Which Hindi Do We Speak Anyway?

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has sent notices to some television channels, directing them to explain the induction of Urdu words in their Hindi programmes. It said it was acting on a complaint from a citizen. A certain Srivastava from Thane, Maharashtra, wrote to the ministry alleging that while channels claim to broadcast in Hindi, nearly 30% of the words they use are Urdu. This, he said, is a fraud upon viewers. Not only that, it is a crime. The ministry found merit in his objection and immediately wrote to the channels, asking them to send a compliance report to the ministry.

The ministry did not feel the need to ask Srivastava how he arrived at this precise calculation of “30 per cent” Urdu in the Hindi programs. Nor did it ask whether Hindi is corrupted only by Urdu words, or whether English words are equally corrupting. Or does he perhaps believe that Urdu pollutes Hindi while English adorns it like jewellery? And what is the rationale by which the use of words from Urdu, English, or Arabic becomes a “crime”?

The irony is that in its own letter, the ministry accused channels of using “galat” (wrong) Hindi and explaining its “istemal” (use) – both words taken from Urdu. In fact, even the word “Hindi” – is it truly Hindi, in the sense Mr Srivastava is using it? Who coined the term ‘Hind’ from which the word Hindi derives? Where did it come from? If one were to demand a “complete purification” of Hindi, one would have to begin with the very word.

It so happened that when the news of this notice reached me through The Wire Hindi editor Meenakshi, I was in Patna listening to Alok Rai speak as part of the Chandrashekhar lecture series. His lecture traced the story of how Hindi became Hindi. His point was that while Hindi as a language can be treated as a spectrum, there has been a real historical anxiety about the construction of  a “standard Hindi”. 

In other words, the battle has always been about “purifying” Hindi, stripping it of foreignness, limiting its vernacular inclusions. Put differently, it has been an effort to drive out intruders and grant citizenship only to the so-called “original inhabitants.” Alok Rai reminded us that the aspiration was for a Hindi that smelled of the sacred fire of the havan (Hindu fire ritual) – the fragrance of loban (frankincense) would not do.

It may help Srivastava and the ministry that supports him to recall who else in history thought this way about Hindi. To Srivastava, the use of Urdu words in Hindi amounts to a crime. But it was also Gandhi’s insistence on a Hindi made more hospitable, blended with Urdu into Hindustani that enraged his assassin Nathuram Godse. 

Why should Godse, a Marathi speaker, have been offended by the Urdu admixture in Hindi? In his justification for Gandhi’s murder, he listed Gandhi’s advocacy of Hindustani as one of the unforgivable crimes:

“Gandhi’s pro-Muslim  policy  is  blatantly [sic] in his perverse attitude on the question  of  the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language. In the beginning of his career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani. 

Everybody in India  knows that there is no  language  called Hindustani; it has no  grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect, it is spoken, but not written. It is a bastard tongue and cross-breed  between  Hindi  and  Urdu,  and  not  even  the  Mahatma’s  sophistry  could  make  it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national  language  of  India.  His  blind  followers,  of  course,  supported  him  and  the  so-called hybrid  language  began to  be  used. The  charm  and purity  of  the Hindi  language  was  to  be prostituted  to  please  the  Muslims.  All  his  experiments  were  at  the expense  of  the  Hindus.”

His Hindu nationalism could not tolerate this “impurity.” A pure nation, he believed, required a pure language, which alone could produce pure Indians. Gandhi, in Godse’s eyes, had committed two crimes: keeping Muslims and Christians within India and thereby defiling it; and polluting Hindi with Urdu. The only punishment, Godse believed, was death for Gandhi.

Since Godse, his admirers have repeatedly sought to hunt down Urdu words in Hindi. Dinanath Batra made it his mission to purify Hindi. Through his Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, he and his team combed textbooks like a lice-comb, removing Urdu words one by one. In 2017, he submitted a five-page report to NCERT demanding the removal of words like mohalla, saal, dost and mushkil. This was only part of the long campaign of purification.

One outcome was that governments in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan directed their police departments to rid Hindi of Arabic and Persian terms. Officers were told to replace words like muqadma, mulzim, ilzam, ittila and chashmdeed with “pure” Hindi equivalents.

The campaign has always drawn inspiration from the RSS’s understanding of Hindi. In 2018, its national assembly passed a resolution expressing concern over the presence of foreign words in Indian languages. Earlier, M.S. Golwalkar, in the book Bunch of Thoughts, had declared that only Sanskrit or its heir Hindi could hold India together, while the Persian-tinged “foreign” language was a dangerous deviation.

This insistence on purity is not new. More than two decades ago, Alok Rai, and before him, his father Amrit Rai, studied the process by which Hindi came into being. Alok Rai pointed out that the decisive moment was the campaign to secure official recognition for the Nagari script in the late 19th century, which culminated in separate recognition for Urdu and Hindi. We seldom notice that what was once simply Nagari — even for Madan Mohan Malaviya — was later elevated to Devanagari. The reasoning was that Hindi had to be presented as the eldest daughter of Sanskrit, the divine language. 

If Sanskrit was the primal voice of Indian identity, Hindi must inherit its throne. And as the daughter of Sanskrit, it could not be written in mere Nagari but only in Devanagari.

But which Hindi deserves to be called Hindi? In an essay, Jaspal Naveel Singh of the Open University narrates a telling story. His father, born near Rawalpindi, fled the massacres of Partition to Delhi, and later migrated to Germany, where he married and raised a family. Jaspal grew up speaking German, and as an adult, sought to reconnect with his roots by learning Hindi. One day, his father asked to see his textbook – Rupert Snell and Simon Weightman’s Teach Yourself Hindi: A Complete Course. As he leafed through it, he shook his head in disapproval. The words in the book, he said, were not Hindi. Perhaps Hindustani, but not Hindi. Words like shukriya, mez, kursi, kitab, bimaar, magar, agar, darwaza, khidki – these, he insisted, were alien.

What is striking is that these were the very words he used daily. But in a textbook, they became unacceptable. The memory behind this rejection was his schooldays in Delhi after Partition. He recalled how teachers punished students for using such words: wedging a pencil between their fingers and striking it with a book until the pencil snapped – or the fingers broke. 

“My father had broken the language,” Jaspal writes, “and now the teacher would break his pen – or even his fingers. That was the simple moral of this violent pedagogical display of power.”

After the Partition, countless children like him suffered this violence of “linguistic racism.” As Singh observes, people used this hybrid language freely in their lives, but within schools and official contexts, they were forced to internalise a purified, exclusionary Hindi.

By the time I write this, the ministry has issued a clarification. It now says that it merely forwarded a citizen’s complaint to the channels, as per routine, and did not issue directions of its own. Yet, its letter instructs the channels to report back within 15 days on what action they have taken.

What is being pursued is a quest for “pure Hindi” – like the quest for pure vegetarian food. Those who eat meat all year may, in the holy month of Shravan, kill to preserve vegetarian purity. A similar logic drives the search for pure Hindi.

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