The bloody history
It’s the human imperative to fight over something. We can’t get out of bed in the morning unless there’s a fight to inspire us. India chooses communalism.
Tensions are rising in India over prime minister Narendra Modi’s push to make Hindi the country’s dominant language.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janaya party (BJP) government has been accused of an agenda of “Hindi imposition” and “Hindi imperialism” and non-Hindi speaking states in south and east India have been fighting back.
Of course with Modi and the BJP it’s not just Hindi, it’s also Hindu – it’s not just the language, it’s also the religion and all the baggage that goes with it.
Modi’s speeches are given exclusively in Hindi and over 70% of cabinet papers are now prepared in Hindi. “If there is one language that has the ability to string the nation together in unity, it is the Hindi language,” said Amit Shah, the powerful home minister and Modi’s closest ally, in 2019.
That’s a big “if” though. It’s entirely possible that there is no one language that can do that. Furthermore, if there were, it could be that only the foreign one would work. English might work the way Latin did in Europe for many centuries: it was no one’s natal language, so it was neutral.
The debate over Hindi’s prominence has raged since before India’s independence. Though there are more Hindi speakers than those of any other native language in India, they are largely concentrated in the populous, politically powerful states in the north known as the Hindi belt. Hindi traditionally has very little presence in southern states such as Tamil-speaking Tamil Nadu and Kannada-speaking Kerala, and eastern states such as West Bengal, home to 78 million Bengali speakers.
…
“Under Modi, language has become a heavily politicised issue,” said Papia Sen Gupta, a professor in the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. “The narrative being projected is that India must be reimagined as Hindu state and that in order to be a true Hindu and a true Indian, you must speak Hindi. They are becoming more and more successful in implementing it.”
Hey I have an idea: why not partition the true Hindu section of India off from the rest of it? That went so well the last time…
Some have warned of the bloody history that language imposition has triggered in the region. Sri Lanka descended into 26-year civil war after Sinhalese nationalists tried to foist their language on the island’s minority Tamils, and it was the oppression of the Bengali language in east Pakistan that led to the 1971 war and the establishment of Bangladesh.
Let’s go to war over language! No let’s go to war over religion! Let’s do both! No let’s do first one and then the other!
In response to the policies seen to promote Hindi, multiple nationalist language movements have now emerged across India, from Rajasthan to West Bengal. In West Bengal, where the Bengali language is seen as a very fundamental part of people’s cultural identity, there has been a growing Bengali nationalist movement over the past two years.
Nationalism begets more nationalism. Anything for a fight, eh?
Ah, you see, now you’re showing your whhhite colonialist privilege in professing the view that neutrality is possible, which is clearly just a self-serving, privilege-preserving concept used to invalidate the lived experience of differently situated speakers under linguistic colonization of alternative ways of speaking.
20 years ago we went to Bangalore to give a course (in English! There was no alternative). One evening a group of doctoral students took us out to a restaurant for dinner. The conversation was, of course, in English, but I asked one of the students what language they would be speaking if my wife, daughter and I had not been there. English, he said, as it was the only language they all could understand. (Bangalore itself is Kannada-speaking, a Dravidian language not related to Hindi, and as different from Hindi as it is from English.)
This is a process under influence by some individuals, but under nobody’s control; though I guess Modi might wish that to be otherwise.
Native English speakers can make their way in most of the world by speaking only their own language, though courtesy demands that a sincere attempt be made to speak the native language of the listeners. Thanks to British colonial rule, English is the second language of India, and much of the rest of the world as well.
A German man of my acquaintance used to tell English speakers: “far too many of you lot believe that you own the English language. You don’t.”
Athel – ya. It’s the same as if a Swedish person & a Finnish person & a Dutch person (& a Danish & a Norwegian) went to dinner together – the lingua franca would be English. Anglophones are lucky this way.
I think we need to take a step further back still. Choosing a language that is truly nobody’s natal language screws everyone over equally. Some possible candidates include Esperanto, Klingon, one of Tolkien’s Middle Earth languages (though if I recall correctly, I believe Elvish had a large dollop of Welch, or Gaelic, or something British in it), or Pig Latin.
At least “I am Groot” is easy to learn, and no less meaningful than anything else is going to be after agenda-pushers of every kind are finished turning every word in every language on Earth into Newspeak.
I am Groot!
Excellent point!
YNnB: Indeed, when I first learnt of the existence of native Esperanto speakers I expected to find evidence of moral agonising about the compromise of the premise of neutrality that they represent and was surprised by my search coming up empty.
I’m always amused* that the “language of the Franks” is English, at least for now.
Otherwise — please, anything but Esperanto. Why not Esperanto? Here‘s a comprehensive and sometimes amusing* “opinion piece, not an objective guide, to a Victorian constructed international auxiliary language”.
Disclaimer – I’m merely fascinated by human language in a somewhat abstract sense, having failed to learn more than one fluently despite the best efforts of my teachers.
* but then I am easily amused…