Friday, June 20, 2014

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.

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