Skip to main content

Hindi vs Tamil

Illustration by Copilot Designer


Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin has once again pitted the Tamil pride against Hindi pride. He has been championing the Dravidian cause against the Aryan Shahs of Delhi for quite some time now. Just last month, he offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who can decode the Indus Valley script which, Stalin believes as I too do, was proto-Dravidian.

As a South Indian, I’m on Stalin’s side. The North shouldn’t impose their culture and language and gods on the Southerners. I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone, please. I’m expressing my personal views. If some people of South India want to be bossed over by someone from the North, that’s their wish and I have no problem with it. I don’t want a native version of colonialism.

Like Stalin, I too believe that the Indus Valley Civilisation was Dravidian. Like him again, I would like more research to go into it. The truth may take the entire the wind out of the Hindutva sails. Moreover, the steamroller that the Hindutva shenanigans have set in motion pulverising regional cultures and languages has to lose its steam for the survival of the infinite variety that makes up India.

There’s one thing, however, on which I disagree with Stalin and many other Tamil people. While their pride in their language, whose history goes back to as many years as that of Sanskrit, is justified, their opposition to Hindi is not. Whenever Stalin and other Tamils oppose Hindi, I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s Caliban.

Caliban was the master of the island on which he lived alone until Prospero landed on it. Prospero uses all his powers to bring Caliban under his control, a colonial control of sorts. Eventually Caliban learns Prospero’s language and is happy to be able to “curse” Prospero in his own language.

Language is power. The New Education Policy of India is seeking to impose Hindi all over the country. This is one of the prominent grievances of Stalin. He is right too. And they will succeed in the effort by and by. India is being transformed slowly but steadily, and not so stealthily, by her Conservo-saurus Rex in Indraprastha. Trying to stop that juggernaut is like a mosquito trying to push an elephant back.

A more pragmatic solution is what Caliban can teach us. Learn their language and oppose them in that language. Anyway, they aren’t going to learn our language. Even the British colonisers leant the local languages. But our very own native colonisers don’t intend to condescend. So, learn their language and tell them in that language about your rights and gods and whatever.

Caliban teaches us that language can be used skilfully to preserve identity and shape resistance. “Be not afraid; the isle is full of noises,” Caliban says. He is connected with the island and its noises, its very soul. Unlike Prospero, the “tyrant who enslaved” him. He learns Prospero’s language which he uses effectively for his redemption from oppressive forces.

Caliban teaches us that language is more than communication. Language shapes identity, relationships, and power dynamics. I regret that I didn’t learn Hindi better when I had the opportunity while working in Delhi. I wish Stalin changes his stance on this one issue.

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    True, fighting that juggernaut is a tad futile. Do what the various parts of Britain did; adopt the commercial/common language for trading and wider interaction. But when those from other parts come to your parts, let them discover that although you are speaking "English/Hindi/common language" it is with your local accent/dialect - which will be every bit as foreign as Welsh/Gaelic/Tamil/Malayalam.... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Learning each other's language can be valuable. But saying one language is "right" and everyone should learn it isn't helpful.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In India today, language is being used as a power weapon.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...