Why Hindi should not be imposed on the South

I could never bring myself to like Hindi and I’ve never ceased to regret that dislike. Most of my professional life was spent in the North and Northeast where Hindi was the lingua franca. I had to manage with pidgin Hindi while dealing with vegetable vendors and auto drivers. My ignorance of Hindi became a pain in my posterior particularly when I travelled by the city buses in Shillong where I worked for 15 long years. Those were tiny buses which could accommodate no more than 20 to 25 passengers but would normally have double that number. “Aage badho,” the conductor would shout all the time and give the passengers a jab each. “Don’t jab,” I longed to say in Hindi and I never could. Even if I learnt the Hindi equivalent of that phrase, it would serve no purpose as I wouldn’t be able to continue the unpleasant exchange that would ensue.  The bus conductors in Shillong of those days regarded themselves as tribal warlords.

My hostile confrontation with Hindi began when I was promoted to grade 5 at school. The burden of Hindi was imposed on students only in the fifth grade in those days. My first Hindi teacher was a Catholic nun who had a domineering physique with an intimidating gaze and a rattan cane in hand. She loved to hate her students whom she punished mercilessly for whatever reason she could think of. Thus Hindi became a nightmare for me and many others.

In the next two or three grades which I studied in a different school, the Hindi teacher turned out to be worse in every way. It was a childless middle-aged woman with a Himalayan body who taught us Hindi in those classes. She too loved the cane more than anything else. Her husband who taught Hindi in the remaining grades at school happened to be a butcher of sorts. In short, I had absolutely no reason to feel any amicable feelings towards that language which the new National Education Policy is trying to impose on all the states in the country.

I studied in two village schools in Kerala up to class ten. Nobody spoke Hindi anywhere around us in those days. Hence our learning of the language was strictly confined to the classroom where the teachers of that language in particular happened to be absolute sadists if not misanthropes. But they gave us pass marks usually in the exams. I remember a question I got once in an exam: Write the antonym of pakka. I didn’t know. When I didn’t know the Hindi word, I usually wrote the Malayalam word for it and sometimes it would be right too. I just had to trim the words a little, that’s all. For example, the Malayalam word prabhatam would become the Hindi prabhat if I trimmed the ending. Since I didn’t know the antonym of pakka, I wrote the Malayalam word for ‘raw’: pachcha. My Hindi teacher was benign enough to award me half the mark since one letter was right; the right answer was kachcha. With many such truncated marks added together, I always managed to pass my Hindi exams.

Nobody took Hindi seriously at school in those days. We were forced to study and we studied enough to score pass marks. Now I’m a teacher of English in Kerala and if my observation is correct very few students take Hindi seriously now too. I’m more sure of another thing: the thirty lakh migrant workers in Kerala who are mostly from North India speak Malayalam with amazing fluency. Quite many of their children study in the state-aided Malayalam medium schools and do well too.

 

Left to right: Sunil Bista, Pooja Dwivedi, Priyanka Singh and Pawan Dwivedi: Children of migrant labourers in Kerala who scored A+ in all subjects including Malayalam. They studied in Malayalam medium schools. [Image and news from Scroll]

Similarly there are lakhs of South Indians (the so-called Madrasis) living in the North and they speak Hindi fluently. People learn the language required for their livelihood. South Indians learn Hindi if they have to work in the North and North Indians learn South Indian languages when they come to work in the South. That’s how life goes on. There’s no need to impose any language on anybody. Language grows on people naturally enough when the need arises. So the controversy about the three-language formula is unnecessary. Let the students learn the languages of their choice. Why insist on Hindi?

Imposing a language on any people is tantamount to imposing a culture. Every language carries a culture with it. This is the reason why many people in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are opposing the move to impose Hindi on them. In fact, most people in India won’t object to English as a link language since that has already become the world’s lingua franca. Even those politicians who seek to impose Hindi on others send their own children to the best English medium public schools. First let them send their children to Hindi medium schools and thus prove their love for the language.