By Ranjan K.Bhagobaty
The dream of having a common language of the masses or a lingua franca that connected every nook and breath of our great nation, while at the same time effervescing with the core essence of India and the age old Indian civilization, led to the adoption of Hindi as the official language in India. However, these efforts during the turbulent times after India’s Independence from more than a century old British rule were not without opposition from the southern region of India where Dravidian Languages like Tamil, Telagu, Malayalam hold sway as the preferred languages for people to people communication. Any modern language that is vibrant and living and is widely accepted in the country by the majority of the population is also bound to evolve with time. The Telecommunication and Information Technology boom has now made it possible for Hindi to touch our lives in unique ways and at the same time direct its evolution by enriching its vocabulary. The newly added words may be from global languages like English, French etc. and also from the regional languages of India.
Much of this evolution or transformation of Hindi may be happening for good however, I would like to focus on another interesting facet of Hindi which is not so widely highlighted or is often downplayed by the so called ‘torch bearers’ of the language. This important and often overlooked characteristic of Hindi is the fact that the so called ‘Pure’ Hindi or the Hindi language taught as a part of the school and college syllabus in India, is seldom spoken as such, in any part of India. This is true for all the states even including the states that have been categorized as Hindi speaking states in India. This facet was brought to my notice by a Professor in Jawaharlal Nehru University during an informal interaction, where he argued that “chaste Bhojpuri or that matter of fact Punjabi, Rajasthani, Haryanvi, Maithillli etc. were as different to Hindi as chaste Assamese is”. His words appeared new and revolutionary to me, egging me on to search deep into the origins of Hindi and also my mother tongue Assamese. It was as if I was trying to re-discover India, in my own special way once again. This spark generated by the informal ‘Chai ke upar charcha’ in Ganga Dhaba of JNU campus, New Delhi met with another stream of thought when I joined Aligarh Muslim University for my Master’s degree. A colleague of mine in AMU belonging to the Kishanganj area of Bihar told me that the language or dialect of Hindi spoken in the areas adjoining in and around his hometown known as ‘Suryapuri’ had high levels of similarity with the Assamese language. This information was a great revelation for me as till that age I myself had never found anyone telling me about the similarity of a form of spoken Hindi to my own mother tongue. My preoccupations with a basic bioscience subject i.e. Microbiology during my Master’s degree did not permit me to continue my quest further. However, by that time I began to marvel at our great cultural and linguistic heritage and the great Indian civilization itself, which somehow connected every part of the nation with another.
I decided to check the validity of the informal information accumulated over the years with regards to Hindi by searching the World Wide Web and to my amazement, not only the facets about Hindi were found to be true, but I also discovered something more about the spoken form of the language which enchanted me even further. The spoken form or the form of Hindi widely used in mass media and Hindi movies is known as “HINDUSTANI”. Historically Hindustani has been also known as Dehlvi, Hindavi and Rekhta, and is the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. This widely spoken language is derived primarily from the ‘Khariboli’ dialect of Delhi and incorporates a large amount of words from Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic and has two official forms: Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu. The spoken versions of the standardized forms of Hindustani i.e. Hindi and Urdu are often indistinguishable with nearly identical grammar but they differ in literary conventions and in academic and technical vocabulary, with Urdu adopting stronger Persian, Turkic and Arabic influences, and Hindi relying more heavily on Sanskrit.
Before the Partition of India, the terms Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi were synonymous; all covered what would be called Urdu and Hindi today. After India’s independence in 1947, the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights recommended that the official language of India be Hindustani. However, this recommendation was not adopted by the Constituent Assembly. Hindi, a major standardized register of Hindustani, was declared by the Constitution of India as the “official language of India. The other major standardized form of Hindustani i.e. Urdu became the national language of Pakistan and is also officially recognized as a regional language in India. Urdu has official language status in the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, National Capital Territory of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana, and West Bengal.
Whatever may have been our historical compulsions, it would have been prudent to adopt the spoken form of the language i.e. Hindustani (comprising of Hindi-Urdu) as the official language of India, as our collective architectural, social and cultural heritage seem to be deeply intertwined with this language of the masses. At this juncture however, it is also important to realize that compulsions similar to the ones leading to switch from Hindustani to Hindi as the official language at the time of Independence may once again be at play in our recent efforts to hurriedly rename major Indian cities. ‘Bombay’ became ‘Mumbai’, ‘Madras’ became ‘Chennai’ but were we able to erase some components of our collective History altogether? Or are these an effort to redefine Indian nationalism? Do we still not feel proud of the ‘The Taj Mahal’ at Agra, in a similar fashion as we do for the ‘Gateway of India’ in Mumbai? In the global context also, neo-radical groups have emerged, that have even resorted to destruction of UNESCO recognized world heritage sites and cultural monuments in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The term ‘Hindustani’ is still used to describe the language spoken in North India and is also the Hindi spoken or heard in Bollywood films. It is also used to describe several quite different varieties of Hindi spoken outside the Indian Subcontinent, such as in the Caribbean Islands, Fiji and South Africa. Much to the dismay of the so called puritan ‘scholars of Hindi’ a rapid shift from the Hindi taught in our schools and colleges is happening across India. Hindi News Channels including the news read in Government run Dooardarshan and popular TV shows are using an increasing number of Urdu words to replace the sanskritized standard version of the language. This change is inevitable and it has been even faster tracked by the social media boom.
So next time when somebody tells you to speak ‘Shuddh Hindi’ just smile back at the person and say that you speak Khasi-Hindi/ Assamese-Hindi / Marathi-Hindi / Malayali-Hindi etc. and you are as proud of it as he or she is proud of his or her Bhojpuri-Hindi, Punjabi-Hindi, Marwari-Hindi or in that same context an American is of his American-English, an Australian of his Australian-English. A language of the masses like music itself, which is constantly evolving with time, has a universal appeal that can transcend boundaries of caste, creed, religion and political borders. The all inclusive spoken Hindustani language was, is and will continue to be the ‘true Essence’ of this great nation. Jai Hind!!!
( The writer currently working as :Senior Research Scientist R&D Department Oil India Limited, Duliajan, Assam)