Recently Amit Shah, the home minister brought up the issue of Hindi to act as a link language among people speaking different languages in states. There was also a discussion in social media between Kannada actor Sudeep and Bollywood actor Ajay Devgan. The point made by Ajay Devgan was that Hindi is a national language implying (though un-stated) that it[Read More...]
When the British ordered the exclusive use of the Nagari script in school in 1880 to meet a Hindu demand in the state of Bihar, the Muslims howled. The Hindi-Urdu duel in the end exploded into Hindu-Muslim war. In free India, Hindi gained the national stature as a symbol of Hindu pride and spread nationwide like wildfire, partly thanks to[Read More...]
Many writings about Hindi are ‘breast beating’ in the style of Bharatendu Harishchandra’s ‘Bharat Durdasha’. This article has a positive attitude towards Hindi Literature. The history of literary Hindi is relatively brief, starting only around 1860. Modern literary Hindi has an even shorter history, beginning around 1936 with the death of Premchand. In this short period Hindi has covered some[Read More...]
Reactionary politics in India, and the Indian State itself, seek to promote Hindi and thwart development of other languages and nationalities, not only those of South India, but notably also those in north India. The term “Hindi States” is an artificial construct meant for the same purpose. Whole languages were undermined and shown as “dialects”. The policy on languages and[Read More...]
Hindi along with Urdu, Kashmiri, Dogri and English, has been made official language of Jammu and Kashmir. A bill is recently passed in the parliament of India to add Dogri and Hindi in list of already existing (Urdu and English) official languages of Jammu and Kashmir. People of Jammu and Kashmir feel alienated and express their distress, as their right[Read More...]
If the Anglophone Indians are derided as ‘Macaulay’s children’, then the Hindi speaking Indians can also be called ‘Gilchrist’s children’. My late maternal grandmother – who had studied philosophy and biology in the 1940s Calcutta – had told me once during my boyhood, that Calcutta was the birthplace of the modern Hindi language: it was ‘invented’ by the British[Read More...]
