|
Home
Search
Subscribe Online
Archives
About
Us
Cartoons
Online
Book Store
E-Greetings
Jobs @ MG
Advertise
on MG
Our
Team
Contact Us
Muslim
Matrimonials
Our Advertisers
| |
Book Review
Hindi's history: split wide open
By Anand Vivek Taneja
|
Book: Hindi
Nationalism
By Alok Rai
Publishers: Orient Longman
(Tracts for the Times Series)
Price: Rs 150 |
The importance of this book is best understood by some comparative
linguistics of the simple sort. For a start, listen to a qawwali by Amir
Khusrau. Then listen to a speech by Atal Behari Vajpayee on a good day.
You will find the Khusrau qawwali, written seven hundred years ago, far
easier to understand. And far more beautiful. (Though some would say that
anything would be more beautiful than Vajpayee's interminable pauses, but
let's not be unkind.) The fact that a Turkish noble, who was in effect a
second generation immigrant to India wrote, and presumably spoke, a far
more accessible language than the Brahmin Prime Minister of contemporary
India, has a lesson for us which we ignore at our peril.
Alok Rai is highly qualified to give us these lessons and he does
precisely that in a concise, yet erudite and passionate book. Apart from
being an Allahabadi, and a respected scholar, he happens to be the
grandson of Premchand, the father figure of modern Hindi, who also wrote a
significant body of work in Urdu. And the importance and urgency of Alok
Rai's work, for himself as well as any concerned reader, emerges out of
the violence done to the fluid yet often magnificent language that the
everyday characters of Premchand's wry fiction speak. This language has
been replaced by a bureaucratized, dead, homogenized, Sanskritized,
sanitized version that makes students regularly fail exams in their own
'mother-tongue', and make non-Hindi speakers dread and resent the
language. Hindi, in short, is being done in by 'Hindi'.
Rai puts part of the blame on us, the English speakers of this country. As
speakers of what is essentially an elite language, and often disconnected
from vernacular realities, we are really in no position, even with our
'secular' (hopefully) outlooks and access to power, to challenge the
sectarian and communal agendas that are now nearly inextricably linked
with the 'Hindi' wallahs, and their (potential) mass audience.
Rai writes about how struggles for power determined the counter
positioning of 'Hindi' against Urdu, English and Brajbhasha. He
painstakingly explains how these struggles transformed a dynamic and
popular language with near infinite local variations, to a homogenized,
de-Persianized version of one dialect, Khari-Boli, which is essentially
the language of the elite, Brahmin class. The book, though full of
detailed, meticulous research, never drags like some other scholarly
works.
Hindi Nationalism documents the rise of divisiveness between the languages
through the school for British administrators at Calcutta's Fort William.
Also covered is the struggle for the introduction of the Nagari script in
the courts of Avadh from the late 19th century onwards, and the often
arrogant reaction of the Persian-reading Kayastha and Muslim
administrative elites to the 'boorish' upstarts from the Nagari-using
classes. Rai skillfully narrates the struggle of 'Hindi' to emerge
dominant as the 'one language' of the 'one nation', and the chauvinism and
the contestation associated with it, down past Partition to the efforts of
the 'Nagari Pracharan Sabha' in Tamil Nadu.
Though writing with a sense of urgency verging on desperation, Rai does
not give up on Hindi, whose future as a language that links disparate
regions and communities - as it did in the past - he does not doubt. In
his own words, "There is no cause for pessimism here … my hope is
to free Hindi from this repressed history of violence … and so enable it
to realize itself. By distancing itself from 'Hindi', which is
unmistakably a part of the problem, Hindi can work towards becoming part
of the solution…"
And for anybody who has ever swayed to a Khusrau qawwali or applauded the
recitation of a Ghalib sher, or smiled at a Premchand story, three final
words - Read this book. There is also an extensive selection of quotes in
myriad forms of Hindi (and if you insist, Urdu) rendered in Devnagari
here. q |
Subscribe
Now
|
