Is Hindi A Marker Of National Identity?
The status of Hindi in Bharat today is unusual. It is definitely some kind of a linking language, if it is not exactly a link language
Bhārat, that is India, is a country now in a critical period in its history where it is seeking an identity which will become ineluctable in its advancement into nationhood. A national identity includes people with that identity and excludes those who do not. Both these inclusionary and exclusionary attributes qualify any nation, howsoever defined, and whether it is or not congruent with a country. Markers of identity in Bhārat could be one of many: religion, bloodline, domicile, culture, geography, diet, history, economics, and finally, and contentiously, language.
Language is a social necessity because its use is the easiest way for an individual to communicate with his or her neighbour. It is defined by necessity — a necessity to communicate. If it is required for an individual to communicate with another individual, they will construct a common language to do so. Language, therefore, is formed as a link between individuals as a matter of practicality, and usually it is a matter of convenience and common sense.
The origin of a language is therefore rarely emotional. Language is not an emotive issue, and yet it has seemingly become one in contemporary India, with some states feeling that their identity is being threatened. This is not a purely Indian issue — the Catalans, Basques, Ukrainians, Romansch and Maoris have all been through this emotional wringer and yet have not succumbed to centrifugal pressures.
India is a polyglot country. There are many languages spoken all over the subcontinent, from Brahui to Bihari to Beary, and if one counts all the myriad dialects and variations that constitute our micro diversity tapestry, one will run into several thousands of them. Out of this linguistic panorama, let us address the question as to whether one of them, namely a language we call Hindi, is the natural marker of our national identity as Bhāratiyas.
Hindi, as we understand it, is the language that is used in the newspapers, media and various types of documentation. It is easier to define it in its written form rather than through its spoken variations. As spoken, it is hardly defined in a sharp manner. It is a hybrid – to use scientific jargon, it is a linear combination of several linguistic components with variable coefficients. The Hindi that is spoken in Kashi, Ayodhya and Mathura, to take these cities as mere examples, is different. Moving into an outer arc, these varieties of Hindi are different from those that are commonly used in, say, Chandigarh, Bhopal and Patna.
Let us also not forget that the Hindi which is spoken today in our country and what one might attempt to make a marker of national identity has also evolved from something called Hindustani that was widely understood in the northern parts of undivided India, after culling words and phrases from Urdu, another hybrid with a Persian component that served and, to some extent, still serves the needs of Muslims in India. Indonesia and Turkey made similar attempts to 'homogenise' a national language with mixed success.
In summary, Hindi cannot even be defined as a single language, and any attempt to sanitise it towards trying to make it a national identity marker will inevitably disturb and eventually destroy the fabric of micro diversity that has evolved naturally in Hindi — as a social necessity — within the group of Hindi speakers that stands today at a mind-blowing 60 crore in India conservatively speaking.
The status of Hindi in Bhārat today is unusual. It is definitely some kind of a linking language, if it is not exactly a link language. In this respect, it shares many features with English, which is also a linking language — the only difference being that Hindi and English link different sets of people. Both languages are highly useful and important in that they help to bring people together in a country where there are so many factors that tend to tear people apart.
The formation of linguistic states in independent India after 1953 (Orissa was the first linguistic state and was created by the British in 1916) was a singularly ill-conceived decision that was taken as a knee-jerk reaction to an immediate political crisis brought about by a hunger strike by a single individual leading to his death after eleven days. Linguistic states were roundly criticised in 1955 by Ambedkar, who viewed them as facilitating Balkanisation and divisions within the country. Subsequent events have proved him, sadly enough, to have been unerringly accurate.
We face today the spectre of states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal that are politically empowered linguistic entities within the Union of India. These states go against Ambedkar's wise dictum that one must have a single language spoken in any given state but that one must never have a state defined in such a way that all people who speak a single language must belong to it. Effectively, language that had only communicability among individuals as its motivation has morphed into an emotional issue with deleterious socio-economic consequences.
It was possible for many in the Hindi-speaking areas of the country to disregard the so-called Hindi-imposition problem as a peculiarity of Tamil Nadu and its supposedly jingoistic tendencies or of West Bengal with its long and shambolic tradition of opposing anything from Delhi as an infringement on the so-called independence of Bengal. Karnataka too has recently joined this club of linguistic naysayers with the more drastic add-on that no language other than Kannada will be tolerated in this state; any language other than Kannada, except Urdu, is being considered an imposition. Why Urdu should be acceptable while Hindi is not is beyond the comprehension of at least this author. Let us just say that language has become an entirely political issue.
The recent happenings in Maharashtra have taken the language issue into new and disturbing dimensions. Here, the championing of the Marathi language has brought two feuding cousins together on the same political platform after 20 years of not communicating with one another in any way whatsoever. This is a political message to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and any member of the group that was sarcastically termed 'Hindiwallahs" by TT Krishnamachari in the Constituent Assembly debates (1946-1950). Let us make no mistake about the latest political developments in Maharashtra. This Hindiwallah group issued a clarion call in the constituent assembly debates for a unitary structure for the country with Hindi, Hindu, and Hindustan being its main, exclusionary themes. It is well known that the debate on a national language and Hindi numerals was the lengthiest of the debates. Finally, it was decided after two full days of debate that India would not have a national language; Hindi and English became primary co-equals among the 22 official languages in the Eighth Schedule of our Constitution.
Why is Maharashtra important in a way that Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and West Bengal are not with respect to the so-called Hindi imposition by the central government? Marathi is an Indo-European language that shares many linguistic and etymological features with Hindi. It shares the Nagari script too, unlike Gujarati, Punjabi, and Bengali, other Indo-European languages that are also related to Hindi.
According to the 2011 Census of India, approximately 81.26 per cent of the population in Maharashtra speaks Marathi as their first, second or third language. As both Marathi and Hindi are Indo-European languages derived from Sanskrit, with the further influence of Hindi through media and Bollywood, education and migration, it is likely that a majority of Marathi speakers have a working knowledge of Hindi. Without precise census data isolating Marathi speakers' proficiency in Hindi, a conservative estimate based on the linguistic and cultural context would place a figure of 70-90 per cent of Marathi speakers having a knowledge of Hindi. As additional information, 42 per cent of native Hindi speakers in Maharashtra know Marathi.
With so much linguistic similarity between Marathi and Hindi, the emotional reaction of Maharashtrians to the introduction of Hindi as a compulsory subject in Class I and beyond is an unexpected development and warrants close attention by the political class. This reaction should not snowball into a wider conflict that affects all non-Hindi-speaking states, even threatening the unity and integrity of Bhārat. This is as clear a signal as a political signal can get, and it would be foolhardy of the BJP and RSS to ignore it.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has talked about the medium of education in schools in terms of the three-language formula, but what these three languages will be and whether they will be uniform in all or most of the states is left unsaid. Little is mentioned in NEP about how all its recommendations (including the ones on language) are ever going to be implemented. This is the biggest, even catastrophic, deficiency in the document and one which can even render the entire NEP nugatory.
As an immediate ad hoc, stopgap measure, the central government will do well to announce that Hindi will not be a medium of instruction in a non-Hindi speaking state, at any level, without the express concurrence of the state in question to so include it. How the rest of the 3-language formula is to be implemented, whether it should be a 2-language formula or whether we do not even need any 'formula' for language in a polyglot country, will be a matter for further mature discussion. For now, the immediate priority is to cool the political temperatures south of the Vindhyas so that this discussion on Hindi ceases forthwith.
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Hindi is not a marker of national identity, and any attempt to force-feed this language to large numbers of non-Hindi speaking people will only lead to deleterious consequences for the BJP at the hustings.
(Gautam Desiraju is in the Indian Institute of Science and UPES, Dehradun. He has discussed the formation of linguistic states in a recent book, 'Delimitation and States Reorganisation', which he has co-authored with Deekhit Bhattacharya. He has a working knowledge of Hindi and speaks three South Indian languages. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views)
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First Published:
August 04, 2025, 00:16 IST
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