English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
English is not tied to any region but is the “second mother tongue,” as it is sometimes called, of the urban elite.
Despite all this, the politics of language in India cannot only be understood simply in terms of the position of English vis àvis “the languages.” The languages have their own rivalries and similarities among them and have varying levels of power nationally. This power derives not only from the numerical strength of each language but also from its perceived cultural worth. This “cultural worth,” not surprisingly, is often defined by a language community's elite members in their chosen fields of cultural production.33 If we consider the language debates and commission report of 1956, we may see, for instance, how English and Hindi were in some ways pitted against each other from the start. They, and their elites, vied for the role of official language (rajbhasha) of the union as well as for the unofficial role as link language. As a result, English and Hindi are in some respects competing national languages.34 This competition exists not only in Delhi, where there is a concentration of elite discourse in both languages, but also in north India more broadly where Hindi is most often recorded as the mother tongue. What we see in the relationship between English and Hindi is a dovetailing of the cultural and the political.
Forty percent of Indians, over 400 million people, are Hindi speakers, though within the appellation “Hindi” are some forty-eight “dialects,” such as Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Marwari, and Awadhi. Hindi is not only a regional language but also, by virtue of being the most widely spoken Indian language, a national language.35 Like English, its hegemonic power is contested but for quite different reasons; for many south Indians, for instance, Hindi is a symbol and arbiter of north Indian cultural hegemony. The major south Indian languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam—are Dravidian based and use different scripts from each other and from the Indo-European languages of the North. This north-south linguistic divide is as relevant to contemporary Indian language politics as the global promises and pretensions of English. Yet English is also implicated in this divide.
The South, especially the state of Tamilnadu, famously opposed Hindi becoming India's national language in a fierce and occasionally violent cultural war. In 1835, during colonial rule, the British made English the language of government (replacing Persian), and knowing English became necessary to obtain coveted government jobs, including those in the railways and the police force. Over a century later, if Hindi were to replace English at the national level in post-independence India, access to government jobs would require knowing Hindi instead.36 In this context, English was curiously a more neutral language and, paradoxically for an elite language, one that promised more equality between north and south Indians. If Hindi was to become the national language, as leaders such as Mohandas K. Gandhi had fervently hoped and planned, the practical consequence would be that south Indians would all of a sudden be at a disadvantage.37 It would be incumbent on them, and not their compatriots from the Hindi belt, to learn an entirely new language (and script) to be in a position to vie for a lucrative government job. For educated, largely Brahmin or other upper caste south Indians, English was already the language of social advancement and cultural comfort. It did not threaten their regional linguistic identities precisely because it was not the language of another Indian region; yet it allowed them a place to assert themselves on an equal footing with English educated north Indians and to excel at the national level.38 The anti-Hindi agitations in the South had the distinction of having the support of nearly all factions of the political spectrum. For non-Brahmins (the overwhelming majority) in Tamilnadu, for instance, Hindi was threatening on at least two accounts: first, it drew away from education in Tamil and represented Sanskrit based north Indian cultural hegemony; and second, if they had to learn a second language, they wanted it to be English, which they saw as a world language and one that Brahmins had already had the opportunity to master.39
Like Hindi, English is able to divide and unite depending on what is at stake; for all its documentation of Hindi and English and its comparisons to other linguistic situations the world over, what the Report of the Official Language Commission fails to stress enough is the relationship and rivalries among the Indian languages themselves. The afterglow of independence and desire for unity did not mean that upper-class Indians were going to change their linguistic priorities if they didn't have to. English thus became more deeply entrenched in the postcolonial government bureaucracy and also became the official language of higher education. The Official Languages Act of 1963 allowed for the continued use alongside Hindi, even after the fifteen-year phasing out period that was to come to an end in 1965. In 1964, when there were more attempts to institute Hindi alone, more protests in the South and elsewhere ensued. By i967 English was officially sanctioned, albeit in reluctant official prose: it would be a “subsidiary official language.” What English became instead, to use Aijaz Ahmad's phrase, was “the language of national integration and bourgeois civility.”40
Unlike Hindi, English could never be viewed as representing “the people”; hence its authenticity was always questioned, even after being accepted as an Indian language in a variety of realms. As Alok Rai makes clear in his analysis of the competition between Hindi and English elites in contemporary north India, it is only political discourse and cultural production in Hindi that may “liberate those democratic energies of the Hindi belt.”41 What Rai is pointing to here is a language's social and political potential in society. Despite its pan-Indian pose, English comes with readymade restraints. Hindi is not only the language of the home, the street, and popular culture (film, radio, television, pulp fiction, comics, music, theater) in north India but also the language of conversation and asides in the very spaces where English is supposedly the most entrenched: government halls and university campuses.
The very fact that political constituencies may be defined in terms of language of course means that these constituencies themselves may be in flux. For instance, English education of dubious quality is increasingly being “sold” to the masses. The widespread opening of “global language institutes” in villages and small towns is just one indication that aspiring to know English is no longer the reserve of the urban middle classes; from construction workers to security guards to domestic servants—everyone wants their children to have English.42 What distinguishes these institutes (which may be located in office blocks or, more often, in ramshackle buildings in local bazaars) is that unlike the traditional English medium education available to upper-class and uppercaste Indians by way of convent schools run by nuns, or today, by mostly private Indian trusts and religious societies, these new centers are open to lower-caste and lower-class groups who could not afford private English medium schools. Contemporary language politics in fact hinges on the politics of both caste and class. English, in the meantime, is signified less and less as a colonial remnant and more as a contemporary global attribute.
THE CASTE OF LANGUAGE
The globalization of English has been especially relevant for the most socially disadvantaged, those who are from the lowest castes. In the realm of Dalit (what used to be called “untouchable” or harijan) and Dalit bahujan (which includes a wider group of lower castes) politics, access to the English language has come to symbolize a new political consciousness. In fact, some see the language as the most feasible and direct method of social empowerment. They are less concerned with the so called linguistic authenticity of the bhashas since the “culture” (and specifically, religion) associated with that authenticity is one from which they are already excluded. As detailed in the scholar and activist Kancha Ilaiah's contemporary political tract, Why I Am Not a Hindu, since Dalits were excluded from Hindu society in terms of day-to-day life on the scriptural principle of being “polluted,” why should they embrace a Hindu identity now?43 Ilaiah's tract hit a nerve precisely because he connected the issue of caste to religious identity and practice, challenging the idea of a large, all encompassing Hindu cultural umbrella. In one fell swoop arguments such as his threaten the Hindu vote bank, one that is dependent on lower-caste and Dalit voters.44
In many respects, Dalit and Dalit bahujan intellectuals who advocate English are responding to an already apparent desire by urban and rural lower classes to have English education for their children. However, for the English education of “the masses,” there will have to be more than an array of private and unregulated language institutes. The real