In battle against ‘Hindi imposition’, a war between two distinct visions of India

The war of words between politicians of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and politicians of the Bharatiya Janata Party has been represented in the press as a battle between two languages, Tamil and Hindi. That description is not inaccurate, yet it is incomplete. For, at a deeper level, the debate represents two very different ideas of India: one that welcomes diversity and difference in culture as well as in politics, and the other whose unspoken motto is “Standardise, Homogenise, Centralise”.

The opposition to Hindi imposition in Tamil Nadu goes back a long way, to the late 1930s, when a Congress government in what was then the Madras Presidency chose to make Hindi teaching compulsory in schools, albeit in stages. Ironically, the prime minister (as the nomenclature then ran) of Madras at the time, C Rajagopalachari, later radically changed his position.

By the 1950s, he began arguing, just as Tamil politicians do now, that if a second language was to be taught in addition to one’s mother tongue, this should be English, rather than Hindi. To those (such as Ram Manohar Lohia) who disparaged English as an alien tongue associated with the colonisers, Rajaji responded that English had become an entirely Indian language, indigenised in practice. Further, if Saraswati was indeed the Goddess of Learning, then surely it was she, and not some strange White man in a cold island thousands of miles away, who had given birth to English too.

In 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri sought afresh to impose Hindi by making it, instead of English, the language in which the Centre and the states communicated with one another. This sparked massive protests in Madras state, taken advantage of by what had now become the major Opposition party in the state, the DMK. Shastri withdrew the offending order; nonetheless, the Congress suffered such reputational damage that it lost power in a state whose politics it had long dominated. Since 1967, it has been only one of the two Dravidian parties that has been in power in Tamil Nadu.

MK Stalin and his advisers surely know this history. They calculate that just as the opposition to Hindi once vanquished the dominant political party of the 1960s, so likewise it could keep at bay the dominant political party of today. The BJP is desperate to make inroads into Tamil Nadu. Consider the “Kashi Tamil Sangamams” so assiduously promoted by Narendra Modi, the spectacle of a sengol being installed in the new Parliament building, and the resources spent by the party’s top brass in building up a former IPS officer as the Hindutva redeemer of Tamil Nadu and so on.

The DMK’s stoking of the language debate makes electoral sense, yet it also draws on a deep reservoir of Tamil pride. This has several dimensions: cultural, the fact that their language is even older than Sanskrit and has produced equally imperishable literature; social, that movements against caste and gender discrimination began earlier and have had much more visible impact here than in the states of the Hindi heartland; and, not least, economic, that Tamil Nadu is far more industrialised and with a far higher per capita income than the states of the Hindi heartland.

It is important to stress that these sentiments are widely shared among Tamils, and by no means restricted to supporters of the DMK. The Tamils have their self-respect as much as the Gujaratis have their asmita.

Tamil Nadu’s opposition to Hindi imposition is based on politics and on culture. Yet it is also consistent with the spirit of the Constitution as it was originally envisaged. For, until 1976, education was a state subject; it was only under the Emergency that it was shifted to the Concurrent List. It is that arbitrary act, carried out under authoritarian rule, which is now being invoked by the Union government to bully the Tamil Nadu government to fall in line, threatening to withdraw funds due to the state unless it follows New Delhi’s diktats.

Three-language formula

Those who oppose Tamil Nadu’s stand refer to what is called the “three-language formula” recommended by various Commissions over the years. This proposed that along with the mother tongue and English, a third language such as Hindi could be taught. However, in practice, the third language in Hindi-speaking states has almost always been Sanskrit. There is no record of government schools in UP or Bihar choosing to have Tamil or Kannada or Bangla or Odia or Malayalam as their third language, nor even Marathi or Gujarati.

Where other states adopted the formula, Tamil Nadu did not. How it has turned out in practice appears to bear out their reservations. For, far from promoting national integration, the three-language formula has been an unwitting tool of State-sponsored Hindi expansionism. It is precisely for this reason that the current regime promotes it. Though the prime minister has been silent on the subject, the home minister has often insisted that Hindi, and Hindi alone, must be the language of communication among the people of different states. He has also made his dislike of Indians choosing to speak in English known.

For about half a century, from 1965 to 2014, the Union government did not actively promote Hindi across the vast, non-Hindi-speaking parts of our country. Yet, the language spread nonetheless, through inter-state migration and, more significantly, through the medium of film and television. It helped that the Hindi of the Bombay film industry and TV serials was a supple, colloquial Hindustani, not the stiff, formalised, excessively Sanskritised Hindi of All India Radio and State propaganda.

Speaking in Kerala last month, Mohan Bhagwat asked Hindus to shun English. Like Lohia once did, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief considers English to be the language of an Anglicised elite whose minds are colonised. He hopes that the language would soon be banished from India. Yet it has not. Particularly since the 1990s, English has spread rapidly, and again through means other than State patronage. The software boom, which was brought about only because our leading engineering colleges taught in English, had much to do with this. English now became identified as the language of social mobility and professional advancement, as a window to a larger and more capacious world.

For many years now, the brilliant thinker, Chandra Bhan Prasad, has argued that Dalits must learn English to get entry into modern professions where they were presently underrepresented. He quoted Dr BR Ambedkar as saying that “English was the milk of a lioness, only those who drink it will roar.” When prominent Kannada writers, in a fit of linguistic pride, asked that English not be taught in schools, Dalit intellectuals responded: first you denied us Sanskrit, now you deny us English — all to keep your (upper-caste) privilege intact.

In this manner, in the decades before Narendra Modi came to power, both Hindi and English began to be known more widely across India – even if the many more Indians who now understood one or both of these languages did not read or speak them with felicity or precision. This growing embrace of Hindi by non-Hindi speakers and of English by Indians was, it must be stressed, voluntary and spontaneous. And it had a salutary effect on the country: politically, culturally, and not least, economically.

Tragically, rather than allow this organic process to evolve further, the sangh parivar wishes to use the power of the state to subtly diminish English and aggressively promote Hindi. This comes from their narrow-minded and even paranoid belief that just as only Hindus are the natural and authentic citizens of India, in the sphere of language only Hindi can serve as the cement of national unity.

In past columns, I have documented (and deplored) the current government’s systematic attempts to make Hindus superior citizens of the land and to humiliate and marginalise Indian Muslims. However, independent India was built and nurtured through its embrace of religious and of linguistic pluralism. No religion was meant to be superior to another, either in theory or in practice, and no language either. It is in this context that the current stand-off between the Tamil Nadu government and the Union government must be viewed.

I do not vote in Tamil Nadu and I am by no means a partisan of the DMK, whose penchant for family rule matches that of the Congress. Yet, what we have here is not a choice between two parties, but between two visions of our country – one which would celebrate the freedom of Indians to dress, speak, eat, make love, and pray as they wish to, the other which would lay down all sorts of prescriptions and prohibitions instead.

This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, is now in stores. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.

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