Can Hindi Suffice ?
By L. F. RUSHBROOK WILLIAMS
THE acute controversy raging in India over the questions if, how and when Hindi is to replace English ranks among the kind of headaches which recently led Mr. Nehru (unsuccessfully) to beg the Congress Party to allow him a short period of freedom from office so that he can think them out quietly. At first sight the Hindi versus English dispute looks like one of those private fights from which good manners debar all outside participa- tion; a matter which India must and will decide for herself. But the possible international and domestic implications of any attempt to force Hindi into the place which English now occupies are so far-reaching that a foreigner may be for- given for pondering upon them.
Bismarck remarked that the future of Europe might well be shaped by the mutual understand- ing developed between Britain and the United States because Americans speak English. Sub- sequent history has shown that he was right. Since his day the English language has become a world language : a powerful link between all nations, Eastern as well as Western, who practise parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. It fulfils these functions, moreover, without in any way displacing national languages, as the ex- amples of Ceylon, Malaya, Pakistan and Ghana plainly prove. It has the further advantage of enabling newly independent lands to take their place with confidence and ease in the deliberations of all international gatherings : many Indians to- day believe that their country owes much of her present position in international affairs 'to the mastery of the English language which her repre- sentatives display so conspicuously at every inter- national conference. And all such practical advantages of a good working acquaintance with English are possibly, in the last resort, less im- portant than the opportunities which that lan- guage offers to underdeveloped countries for sharing with advanced countries the benefits of scientific and technicological advances.
Considering the benefits which India herself has derived from English, it may seem strange that the rivalry between Hindi and English is so embittered. The contest looks too unequal. Yet the facts are a matter of observation. Highly re- spected political leaders, some of them as vener- able in years as in appearance, seem to lose their habitual restraint in their zeal to scarify oppo- nents. Younger men freely threaten, and occa- sionally indulge in, actual violence. The Indian press is fiercely divided along partisan lines.
The objective, laid down in the Constitution, of substituting Hindi for English as the official language by 1965 has proved in practice so damaging to the interests of the Congress Party in South, West and East India that only obdurate champions of Hindi now seriously profess to be- lieve in the possibility of carrying it through unaltered. The December meeting of the party seemed ready to relegate the change to some vague and nebulous future. But this has done little to heal the quarrels. Mr. Nehru himself appears far from happy about it; he has lectured the extremists on both sides in very severe terms. But he has added fuel to the flames he was trying to extinguish by accusing those who argue that Hindi cannot, leave alone ought not to, replace English, of attempting to disrupt the unity of the country. Since the deeply respected Mr. Rajagopalachari of Madras. and Dr. B. C. Roy, Chief Minister of Bengal, with many other persons of national standing, are saying precisely this, Mr. Nehru's statement brought upon his head a storm of criticism. Even so loyal a supporter of the Prime Minister as Mr. Krishna Menon, the Defence Minister, while not attacking his chief, was soon afterwards moved to declare publicly that he himself does not know a word of Hindi : and that to him the struggle between Hindi and English Is a struggle between obscurantism and modern- 'sm. Further, Mr. Nehru exposed himself to the retort that the one way of destroying the unity Which all Indians agree with him in prizing is to impose Hindi as the official language in face of the feeling, spread over many States, that such action would discriminate unfairly against large numbers of persons. Already entrance, pro- motion and even confirmation in several of the All-India Services depend upon a knowledge of Hindi which makes heavy demands on non-Hindi- speaking officers. Hindi is largely an 'invented' language, devised about a century ago by Hindus to challenge the currency of Urdu, which was associated with typically Muslim culture; it is made up of a mixture of popular speech and neologisms—many of them polysyllabic, abstruse and difficult--derived from Sanskrit.
Why should a language essential for progress in commerce, industry, science and technology be abandoned in favour of a tongue which has not even attained workable precision of expression and can easily assume forms quite unintelligible even to those who profess to know it? Opponents of Hindi as the official language assert, without Contradiction, that the elaborate Hindi manuals of instruction which careful Russians sent along With the aeroplane presented to Mr. Nehru, and with some of the machinery which they are in- stalling in India, have had to be translated into English by learned scholars of Sanskrit before anyone else can make head or tail of them. Is this the kind of language, the champions of English ask, to which an enlightened India ought to pin her faith in this technological age?
The partisans of Hindi are content to rest their ease on impassioned assertions that English, as a relic of British rule, deserves no support from Patriotic Indians; that Hindi is already spoken (admittedly, perhaps, in simple form) by 40 per cent. of the population of India; that there is no reason why the rest of the population should not learn it instead of English if they want to take part in administering the country; and that all other nations have a national language as a symbol of self-respect.
To the foreign observer much, of the present Controversy seems to turn on the reluctance of the partisans of Hindi to admit the difference in linguistic situation between India and other coun- !les. Other lands have usually one or, at most, t,,Wo or three languages : while India has some fourteen, many with great and ancient literatures --d fact officially recognised by the recent division a the country between fourteen linguistic States. In history, India has always had a lingua franca sometimes Sanskrit, sometimes Persian, some- times English—as an inter-statal medium of com- munication. But the lingua franca has never been nguage spoken by the masses nor was it associated with, or calculated to confer advantage upon, any particular • region. English had (and has) the further merits (shared in its day by Per- sian) of being also a medium of international diplomacy and a vehicle of the latest creative knowledge. Practical experience shows that In- dians who learn it kill three birds with one stone : they can communicate with fellow Indians whose mother-tongue is different; they can play their part in Commonwealth and United Nations affairs without linguistic handicap; and they have access to the best scientific and technical know- ledge which the world can offer them. Hindi, though it will always be important because so many people speak it, seems unlikely to fulfil more than the first function. Its main appeal today is its claim that it can free India from the thral- dom of English, still atavistically and mistakenly associated in the minds of many patriotic persons only with bygone British domination. The claim will probably persist until the kind of resentful complex from which it springs yields to greater self-confidence and a less biased vision of the national interest. Meanwhile, the wisest advice seems to come from Mr. Krishna Menon, who has bluntly told those who do not know English to stop shouting about it and those who dislike Hindi to refrain from attacking it.
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