Hindi and nation building

In this week’s column, I explore the vital role that Hindi played in the Indian independence struggle and how it assumes its present pre-eminen position among Indian languages. In a way, the growth and spread of Hindi is phenomenal and is intrinsically linked with India’s independence struggle.

About 100 years ago, Hindi was commonly perceived as underprivileged and underdeveloped language. It was primarily fragmented into competing dialects and was associated with rural citizenry.

Dealing with the theme of Hindi and the Nation, Harish Trivedi observes, “Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, Hindi began to assert vigorously its new identity, especially in relation to its sister language, Urdu, which inhabited the same vast and populace expanse of northern India. Indeed so sudden and spectacular was the rise of Hindi that most of other Indian languages, some of which had modernised and reinvigorated themselves in response to colonial stimulus some decades before, now opposed the spread of ‘imposition’ of Hindi and its encroachment, in terms of both official diktat and popular culture, upon their traditional territories. ”

Irony in the rise of Hindi as a preeminen Indian language in the postcoloniality is that it ‘ Hindi’ spearhead resistance against colonialism in the colonial times, is now being accused of spreading ‘ Hindi imperialism’ exercising a neo linguistic dominance and expansionism which , naturally, resisted by other Indian languages. The important aspect of this development is the process which led Hindi to become the major Indian language.

Trivedi observes, “Such as resurgence and refashioning of Hindi was effected through a series of related and mutually reinforcing measures. The movement, which began in 1867 but assumed a sustained charge through the 1880s and 1890s, was initially a modest demand that Devanagari, the script which Hindi is written, be permitted as an alternative script, alongside the modified Persian script in which Urdu is written, for the purpose of administrative and judicial business at the lower levels in the North-Western provinces and Oudh ( subsequently called the United Provinces and after independence, Uttar Pradesh, both abbreviated U.P). ”

Demand

Trivedi points out that significantly this demand on the then British government was ‘accompanied by an internal literary development’. At the time the demand was made, Hindi was not a highly developed language capable of writing prose. However, need for such a form of Hindi was strongly felt at the time.

Trivedi observes, “This public demand on the British government was accompanied by an internal literary development: the search for a form of Hindi suitable for the writing of prose, which until then had hardly existed but for which a growing need was now actually felt. The form of Hindi selected, Khari Boli (a dialect or regional form spoken in the areas of Western U.P, Delhi, and Haryana) was a new literary medium, and the choice was perhaps, reinforced by the fact that virtually all the poetry in Hindi so far had been written in other regional forms, mainly Brajbhasha and Avadhi. ”

One of the significant aspects of the form of Hindi selected, Khari Boli was that it was untainted of the influence of all other major dialects of Hindi such as Brajbhasha and Avadhi thus forming a hitherto uncorrupted language.

Travedi observes, “The new prose in Hindi was thus to be uncontaminated by any preceding poetry. In fact, when the early Hindi essays and novels, which were the most popular new forms of prose in the language, used poetic quotations and allusions, as they did quite frequently, they illustrated a conjunction of two different kinds of Hindi hardly ever seen before.”

The natural outcome of this process of forming a new variety of Hindi is that need arose for it to be the language of prose and poetry as in all other developed languages such as English. According to Travedi the change was slow and rather uneasy and evolved into a decisive phase with the rise of the Chayavad movement, Romantic Movement in Hindi poetry in the 1920s. By the 1920s, Khari Boli, the dialect which is established today as the standard Hindi, became a medium of poetry. Significantly, the evolution of modern Hindi was spectacular and dramatic in that it made a number of crucial choices which at the time were feared to be erroneous. Travedi observes that in the process of becoming a major language, Hindi has shed well-established poetic tradition.

Crucial choices

He states, “By decisively turning its back on its literary genealogy of over a half a millennium and marching off into what many at the time feared might proved to be wilderness, Hindi at once made a crucial choices. While it lost that long corridor of echo and allusion, which constitutes much of what poetry connotes, it also shed at once stroke the encumbering load of an overwrought and played-out poetic tradition, and it awaited the future as an empty vessel into which could be poured unimpeded the spirit of the time. Further, Khari Boli is distinctly closer in grammatical structure and even basic vocabulary of Urdu, one that could be proved either mutually and harmoniously assimilative or sharply and divisively contested. ”

As pointed out by Travedi an important debate arose over the linguistic identity of Hindi and Urdu. One extreme strategy adapted against this crisis of linguistic identity was for Hindi and Urdu to that the ‘other language hardly existed as an independent entity’. Propagating Khari Boli as the new standardised Hindi, in the public sphere resulted in the widespread of Hindi in an unprecedented manner, spreading it across seven or eight states from Himachal Pradesh in the north through Panjab and Haryana, Delhi to Madhya Pradesh in central India. What is important is that the evolution of Hindi as a national language took place against the backdrop of consolidating nationalist political movement across the regions.

Travedi observes, “The emergence and spread of modern Hindi supplemented and cemented the transregional political consensus and solidarity that the nationalist movement served to bring about in the country. The new national identity of India, whether in the colonial first half of the twentieth century or in the postcolonial half, thus had Hindi as one of its defining components. Consonant with this role, the growth of the novel in Hindi reflected if not a conscious project to narrate the nation than at least a marked proclivity to represent not merely local or regional but equally national and nationalist thematic concerns. ”