{"id":3124,"date":"2014-10-10T08:14:26","date_gmt":"2014-10-10T08:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/2014\/10\/10\/karan-dev-7\/"},"modified":"2018-05-29T21:29:48","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T17:29:48","slug":"karan-dev-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/karan-dev-7\/","title":{"rendered":"New Discourse around Hindi and Nationalism in Modi\u2019s India"},"content":{"rendered":"

The push for greater use of Hindi by Modi, the son of a poor tea-seller who made a stunning political rise, has been read partly as a move to break from the Anglophone elite of the dynastic Congress party, which he defeated in parliamentary polls in April and May. He is trying to represent a different India<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

During the Indian freedom struggle, many nationalist leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, felt the need for a pan-Indian language that could replace English as a common language. Based on the numbers of people who spoke it, the nationalistic ideology surrounding it, and the representation of Hindi speakers in the freedom movement, Hindi was projected as the national language. Gandhi encouraged all freedom fighters to learn Hindi, and to teach it to as many people as they could, to spread the national language \u2013 along with the nationalist ideology. <\/span><\/p>\n

Almost half of India\u2019s population consists of native speakers of what are classified as \u201cdialects\u201d of Hindi. After India gained independence in 1947, the states were delineated according to linguistic \u201cboundaries\u201d. Most of the linguistic forms in the North, no matter how different, were declared to be dialects of Hindi. English was the language of the British, adopted by the colonial middle class. It became associated with upper caste and upper class identity. <\/span><\/p>\n

Some scholars have noted that the creation of a native elite in its own image was the most spectacular and enduring achievement of British colonialism in India. In pre-independence India, English education did not simply represent a means for a shift in cultural status, it also provided a central avenue for various segments of upper caste, upper middle class individuals to consolidate their socioeconomic position within the political economy of colonial rule.<\/span><\/p>\n

The original Indian Constitution included a plan to have Hindi as independent India\u2019s official language, supported by English only until 1965. However, there were many ideological differences within the new nation, which had their roots in linguistic differences. People from many parts of India, notably Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, were vehemently anti-Hindi, and English\u2019s \u201ctemporary\u201d status as an associate official language continues to this day. The perseverance of nationalistic regional-language ideologies has thus been a major factor in the perpetuation of persistent ideologies about the importance of English in India. English continues to be a language of power in India. The Bollywood movie \u201cEnglish-Vinglish<\/em>\u201d is here an illustration of this fact. As late as the 1980s, the English-educated social elite controlled the civil services in India.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the opening up of Indian markets in the early nineties, new discourses of language and nationalism came into being. When India\u2019s markets opened up, the Indian economy began to \u2018boom\u2019, and the English-dominant elite began to feel a sense of nationalistic pride. The Bharatiya Janata Party\u2019s campaign slogan for the 2004 elections, \u201cIndia Shining\u201d,<\/em> tried to harness this feeling toward electoral victory (but failed). There was this feeling among the Indian elite that India had finally come into her own, and Indians\u2019 ability to speak English was seen as a critical element of this success.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since taking office as India\u2019s Prime Minister in 2014, Narendra Modi has now taken a clear stand in support of Hindi, pushing for it to replace English as the preferred language of the capital\u2019s bureaucrats. Hindi and English are India\u2019s two official languages for federal government business, although India\u2019s constitution recognizes a total of 22 languages. Modi\u2019s government has ordered its officials to use Hindi on social media accounts such as Twitter and Facebook and in government letters. Modi speaks in Hindi and uses interpreters in meetings with foreign leaders. <\/span><\/p>\n

The push for greater use of Hindi by Modi, the son of a poor tea-seller who made a stunning political rise, has been read partly as a move to break from the Anglophone elite of the dynastic Congress party, which he defeated in parliamentary polls in April and May. He is trying to represent a different India, which is rural and small-town oriented. That\u2019s the group he campaigned to, and that\u2019s the group he is from. The BJP has long championed Hindi as a uniting force for India. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Indian government counts more than 400 million speakers of Hindi or a Hindi dialect, which makes Hindi the fourth most prevalent language in the world after English, Spanish and Mandarin. Yet it\u2019s still not one of the United Nations\u2019 official languages. By speaking in Hindi at the United Nations, with global leaders, Modi is showing a confident India.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the Indian government, 28% of Indians speak or understand English \u2013 that\u2019s roughly 350 million people. They mostly belong to India\u2019s elite, and are the ones travelling around the world and moving outside India\u2019s borders. In fact, the country\u2019s English-speaking elite are often derisively called \u201cMacaulay\u2019s Children\u201d, after the British administrator who introduced English-language education in India in 1835. <\/span><\/p>\n

Modi wants \u201cMake in India\u201d to be a global mantra. To be a global factory, India doesn\u2019t need to know English. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and China have all comfortably grown a manufacturing base without functioning in English. Modi knows that, and he knows that if \u201cMake in India\u201d is indeed to become a mantra, then the one billion Indians who don\u2019t speak English and whom he represents will have to be a part of the global Indian factory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last century, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi and other members of her family spoke in English to enlighten the world about India. In 2014, Modi speaks in Hindi to do just the same.<\/span><\/p>\n

* Published in print edition on 10 October 2014<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The push for greater use of Hindi by Modi, the son of a poor tea-seller who made a stunning political rise, has been read partly as a move to break from the Anglophone elite of the dynastic Congress party, which he defeated in parliamentary polls in April and May. He is trying to represent a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":6560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[28],"tags":[6475,10575,10576,4677,10577,2513,10573,10574],"class_list":["post-3124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-affairs","tag-bharatiya-janata-party","tag-english-vinglish","tag-india-shining","tag-indian-constitution","tag-karan-dev","tag-make-in-india","tag-modi","tag-pan-indian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/MT-Logokk.jpg?fit=1200%2C880&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-Oo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}