will come and give Alok some red hot anal loving.
The tension between the regional and the supra-regional—if not yet, or always, or consensually, “national”—is familiar to all students of the evolution of our modern being.
More so to 'Madrasis'. Rajaji was a Tamil chauvinist. Radhakrishnan was a Telugu chauvinist. Linguistic reorganization of the States was required because of pressure from below. But Telengana too resented domination by coastal Andhras. I suppose Orissa too will be split up.
The inherent and exhilarating (and sometimes infuriating) diversity of India lends itself to being configured in different ways in order to yield different “unities,” different and competing “ideas of India.”
No. Religion trumps Language though not necessarily caste. Resentment of 'outsider' domination can lead to the redrawing of Provincial boundaries.
But for all that cacophony and contention, there was general agreement on the idea that there must be one national language
No. There was general agreement that the thing didn't matter. States would make their own arrangements one way or another. When it came to Religion, however, best tread carefully. Look what happened to Indira after Bluestar.
—and after the first flirtations with polite “memorandum” nationalism, it was realized that
cow-protection was the way to go to achieve mass-contact. Also, in Maharashtra, Ganapati Puja and opposition to draconian enforcement of the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 played a role. However students were increasingly being drawn to revolutionary organizations of a patriotic kind. The agitation against the partition of Bengal and Hindu resentment of 'pro-agriculturist' land laws in Punjab played a part. Even somnolent Madras was waking up. The Vernacular press was throwing off its timidity. Profits could be made by catering to the rising generation.
the communicational-mobilizational needs of the movement required that this national language be one that would be accessible to the broad masses of the Indian people.
No. Gandhi found that the Hindi edition of his paper needed subsidization. It would be convenient if everybody adopted the same language but for that to happen you would have to produce something worth reading. Sadly, the only people who could write in Hindi wrote miserabilist shit- probably because they kept being defeated in argument by supercilious cows. On the other hand, people were prepared to watch Hindi films if the actresses were pretty and the songs were nice. Nothing wrong with Hindustani music. It is Hindi literature- thanks to the likes of Premchand- which is boring, miserabilist, shite. Why? The Hindi writer feels contempt for his reader. Why throw pearls before swine? Just dash off some sob story about rustic retards being beastly to each other in the boondocks and see if you can get paid some money for it.
Gandhi is often credited with the political initiation of this idea,
Gandhi had a spiritual quality. Many learnt Hindi because he commanded it- just as he commanded them to spin cotton or go to jail. But they wouldn't read Hindi. Why? It was boring shit written by people who were stupider than cows and who firmly believed their readers where even stupider and more bestial. Rai should understand that if there is a Directive Principle regarding cow protection in the constitution, it is because average IQ in UP will fall if cows are killed or otherwise excluded from the aggregation exercise.
but forms of this are to be found much before Gandhi’s advent into Indian politics, in the writings of sundry forward-looking thinkers, particularly from Bengal. Thus, Purushottam Das Tandon, the Hindi ideologue, speaking on 14 September 1949, reminded the Constituent Assembly: We have been speaking of a national language for years and years. It is not a new subject before the House. It was in the 19th century that this idea of a national language took shape in Bengal, not in Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) or Bihar…. Lakshmi Kant Maitra, representing Bengal, grumbled: “We have been amply rewarded for all that!”
After partition, it was obvious that the cow-belt would have a disproportionate number of votes. The trick was to get them to accept a language called 'Hindi' which they themselves could not speak. Boring official communications can be written by clever Bengalis or Madrasis in Sanskritized Hindi. That way the cow-belt would be kept in the dark about what had been decided.
...The wise people who were running the Constituent Assembly managed to save the situation by deferring the question of language until the very end, when most of the Constitution was in the bag already, and members were reluctant to abandon the whole project, or start all over again.
This is silly. Nehru was in the driving seat. It didn't matter what the Assembly did or didn't do.
However, the universally and consensually acceptable “national” language, prior to the convening of the Constituent Assembly, was not Hindi but Hindustani.
Gandhi didn't know Sanskrit and spoke only the lingua franca. Nehru had absorbed correct Hindi from the women of his family though he himself liked Urdu.
Fauji Hindustani was a possibility. The problem was that Provinces were determined to hang on to their separate scripts. If Hindustani is written in Roman, the habit might spread to other languages.
There, as we have remarked already, it continued to lead its ghostly existence, hovering between being and non-being.
No. Like Cockney, it was downgraded to a vulgar dialect or lingua franca good enough for soldiers and prostitutes but not senior bureaucrats or professors.
...the fact of the matter is that “the question of Hindustani” refuses to lie down and stay dead, so to speak.
Is there any political party which says 'replace Hindi with Hindustani?' No. The issue is dead. Alok may say 'it is a pity that such and such wasn't done 75 years ago' but the riposte is 'it couldn't be done then. It can't be done now. Don't be silly.'
Once it became crucial for the emergent Hindi-Hindu savarna proto-élite, in the period after 1857, to make space for themselves in the colonial administration
It is always crucial for a proto-elite to make space for itself in any administration whatsoever. What was funny was that the way this was done was by putting on dhoti, shouting slogans in Hindi and then going to jail. Suppose, in the year 1910, someone had pointed at Dr. Rajendra Prasad and said 'that man will occupy the Viceregal Mansion', you would have assumed that, like S.P Sinha (who was made a Lord) he would have risen as a barrister and then as a learned judge and then a member of the Viceroy's Council before gaining the ultimate accolade of being appointed Governor General on the grounds of his intelligence and erudition. You would not have guessed that Prasad would spend years as a khadi clad jail-bird.
the shared and overlapping linguistic space had to be divided and split up.
Nonsense! Bengalis and Madrasis and so on did no such thing. The elite, under the Raj were White. You could join that elite by becoming a Judge or an ICS officer or making so much money that you were knighted or given a Baronetcy.
Then, the name “Hindustani” could mean either that overlapping part of the continuum which was common to both Hindi and Urdu—which was no fun at all if one was thinking of making space for oneself in the zero-sum game of the colonial administration; or “Hindustani” could mean that part of the continuum which was neither Hindi nor Urdu—in which case it disappeared altogether, as it did for Mr. Ghanshyam Gupta.
This is nonsense. Muslims had already decided to upgrade the vernacular using Arabic and Persian. Iqbal taught Arabic in Lahore before travelling to Europe. Subsequently, he began writing in Persian. His Urdu poetry caught on. There was genuine enthusiasm for the language. This meant there was an in-built support base for his vision of an Islamic Pakistan. By contrast, there was no enthusiasm for Hindi. Still, as an official language, you could have a stilted, Sanskritised, version of it. In any case, India needed to concentrate on Engineering not Literature.
As the politics of dissension gathered steam, and— mixing metaphors madly—snowballed and ramified, “Hindustani” came to denominate the terminological compromise which was advocated by Gandhi, among others. However, compromise was the last thing anybody had on their minds at that time,
because the Muslim League could paralyse the administration if Partition wasn't conceded.
and “Hindustani” left both of the combatants dissatisfied and suspicious:
because good writers wrote in Urdu. Hindi had no literature save of a miserabilist kind.
each saw the name as a Trojan horse for the other side—even as it sought, with manifest contradiction, both to distance itself from, and to claim, also for its democratic legitimacy, the common terrain!
Trojan horses are wooden. They can't gallop. Urdu was a Bucephalus. Hindi was a donkey which hoped to one day become a cow.
In this kind of force-field, Gandhi’s compromise formulation “Hindi or Hindustani” was doomed to failure.
Because Jinnah would not compromise with him. Why does Rai not understand this? Muslims followed Jinnah. They wanted Pakistan and Urdu not Hindustani and Kaffirs. Perhaps, if people had wanted Maithili, Avadhi, Bhojpuri etc, they'd have got it. But they didn't. Why? They could have as much of it as they liked in any case. They wanted their kids to learn something at school which would help them to rise. Sanskritized language had prestige for Hindus for a religious reason. Persianate language had prestige for Muslims for both social and religious reason.
True, some self-hating Hindus might prefer Urdu to Hindi. But English was superior to either. It marked a superior deracination and self-loathing.
That “or” could connote either alterity or identity. It could mean either that Hindi was the same as Hindustani, so the mullah was up in arms, or that Hindustani was an alternative to Hindi, so the pandit, quite as pugnacious, would have none of it. Census data offers a comic, and also tragic, illustration of the fate of Hindustani in our troubled times. Thus, between 1931 and 1951, the numbers of people claiming Hindustani as their mother tongue in U.P. declined by 86.4 percent, and by 98.5 percent in the period 1951–1961. Similar catastrophic declines—disappearing millions!—reflect little more than the communalization of linguistic identities.
No. The issue was 'what language should be taught in schools?' The answer was 'a more prestigious type than is commonly spoken'. Hindi may not have much in the way of literature. Sanskrit does. Shuddh Hindi opens the door to Sanskrit scholarship. Persianate Urdu opens the door to Persian itself. But Arabic is better yet. Elite Urdu speakers complain of a growing tendency to prefer Arabic words or Arabic pronunciation for Persian equivalents- e.g. 'Allah hafiz' for 'Khuda hafiz'.
. Hindustani isn’t the only language-description to have gotten caught up in the politics of identity. Thus, in the 1941 census for Punjab, language statistics were not collected because it turned out that there were no Punjabi speakers there at all: the Muslims claimed Urdu as their mother tongue and all the others claimed Hindi! The 1971 census still recognized Hindustani, albeit grouping it under Hindi, but subsequent censuses have eliminated Hindustani altogether. The terminological difficulty is so acute that one is tempted to abandon the name altogether—except that there is something valuable in the idea of Hindustani that continues to haunt us;
what haunts Rai is the idea that if Grandpa hadn't died in 1936 maybe he'd have written something readable. Iqbal and Tagore would have praised him. Everybody would say 'our children must learn Premchand's language. He writes so well. He isn't a miserabilist cretin at all.' That way there would have been no Partition. The King Emperor would have learnt 'Hindustani'. He would have married his daughter, Elizabeth. to Alok's daddy. Alok would rule over a vast Empire from Bucking Palace.
as opposed to the reality of it, which is at best ambiguous.
No. It is unambiguous. Urdu had good writers. Hindi didn't but we could ignore actual Hindi and just make it the closest thing to Sanskrit possible. After all, smart peeps in Europe learn Sanskrit. Look at T.S Eliot! Nobody wants their kids to have to read Premchand.
The fact that Hindustani was imbricated, but not complicit, with the Avadh feudal order
English was imbricated and complicit with the British Imperial order. But it is useful. Its literature is good. Rai, like his father, prefers to write in it. Hindustani is okay if that's all you know. But you don't want to spend money getting your kids to speak it.
meant that a whole range of cultural possibilities could be represented as being tainted, even as it enabled the Hindi counter-élite—primarily upper-caste and conservative, even reactionary—to pretend to a democratic, popular legitimacy whose consequences are all around us even today.
Modi would not have pretended to have gotten a majority in 2014 or 2019 if Hindustani hadn't been killed by Brahmin bastids.
Summing up in his account of the constitutional debate apropos, Granville Austin remarks: Partition killed Hindustani (1966, 302).
Killing kaffirs caused kaffirs to want Partition. It turned out, they too were good at killing.
The implied antithesis between the two
There is none. Partition means a parting of the ways. Hindustani was a middle ground.
explains the continued lure, the ghostly persistence of Hindustani as something that might assist in the process of recovery from the cultural consequences of Partition.
i.e. Pakistan and Bangladesh begging to become part of India.
But the chances don’t look too good. In a recent paper, Hindustani was described, sensitively, as not quite a language, but rather a zone of “anxiety” between Hindi and Urdu (Hasnain and Rajyashree 2002, n.p.)
Only if you care about such things. But nobody who is not employed teaching shite gives a shit.
This is a pity because a large part of the power and delight of Hindustani consists precisely in the way it enables the skilled user to play with polymorphous perversity, so to speak, over the entire range, from fairly tatsama Sanskrit all the way to fluent Persian and guttural Arabic, providing cross-border frissons to a genuinely multilingual community.
This is similar to the jouissance gained by playing with your own shit. You may think you are being very clever. Everybody else thinks you are a drooling imbecile.
The de-legitimizing of this glorious linguistic domain—particularly in the pedagogical apparatuses of the State— chokes this play and renders the anxious victim-learners dull, pompous and pedestrian.
Nonsense! If you can write well or have something interesting or witty to say, you can make a lot of money talking or writing in a macaronic style.
Unbending, inhumane politics is the inevitable corollary.
Arvind Kejriwal rose because he had taken part in Hindi theatre performances while at IIT. He crafted a persona for himself and an idiolect- featuring words like 'kattar'- for himself. Rahul is trying to do the same thing by saying 'babbar'.
On the recoil from all this, Hindustani presents itself—on the ramparts, at the hour of the wolf—as a utopian symbol, a point of desire, something light, bright and distant from our sphere of sorrow (to coin a phrase!).
Very true. If only Nehru had spoken Hobson-Jobson, India would have been saved from his Dynasty. Instead of saying 'long years ago we made a tryst with destiny', he should have said 'Yaar, long time hum ko Kismet se fucky-sucky mangta hai.'
However Hamlet, beware!
Ghost of your Daddy is actually Hindustani.
I yield to none in my love for this my language.
He had to translate his own 'Hindi Nationalism' into Hindi after 20 years of other translators throwing up their hands and retreating from the task.
And I have often been tempted by the thought—something of an occupational hazard for wordsmiths—that some kind of linguistic initiative might provide the trigger for change, a revolution made by poets.
So, not Premchand or his descendants then.
More realistically, however, I suggest that the yearning for Hindustani is a kind of symptom of our political condition, a revulsion against the purist, intolerant attitudes that inform the politics of the Hindu Right.
The problem is bad writing which is caused by refusing to read your own shite and crossing out everything which isn't informative or entertaining. Good editors make for good literature. That has nothing to do with politics. Rai, in his introduction to his translation of his own book says he is indebted to many learned people. Sadly none seem to have had any editorial skill.
Like a litmus paper, this recurrent yearning can, at best, register change, and perhaps the hope for change,
Nope. That's not how litmus paper works. Hope doesn't count.
but the transformation itself will have to happen in the real, material world.
i.e. yearning doesn't have any magical power.
Sensitive observers realize that the stalemate between the English élite and the Hindi élite that purports to challenge it holds us all hostage.
There is no such stalemate. Everybody understands that only STEM subjects matter. Anyway, AI can do pretty good translation- or even composition- in Indian languages. Religion, however, remains Religion. Hating Hinduism and yearning for it to disappear from India is going to leave you a bitter and disappointed man.
The fact that the privileged speak for “secularism”
like Jinnah?
and the intolerant and communal speak for “democracy”
like Nehru. It was on his watch that Hindi in Devanagari script became the official language.
poisons our necessary public discourse about both of these vital ideas.
No. It is stupidity and bigotry which has that effect.
It is at this point that the possibility of Hindustani presents itself, as the natural vehicle of popular democracy as well as of secularism.
If you listen to Modi, what you hear is not shuddh Hindi or Urdu. You could call it Hindustani. But what you call it doesn't matter. What matters is whether somebody can do his job better than he can. Sooner or later some such person must be found. Perhaps it will be from his own party. Perhaps not. What is certain is that Religion has high 'Income elasticity of demand' in India. The thing isn't going to go away just because you don't like it.
