Whose Tongue Is It Anyway?

Language remains an attractive business opportunity in Indian politics.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

Union Home Minister Amit Shah joined a long line of political entrepreneurs when he recently said, at the launch of a book by Hindi poet and administrator Ashutosh Agnihotri, that the days of English are numbered, and that English-speakers in India would soon "feel ashamed." But what exactly was the venture about, and was it a losing proposition?

In the language business, north Indian politicians usually propose to replace English, the working language of the British Raj, with Hindi, the language in which governments after independence hoped to bind together the states, which were demarcated on linguistic basis. Indira Gandhi established the department of official language in the 1970s to give teeth to the Official Language Act, 1963. Its core project was to promote Hindi in the work of the Union government.

The first step was to create vocabularies to describe the functions and processes of government. Words like nyayalaya (court) were not in common use in the 1970s. The Urdu adalat prevailed. And newfangled terms like urja mantri (minister for energy) sounded unnatural. Delhi's governments had always relied on English, Urdu and Persian to conduct affairs of the state. Now, a new Hindi vocabulary had to be assembled quickly—and awkwardly. The news on state-controlled media baffled millions. State-sanctioned school curriculums featured monstrosities like vismaya dibodhakchinh, Hindi for the exclamation mark. Only a language bureaucrat could have dreamed that one up.