Language and Politics in India: An overview
After India’s independence, the government decided that the
official language of India will be Hindi. India is the home to the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families, two of
the world's largest. Hindi belongs to the family of Aryan languages. India is one of the multilingual nations in the world
today. The Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman language families are also found in
India, though by relatively few people compared to speakers of the other two
families. These language families show India's lengthy and diverse linguistic history.
The Indian sub-continent has been united under various empires during the last
thousand years. The fragmentation into many small kingdoms has helped spread
many common linguistic features among Indians without allowing any particular
language to become overwhelmingly dominant. After independence from the British
in 1947, Indian leaders chose Hindi as the official language of India in the
hope that it would make easy regional communication and encourage national
unity. They were aware of many of the difficulties inherent with setting up a
single language in India's multilingual environment, and they accordingly laid
out a plan for introducing Hindi and English together. Despite this planning,
Hindi, and English today still share their status as official languages. This has
happened due to many unseen obstacles in addition to tactical errors made by
some of the promoters of Hindi. Urdu speakers were more curious to take Urdu as
the official language of India. Before the independence, Urdu was the official
language in India. People used to communicate in Urdu except Britishers.
Mahatma Gandhi used the term “Hindustani” to solve the language problem. Hindus
were not in favour of Urdu and Muslims in Hindi as a national language. Urdu
and Hindi are the same languages with different names. After independence, Hindi and English used as
official languages. These errors led to forceful counteractions by the groups,
who felt that Hindi was being imposed upon them.
This situation insists me
for the analysis of political and social aspects of language planning and
promotion as an overview of it. English has not taken place in Indian general
social life except for those in the educated classes. Many Indians feel that
English is no longer a foreign language; they have made it their own. Regarding
Hindi, they indicated that being a national language, people communicate with
whichever language or mixture of languages they are most comfortable with. The
point is that there is a great deal of opposition to Hindi by the Urdu speaker
as well as the other southern language speaker. Unable to synthesize the
divergent viewpoints I had been very clear from my various observations, I
decided to make the historical overview of language politics in postcolonial
India, so, I could answer some of the questions in my mind. What are the issues
with the language policy and planning? Why was it so criticized in India? Why
cannot India function effectively with a common regional language? How much significant
was the language politics to Indians? And finally, what will happen in the
future?
The information I have gathered to answer these and other questions obtained from literary, Internet, and other sources. These sources were extremely useful for understanding the background of the language issue. The India news servers on the Internet provided very current information; however, much of it was only tangentially related to the topic.
The Position of languages
in India
As mentioned above, India
is the home of the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families. It also contains
speakers of two more language families, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman. Given
in the Atlas of World Languages (Moseley and Asher 1994, p.207). Even though
the Tibeto-Burman family has the fewest speakers, it boasts the number of
languages. However, one should know the fact that the number of languages which
are recognized after each census. This has happened because of the difficulty
of deciding whether something is a dialect of a language or related to it. The
questions arises here are based on many scholarly debates on the relationships
among languages in India. In 1961, almost 190 languages were listed, which was
a paring down of the 1,652 mother tongue languages names submitted by surveyor.
These reductions affected languages which had only a low number of
speakers-some as few as one or two. Later, many languages were grouped under
Hindi, and other groups were consolidated, which ultimately declined the number
of recognized languages to 175 in 1971 and 145 in 1981. Despite this still
quite a large number, the speakers of the eighteen scheduled languages identified
by the Constitution of India represent 95.6 percent of the population.
•
Indo- Aryan - 491,086,116 74.3%
Dravidian - 157,836,723 23.9%
Austro-Asiatic - 7,705,011 1.2%
Tibeto-Burman - 4,071,401 0.6%
Language documented from
a documentary linguistics perspective. It purpose "to provide a comprehensive
record of the linguistic characteristics of a given speech community."
which aims to describe a language's abstract system of structures smooth rules
in the form of grammar or dictionary. New technologies permit better
recordings, with better descriptions, all of which can be housed in digital
archives, like AILLA or PARADISEC, and be made available to the speakers with
little effort.
The Indian census takes the
widest possible definition of "Hindi" as the broad variety. The
native speakers of Hindi so defined are 41% of Indians. English is
recognized as the native language of 226,449 Indians in the 2001 census.
English is the second "language of the Union of India” besides Hindi.
Eight
scheduled languages of the Indian constitution are as follows:
Hindi, Bengali, Telugu,
Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujrati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Sindhi, Nepali,
Punjabi, Sinhalese Assamese. Maithili, Bhili, Santali Kashmiri. Gondi Konkani,
Dogri, Khandeshi, Kurukh, Meitei, Tulu, Bodo, Khasi, Mundari and Ho.
Thirteen languages belong to more than 1% of
Indian population each, and between themselves for over 95%; all of them are "scheduled languages of the Indian constitution."
Scheduled languages spoken by less than 1% of Indians are Santhali (0.64%), Manipuri (0.14%), Bodo(0.13%), Dogri (0.01%, spoken in Jammu and Kashmir). The language that is not "scheduled" is Bhili(0.95%), followed by Gondi (0.27%), Tulu (0.17%) and Kurukh (0.099%).
Language politics, policy, and planning
Mahatma Gandhi and other secular political
leader prefer Hindustani should be our national language. After having gained
independence from the British in 1947, the leaders of the new Indian nation observed
the opportunity to unite the many regions of India with a single, universal
language. Mahatma Gandhi felt that this was essential to the emergence of India
as a self-proclaimed nation. He
pointed out five requirements for any language to be accepted as the national
language:
•
It should be easy to learn for government officials.
•
It should be capable of serving as a medium of religious,
economic, and political intercourse throughout India.
•
It should be the speech of the majority of the inhabitants of
India.
•
It should be easy to learn for the whole of the country.
•
In choosing this language, considerations of temporary or passing
interests should not count. (Das Gupta 1970, p.109).
The task of the Indian
government was significant but difficult one-not only because choosing the link
language was a controversial task, also because it would be very difficult to
get the public to accept any particular language. Initial years before
independence, Gandhi tirelessly supported Hindustani, which is a kind of
compromise between Hindi and Urdu, as the best choice for a national language.
However, after the partition and the following emigration of millions of Muslims,
Hindu leaders in Congress felt little need for Gandhi's concessions to the
Muslims. They accordingly focused on Hindi and left Urdu and Hindustani to
their fates. However it did not have an assured dominance over the other
languages in India, Hindi seemed the clear choice from the beginning. English,
despite its prominence and somewhat even distribution throughout the nation,
was unacceptable for several reasons. As the language of the colonial power
which had just been ousted, English was too many a "symbol of
slavery" (Nayar 1967, p.12). According to Ralph Fasold (1988, p. 182),
"the former colonial language is an absolutely atrocious choice as a
national language. Nothing could be a worse symbol of a new nation's
self-awareness than the language of a country from which it had just achieved
independence." More importantly, a foreign tongue such as English would
not contribute to the national identity in the way that an indigenous one
could.
English also had few
speakers-only about one percent of India's population. Hindi claimed the greatest
number of speakers of all the Indian languages and it was closely related to
several of the other most widely spoken ones. Though it was unrelated to the
south Indian languages, it was also thought that Hindi would not be entirely
foreign to south Indians because of the strong Sanskrit influence it shared
with the four main Dravidian languages. Whether or not this thinking was
correct, Hindi was chosen as the official language amidst Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru's assurance that it would never be imposed on people in
non-Hindi areas.
The Indian constitution,
in 1950, declared Hindi in Devanagari script to be the official language of the
union. Unless Parliament decided otherwise, the use of English for official
purposes was to cease 15 years after the constitution came into effect, i.e.,
on 26 January 1965. The prospect of the changeover, however, led to much alarm
in the non Hindi-speaking areas of India, especially Dravidian-speaking states
whose languages were not related to Hindi at all. As a result, Parliament
enacted the Official Languages Act, 1963 which provided for the continued use
of English for official purposes along with Hindi, even after 1965. In late
1964, an attempt was made to expressly provide for an end to the use of
English, but it was met with protests from states such as Maharashtra, Tamil
Nadu, Punjab, West Bengal, Karnataka, Puducherry and Andhra Pradesh. Some of
these protests also turned violent. As a result, the proposal was dropped, and
the Act itself was amended in 1967 to provide that the use of English would not
be ended until a resolution to that effect was passed by the legislature of
every state that had not adopted Hindi as its official language, and by each
house of the Indian Parliament.
The position was thus
that the Union government continues to use English in addition to Hindi for its
official purposes as a "subsidiary official language," but is also
required to prepare and execute a programme to progressively increase its use
of Hindi. The exact extent to which, and the areas in which, the Union
government uses Hindi and English, respectively, is determined by the
provisions of the Constitution, the Official Languages Act, 1963, the Official
Languages Rules, 1976, and statutory instruments made by the Department of
Official Language under these laws.
Various steps have been taken by the Indian
government to implement the use and familiarisation of Hindi extensively.
Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha headquartered at Chennai was formed to
spread Hindi in South Indian states. Regional Hindi implementation offices at
Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, Mumbai, Kolkata, Guwahati, Bhopal, Delhi, and
Ghaziabad have been established to monitor the implementation of Hindi in
Central government offices and PSUs. The Department of Official Language set annual
targets regarding the amount of correspondence being carried out in Hindi. A
Parliament Committee on Official Language constituted in 1976 periodically
reviews the progress in the use of Hindi and submitted a report to the President.
The governmental body which makes policy decisions and established guidelines
for promotion of Hindi is the Kendriya Hindi Samiti (est. 1967). In every city
that has more than ten central Government offices, a Town Official Language
Implementation Committee is established, and cash awards are distributed to
government employees who write books in Hindi. Also, these offices have
received orders to open Hindi Cells for implementation of Hindi in their
offices. Recently, the Modi government announced plans to promote Hindi in
government offices in Southern and Northeast India.
Minority and Majority languages in India
A majority
language is usually speaking by a majority of the population in a region of a country. In a
multilingual society, the majority
language is considered the high-status language, also called the dominant language or killer language. In India, Hindi is a majority language that is spoken by
41% people. Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, etc these languages are
minority languages. Regularly uses of majority languages causes to minority
language and sometimes resulting total loss of minority language. A Government
should maintain the status of minority languages along with majority languages.
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