Hindi

After coming to US, I realized that it would have been nice to know hindi. Everyone I seem to meet (I mean Indians) assume I speak hindi. When I say Idont, they ask if I m from Chennai. So this blog is about the differing attitudes towards knowing/not knowing hindi.
There are people who think you are not Indian enough without hindi. That is absolute nonsense. If diversity is out greatest asset, then these people are trying to kill the spirit that is India. Having said that, it also irritates to see people refusing to learn, the only sole reason being it is hindi. The same people have no qualms about learning Spanish, French, Chinese etc when it comes to learning languages. Moving with so many Indians from so many parts of India, I find that only in my state (Tamilnadu) this language barrier is so profound. There are both good and bad reasons for this situation.
If my knowledge of history is right, soon after independence there was movement to make hindi the national language and replace English. The problem was diversity. Tamil being unrelated to Sanskrit, the people found hindi totally alien and intensely difficult to master. Strange as it may sound, they wholeheartedly embraced English. This is sort of a paradox. They were ready to learn the language of their slavers but not another of their own country. Why would this apparent contradiction come into play? The reason as I see is, though English was a foreign language more alien than hindi, it was indeed the language of the ruling. Before independence it was associated with power and this situation did not change after independence. So the glamour continued till this day. Through strange twist of fate, it is this very English which helps people of my state to get jobs. So, the argument about need to replace English and saying that it the slavery language don’t stand the test of time. English has become a necessity and no one can change it now. Hmm, I diverge!
Anyway coming back to hindi, it was seen as a peer to my language (definitely not in the literary or historical sense). So it was natural for people to question why they should learn it while their peers in north need not do it. This argument makes sense, since apart from learning English and Tamil, they also had to learn a third language. This would put extra pressure on the students. Again, this is also a reasonable arguments since those in north India need not have to go through this problem. Ofcourse learning another language is not bad, but then when are things ever ideal. Also, the method in which it was “imposed” was entirely wrong. I really don’t get the logic in requiring students to learn kalidas and kabirdas given the fact that student can pass out the entire schooling without learning their mother tongue. Whatever reason anybody might give, this aspect of forgetting one’s mother tongue is something which I can never accept.
Further we have our politicians. The superiority one’s language is quite understandable. But this was taken to Himalayan heights in my state. So, hindi was practically abolished and continues to be the case now. Right now chennai is the only metro in India which does not speak hindi and infact still stubbornly refuses to do so. So how to deal with this issue?
Firstly, it has to be understood that learning hindi would be nice. Note that I am saying nice not necessity. A country should have one language or every person of a country should be able to speak their national language. No, I disagree with this idea. This is the kind of imposition I am talking about. No can define how Indian I am by knowing/not knowing a particular language. So coming back to nice part, how to make hindi accessible to people. Simple, one needs to just look at the reason why anybody needs to learn hindi. Conversation – that is the only reason I can think of. So, make it compulsory from lower standards. But reduce the workload and redirect the syllabus more towards achieving the goal of conversation than tradition poetry/grammar. Make the exams quite easy. Don’t include the subject to get in professional colleges etc. This is indeed a dilution. There are people who might say that students wont pay much attention and the goal would be lost. I think otherwise. If you make it easy students would infact love the subject. And the goal anyway is not to speak or write proper hindi but to make a decent conversation and the make hindi a true link language. Both sides for this idea (for and against) have to give in find a middle ground and then it might be possible to remove this problem. But then I don’t see that happening. Afterall without hindi my state had managed quite well and is in top of all the social-economic indicators in india. I do sound like a fanatic when I say this, but this is the temperament of an average tamilian.