On Hindi as a national Language: A personal History.

TV and the media have made gutter Hindi the de facto language. Not the kind of language that is music to my ears. I do not speak Hindi for the fear that by mistake I might belt out some of that ghastly media Bombay Hindi.

There is a need for ONE language for communication between the states. And that language can never be Hindi and has to be English, because there is virtually no opposition to the use of English anywhere but there is opposition to just about every other language including Hindi. Tragically, the old Hindi imperialists brought this fate to Hindi. When I was growing up right after independence, there was a lot of goodwill for Hindi in the them Madras, Mysore, and the itsy-bitsy kingdoms in present-day Kerala (there was no Kerala, Karnataka, or Andhra Pradesh then). And then the Hindi fanatics hit the fan. Had INC been more understanding things would have been different.

You must remember that after independence the politicians tried their best to keep English out of the list of national languages. They failed utterly because in 1967 Nagaland proclaimed English to be their state language; the consensus was that all state languages should also be national languages of India. We all should be eternally grateful to Nagaland for this wonderful gift.

My father was transferred from Delhi to a place Kasaragod (now in Kerala) in 1951. He knew no Hindi but was favourably disposed towards it also because of his interest in Hndustani classical music. He was a botanist working at a research Institute. The the Hindi imperialists ht them and all researchers were required to put their research on the back burner and attend Hindi classes. It was such a joke! I know because my father took me with him to one of those classes. There were these researchers reading some journal article or simply dozing off while the teacher droned.

Rajaji (Rajagopalachari) was favourably disposed to Hindustani but NOT HIndi. Even DMK probably would have lived, though uncomfortably, with Hindustani. But that was not enough for the Hindi zealots. Nothing short of Sanskritised Hindustani was good enough. That was the last nail in the coffin for Hindi as national language.

This chauvinism has pervaded Indian politics even in areas other than language. For eample, in music, Harmonium was banned on All India Radio until fairly recently on the contention that it was not an Indian but a Western instrument. But then much of Indian music, especially that espoused by muslims, was harmonium based (try looking for qawali music without harmonium). It shut out more than a generation of musicians from All India Radio.

In a democracy, in the long run, nothing can survive without popular consent.

On Indian National Language.

Hindi is NOT the national language of India, it is ONE of the national languages. There are 22 of those, each with equal status. This is a fact clarified by court decisions, and is not an opinion. That is the reason that the rupee note carries its denomination in all those languages. If you look at 50 and 100 rupee notes, you will see that Hindi is the ninth language in which the denomination is listed (in alphabetic order since Assamese and Bengali are the first two).

I like Hindi as a language, especially because of my interest in Hindustani classical music. But while in college, I was a victim of Hindi imperialism. I was forced to study and take university exams even though I did not even know the alphabets well. It was "additional English" that saved me since, luckily for me, the university considered pass in Hindi jointly with that subject. I might have been more enthusiastic about Hindi if I was given the opportunity to develop it a more meaningful pace and not within nine months to master the literature of stalwarts such as Sumitranandan Pant, Harivansh Rai Bachan, and Munshi Premchand.

It is important to realise that Hindi will NEVER be the national language of India so long as a majority of the states do not accept it. If even states in the Hindi belt, and Odisha can be considered a part of it, do not accept it, proponents of Hindi have a tough row to hoe.

Hindi will never replace English. At best it will be a very very distant second language favoured by the uneducated. In fact it is not even a language, but just a dialect, it borrows ts script from Sanskrit like many of the other languages.

On writing

My brother-in-law, an ex-banker and a journalist, sent me the following about Bertrand Russel's thoughts on writing. Thought some of you might like it:

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"First: Never use a long word if a short word will do.

Second: If you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences.

Third: Do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

Take, say, such a sentence as the following, which might occur in a work of sociology: " Human beings are completely exempt from undesirable behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites, not satisfied except in a small percentage of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous concourse of favourable circumstances, whether congenital or environmental, chanced to combine in producing an individual in whom many factors deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous manner." Let us see if we can translate this sentence into English. I suggest the following: 'All men are scoundrels, or at any rate almost all. The ones who are not must have had unusual luck both in their birth and in their upbringing.' This is shorter and more intelligible and and says just the same thing. But I am afraid any professor who used the second sentence instead of the first would get the sack."

(Portraits From Memory London: Allen and Unwin 1956)
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On Tenure

No matter which way you look at it, tenure is a political process, and so it perpetuates the political astuteness of senior faculty (unless, of course the culture of the place makes the process apolitical). After all, the tenured are those who have been astute enough to play the right tune to please the committees. This holds irrespective of whether the university is "liberal", as some would allege, or "conservative" as some can be (believe me, there are plenty of those too).

I served on the tenure committees at SUNY Albany, and as department chair I had to put faculty up for tenure and defend my decisions before the tenure committees as well as the deans. Having worked with programs involving more than a dozen departments (from over half a dozen schools) across the campus my experience was that the quality of the tenure candidates, be they liberal or conservative, are strictly a function of the quality of "senior" faculty. Mediocre senior faculty perpetuate mediocrity, and meritocratic senior faculty perpetuate meritocracy. Both mediocrity and meritocracy are self-perpetuating. This means every tenure case is crucial, and even a very few poor tenure decisions can sink the culture and the reputation of any department.

Having served at many universities, my experience also has been that business schools, especially in accounting,  almost always push mediocre candidates for tenure based on the  argument that it is difficult to recruit without paying exorbitant salaries to incoming faculty.  That, however,  is a recipe for disaster and for long term sinking of productivity. There was a time when I advocated closing a department rather than following the convenient recipe, but then I am sure my colleagues suspected I was snorting something. (In fact that was the rule a long time ago even at SUNY Albany, which shut its Nursing school some time before I went to Albany).

If the tenure decisions are right, there should be no productivity problems provided the university provides a path for those at the tail end of their careers when the productivity is likely to taper (through administrative appointments). That was the presumed rule, at least until recently (Read Rosovsky's fascinating book "The University: An Owner's Manual"). Now, however, administrative positions in the universities have become an alternative career path with the tenure process serving as just an obstacle.

That makes a mockery of the whole tenure process.

In my ideal world, unless one acquired an administrative position at the tail end of one's illustrative career, one would lose tenure at appointment to an administrative position. This also will take care of the present situation where most senior administrators play the musical chairs in a game where no chairs are removed whenever the music stops, and so it is the same set of characters in the game.

I have serious doubts post-tenure review improves the situation because it introduces just one more political stumbling block, penalizing the most precious resource of productive teachers at the tail end of their careers: time.

The only way to solve the problem is to have a culture of productivity (not just in publications that no one reads) in the departments, and then to  defend it as if the department's life itself depends on it.