Hindi

 There has always existed a school of thought cutting across political parties (North based) which wanted Hindi to be the National language. The constitution does not name Hindi or any other language as National language although promoting Hindi as one of the official language ( the other official language being English, apart from regional languages) has been a declared policy of the government with 14th Sept declared as Hindi diwas to be celebrated every year. The celebrations are mainly confined to token functions in government and affiliated institutes ( like PSUs) and public speeches by ruling politicians exhorting people to poularise use of Hindi. The demand for making Hindi language as the National language keeps surfacing on such ocassions and each time it is raised by some statement from a politician, it leads to controversy. Such controversies have almost invariably been initiated by politicians from the North and equally invariably engendered fierce opposition mainly from the south. Opposition from Tamils, who claim their language older than Sanskrit, has been the fiercest. Anti-Hindi agitation in the South turned extremely violent when the government under LB Shastri decided to formally declare Hindi as the National language The riotous outbreaks saw wide spread arson and disfiguring and destroying of name plates mainly on government properties like railways and office buildings bearing Hindi. Mercifully the move was dropped by the government. Minor eruptions on the issue are usually doused with platitudinous assurances by some minister or other that there are no plans to impose Hindi as National language.

Language has always been a very culturally sensitive subjects here, an expression of sub-nationalism. Recognising this, the constituent assembly (tasked with framing the constitution) consciously adopted a federal structure with many officially recognised languages but no language as the national language. Reorganized states on linguistic basis was a recognition of this reality. In the mean-time Hindi as a language has spread not so much due to official promotion but more on account of increasing popularity of Hindi movies / TV and movement of people across states for jobs etc. 

Strictly speaking there was no such language as pure Hindi and most of the languages spoken in so called Hindi-belt had ( and still have) a variety of languages- Magadhi, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj, Bundelkhandi, Haryanvi etc with further variations within. Many in Bihar state their mother tongue in the census as Bhojpuri or Magadhi. The forerunner of what can be called official or Sarkari Hindi was Hindustani which derived out of a mix of Urdu and local languages. Urdu too itself evolved as common people’s language in parts of North in contrast to Persian/Farsi which was the court language of the Afghan and Persian and later Moghul rulers. The word “Urdu” derives its origin from Turkish word for army camp, which had soldiers from different regions that led to evolution of some sort of common speech.  Over a period extending from mediaeval to the establishment of British rule, it spread across northern India. As it spread, it borrowed words from local languages of various regions that led to Hindustani / Hindi with vocabulary from both Persian/Arabic and local languages and using both Urdu (Persian/Arabic based) and Devanagari script. Urdu has a fairly impressive literary tradition from 14th century Sufi poet Amir Khusro to Ghalib to modern poets like Faiz and Sahir Ludhiyanvi. Some literary works of Munshi Premchand, one of the giants of Hindi literature, are written in Urdu script. Urdu is thus a unique language evolved in the Northern Indian subcontinent (spoken nowhere else) and is also recognised by Indian constitution as one of the official languages. The Indian currency notes have the values printed in all officially recognised 14 languages including (as of now) Urdu.  However there was opposition to Urdu in some quarters in whose eyes Urdu was a foreign language (which is factually incorrect) associated with Moghul period. (To call Moghul rule a foreign rule or a period of slavery, simply because of religion, is a travesty of history. Except for Babur all the following dynasts, like other feudal rulers in India were born, brought up, lived, ruled, regularly fought and allied with others and buried in India. Like other feudal rulers – Rajputs, Marathas- they were dynasts. Some were cruel and fanatics and iconoclasts, some whimsical, some tolerant but at the end all were rulers constantly engaged in war, conquests, and annexations. The last Moghul was an Urdu poet and was declared leader of 1857 rebellion and was sentenced by the British for waging war of independence against them. Mughals had no links to the original place from where Babur came nor did they take away any wealth out unlike the British. In fact before the British rule India was supposed to be one of the most economically advanced countries and a leading exporter in the world, as Sashi Tharror so eloquently argued with facts and figures in the video clip currently doing rounds in WA groups. ) 

The foundations of bias against Urdu were laid during the British rule itself. With the British policy of religious divide, Urdu with Persian/Arabic script became the language of Muslims and Hindi with Devnagari script of Hindus despite the fact that both communities spoke variations of Hindustani. After the independence official Hindi promotion policy carried this anti-Urdu bias. Hindi / Hindustani language or other local languages were peoples “spoken” language quite different from classical Sanskrit in grammar, structure, vocabulary and sounds, with only some words having Sanskrit origin and also including words of Turkish, Persian. With the obsession of purification official Hindi began to be systematically “Sankritised” by purging Urdu/Arabic/Persian and even regional origin words and replacing them with Sanskrit origin or newly coined words. (In Pakistan, the opposite happened- words from local languages were replaced with Arabic/Persian words in Urdu). On the AIR radio, English news used to be  followed with an announcement "अब हिंदिमे समाचार सूनिये". The language was so suffused with Sankritised words that there was running quip that the announcement ought to be “ अब समाचार मे नयी हिंदी सुनिये". While enriching a language by coining new words for new things or phenomenon is understood, the vigorous efforts to remove Urdu words and even local non-Urdu words can only be described as an obsession to obliterate Islamic influence from Indian subcontinent history. This creates one more issue for division between Hindu and Muslim communities. Ironically most Indian Muslims do not speak pure literary Urdu (nor, for that matter, do most Pakistani). The Sanskritised Hindi in India and Persian-laced Urdu in Pakistan are not what general populations speak..  Such official Hindi is often mocked and ridiculed in movies with some character speaking “chaste” Hindi as actor Omprrakash does in the movie Chupke Chupke

The notion that a language becomes “polluted” by inclusion of words outside the classical language is my opinion hugely erroneous. The language rather becomes richer as it augments the vocabulary and consequently enhances expression and communication capabilities of the language. Take the case of English language which regularly incorporates foreign words and makes them its own.  Some of the words of Indian origin that English has imbibed include Mantra, Guru, Pandit, Pyjama, Juggernaut ( from Jagannath rath yatra), Karma, Dharma, Gymkhana, Cot, Veranda, Thug, Typhoon (Toofan),  Loot, Khaki, Jungle, Avatar and so on. Of course  colloquial everyday spoken Hindi / Urdu  too has words adopted from English but these too are becoming victims of purification – some examples being अफसर/ पदाधिकारी, कप्तान / कर्णधार, अस्पतल/ रुग्णालय. Some of the words purged and replaced from the official Hindi that still are commonly used by general population  include: मुफ्त / निशुल्लका , दोस्ती/मित्रता/यार,खबर/समाचार , शुक्रिया , धन्यवाद, वकत/समय, किस्मत/भाग्य, गुन्हा/अपराध, कमरा/कक्ष , इज्जत/प्रतिष्ठा , शर्म/लज्जा etc

Coming back to the question of National language, given the linguistic diversity in India (and different languages having different scripts),  forcibly imposing one language as a National language above regional languages is a certain recipe for internal strife, a fact recognised by founding leaders of independent India who coined the slogan “Unity in Diversity”. Yet one can be certain that the issue will keep on surfacing from time to time. This stems from the misconceived notion that one language is a must for national unity, a notion that is particularly dear to the

present political dispensation who cannot resist temptation to test waters by raking up the issue from time to time. This is the "Hindi Nationalism". For it, uniformity is a precondition for unity or rather synonymous with unity and as a corollary it sees diversity and federalism as a threat to Nation, notwithstanding lip service paid to Indian federal diversity as an expedient exercise.