In the latest episode of The Wire Talks podcast, one of The Wire's founding editors, Sidharth Bhatia, spoke to academic Alok Rai on the Fadnavis government's move to withdraw the proposal to introduce Hindi in the early classes in schools in Maharashtra. What explains the BJP's posture on Hindi? What is the larger cultural agenda behind it? The chat looks into the role of caste and politics in this move. 

The following is the full text of the discussion, edited lightly for ease of understanding. It has been transcribed by Joshua Kullu.

Sidharth Bhatia: Hello and welcome to The Wire Talks. I am Sidharth Bhatia. The Maharashtra government recently withdrew its proposal to start teaching Hindi from the lower classes in schools after pressure from opposition parties. The union government faced similar pushback in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu for the same proposal. There are political, social and cultural dimensions to the imposition of Hindi on the states. Many states outside the northern belt see it as a move by the BJP to impose not just the language but also Hindutva. And the bigger question is which Hindi?

My guest today – professor Alok Rai – can provide some answers to these questions. He is an alumnus of the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes scholar and also of University College London. His PhD dissertation was on George Orwell. He has translated the well-known work, Nirmala by Munshi Premchand, who was his grandfather and has written a monograph, Hindi Nationalism. He has taught in various institutions including, the University of Allahabad, University of Delhi and University of Pennsylvania. Professor Alok Rai, welcome to The Wire Talks. What do you make of this resistance by state governments against the BJP’s attempts to teach Hindi in the early classes at school.

Alok Rai: Well, at the first level obviously the resistance is because they feel naturally that they would be disadvantaged relative to native speakers of Hindi. But, I suspect that the politics of both the attempt to impose school Hindi and the resistance to it should be understood as it were in a slightly more fine-grained fashion in the sense that, I suspect that Hindi is the least of what is intended. That is to say, it is not as if there is a burning desire that the people of Karnataka should speak Hindi or Maharashtra for that matter, or use Hindi. I think, there's something more complicated going on in the name of, in the guise of linguistic policy.

Sidharth Bhatia: You said something more is intended – such as what?

Alok Rai: Frankly I suspect that, I mean similarly as I've argued in my book you know the demand for Hindi actually even in North India at the beginning of the 20th century was actually part of a much larger agenda. And I suspect that this attempt to extend Hindi, school Hindi to the non-Hindi belt is also serving another agenda. I mean let me try, let me explain what I mean really. I do think that as with certain other policies that this government follows, it is not as if they would be entirely surprised by the resistance that they are meeting in Tamil Nadu or Karnataka or even Maharashtra. All right? They are prepared for this surprise, for this resentment, but it produces other consequences that they desire. Basically what I'm saying is that it is the second order consequences of this policy which they are really after which is to say, the attempt to increase the sway of Hindi in the south consolidates their support base in the Hindi belt. That the agenda is really to consolidate Hindi belt support and, the fact that you do it in Tamil Nadu and you get resistance, dramatic resistance, whatever it is. All right? Interestingly, it doesn't matter if you notice there's a difference between the way they are reacting to Tamil Nadu or Karnataka and to Maharashtra. In Maharashtra, they have backed down. The Maharashtra government has backed down. All right? And interestingly they have backed down because in Maharashtra the ruling party, the BJP actually is a serious political player and they therefore cannot afford to throw away the support in Maharashtra in order to consolidate support in the Hindi belt. So in Maharashtra they compromise in Tamil Nadu the more resistance there is the stronger their support base is, the more consolidation they achieve in the Hindi belt that is basically the thesis I would argue.

Sidharth Bhatia: No, so by that, I mean if we take this thesis forward, if they want they almost want the resistance to be there because it helps them but there must be some agenda in promoting it too, the idea of the language. 

Alok Rai: See there is this sort of, lust for uniformity. All right? Which shows in the one nation, one election, one this one that. So there is that. But the fact of the matter is that the particular Hindi that is thought to be introduced as ‘school Hindi’ which I distinguish from the language as it is used normally by people in most of India excluding minor pockets of Tamil Nadu, is a kind of Hindi which is in use throughout the country. But the very specific ‘school Hindi’ that is being sought to be imposed is something that also carries coded within it a cultural, and indeed a communal agenda. It is a polarising agenda. It is what someone else described as something that re-enacts the logic of partition, of irreconcilable cultural difference, both in interpersonal communication and indeed within one's own, one person's use of the language that one is, as it were, inhabited by the other unless one is consciously striving to reject it. Do you follow what I'm saying? That there's a kind of intimacy in the way one relates to language and therefore, to introduce the idea that there is a kind of alien element which your language carries unless you strive actively to remove it. You see? So the cultural agenda, the sort of the language as it were is encoded with this cultural agenda.

Sidharth Bhatia: No, so I’ve picked up some nuances from what you're saying. And since you mentioned partition, it brings in an entirely new element and that is they do believe in the fact that Hindi, and the Hindi that will be taught will be of a certain kind with certain messaging and of certain “purity” in quotes, is a Hindu language while the other, Urdu say for example, is not a Hindu language. So will these be the cultural messaging that will go on in teaching this?

Alok Rai: Precisely Sidharth, precisely. That, you know, that in something as intimate as language, something that one relates to with the intimacy of language, to introduce and to smuggle that cultural agenda of irreconcilable religious, communal difference. All right? This is so language is remarkably well suited to carrying that agenda in the most insidious form.

Sidharth Bhatia: And, this has always been, from what I read parts of your book, as much as I could, but wasn't this also a colonial agenda?

Alok Rai: I rather suspect Sidharth that it was not. I think it has been in, you know it has been argued you're absolutely right that kind of, most people argue that this is part of the colonial agenda of divide and rule, except that in the matter of language. As a matter of fact a lot of colonial education administrators are on record as saying that this is disastrous, that it is pedagogically both foolish, both wrong and has negative consequences. But the fact that this Hindi was encoded with a communal agenda is sought to be obscured by planting on it a kind of colonial motivation. Do you see what I'm saying? That Fort William is in fact a false trail. The colonial intention is a false trail. The real trail leads to the people who are pushing this agenda in the face of resistance from the colonial education administrators.

Sidharth Bhatia: Even then?

Alok Rai: Even then. 

Sidharth Bhatia: So tell me this is are you saying that the slogan of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” which has been linked to say the Sanghi agenda is a giveaway to say that if you learn Hindi, ‘One nation, One language’ etc. but you also identify yourselves as a Hindu and therefore you, this country is for Hindus. I'm just putting it crudely.

Alok Rai: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right that this has always been there from the early beginnings. And mind you, I mean, this as I, as indeed I argue in my book. All right? This Hindu agenda is also very specific, and we can see it from the original context in which the controversy started. It is also actually a cast agenda. It is an upper cast agenda which is being sought to be pushed. But obviously this cast, again by calling it Hindu in some sense, is being diverted from the covert class agenda. Cast agenda sorry forgive me.

Sidharth Bhatia: And the cast agenda is that the Brahmins know what's good for you. Again put it simply.

Alok Rai: Absolutely. Absolutely. That is exactly right. That they do and they are the, they are the preservers of what is actually authentic in your cultural heritage, that everything else is merely pollution of one kind and another.

Sidharth Bhatia: Do you think that the opposition parties in states like Tamil Nadu have grasped that?

Alok Rai: I think at some subconscious level they might well have. They might well have. They might well be aware that Hindi, that language policy is basically the thin end of a wedge. And the wedge is obviously a wedge, right? It pushes, it pushes a bigger agenda. But I think, but again Sidharth, my main point is that the real agenda is not the non-Hindi state. The real agenda is ‘consolidate the Hindi belt vote’. That this is our party. These are people who are pushing our interests even against the political resistance of others, or other states. You know?

Sidharth Bhatia: Alok but when you say that it means, put it again in stark political terms, it means that the governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are walking into the BJP trap.

Alok Rai: I hadn't thought of it that way but I think you're right. I think you're right. Either way I, basically for them it is lose-lose. Either they consent, all right, in which case they obviously disadvantage themselves relative to native speakers of Hindi or they disadvantage themselves, all right, because they consolidate the political opposition. The kind of, the demographic balance in any case favours the north and then if this policy is accepted by them, so either way, either they consolidate the BJP support in the Hindi belt or they consent to the domination, the linguistic domination, of the native speakers of the Hindi belt. So either way they lose. So from the purely political point of view it is a brilliant policy initiative.

Sidharth Bhatia: But surely at some level, at some level, playing devil's advocate, at some level they, the BJP, may want to spread Hindi as much as possible because, going strictly by what you've been saying, because it promises to bring them electoral support even in the southern states in the future.

Alok Rai: I don't see the logic of that frankly Sidharth. I mean, I don't see how introducing Hindi in schools in Karnataka or Tamil Nadu will bring them political support in the future. Whose support are they, are they garnering with that?

Sidharth Bhatia: The support of a new, , cohort of people from Karnataka or Tamil Nadu who will grow up with these ideas in their head, a Sarkari Hindu, a pure Hindu, Hindi, Sarkari Hindi and they will grow up and they will say yes and those ideas will obviously as you said in the beginning, it's a coded packaging in the teaching, in the pedagogy. Those ideas will get into their head and they will probably grow up more leaning towards that agenda than the native one. Just a thought.

Alok Rai: Yeah. No, no. There might be something in it, frankly, you know. I mean, I don't see how, I don't really see now the way in which this politics will play out in say Tamil Nadu. All right? Because obviously since the identity of, the cultural identity of Tamil Nadu is constructed so much around the idea of Tamil whether the cultural logic of Hindi as being in some sense primary indigenous will play out there. I don't know. Frankly, I cannot, I mean I concede your point that there is a possibility that a new constituency may emerge in the fullness of time. All right? Which is, which is as it were encoded with the cultural agenda of ‘school Hindi’. It's possible. But I don't, you know I hadn't actually thought of it in those terms at all. I was really much more interested in the, in what it is doing in the immediate, in the present. All right? In the present time. Which is to consolidate their identity as a Hindi belt party. That is what they really are.

Sidharth Bhatia: Where there are already this entire exercise of more seats and delimitation, etc. is already being played out separately which the south, southern parties realise and that it's going to serve anyone who dominates the north a lot more than somebody who relies on the southern seats which will go down there. So already there is something else going on in parallel.

Alok Rai: Yeah. Yeah. I think I agree with you. There's something else you know this seems to sort of fit in with that. Now I'm just curious about why, because obviously the people at the centre who have devised this policy and are returning to it recurrently. All right? These are very, excuse me, these are very clever people. So you know so the first order, second order, third order consequences of their policy must all have been taken into account. What I'm suggesting is that there are, so to speak, that the immediate effect of that policy might not be all that is intended.

Sidharth Bhatia: Okay. Now the one question that one wants to ask is, yes there is, there are all these objectives going on while promoting this or pushing this policy, which Hindi will be taught? Question 1. Question 1A will it be a Sarkari Hindi? You know you take a flight, you listen to the airhostess speak and you are completely, utterly mystified by what she is saying because it is in such boring Sarkari Hindi or B, the day-to-day Hindustani which is easy to grasp, which is not necessarily colloquial but linguistically very easy to understand. So you promote those kinds of chapters or stories which are… and if you want to be slightly imaginative you might also show some interesting audio visual aids, because in Hindi movies, for example, that kind of Hindi is used. Will it be that? I suspect it'll be the first but what do you think?

Alok Rai: I think you know the, as it were the everyday Hindi of communication, all right? That people have used today and have used for centuries really, I mean the Hindi, the everyday Hindi that we call Hindustani or whatever, all right? This is something that has, that has evolved over time through the natural communication needs of people who come in contact with each other and so it is not, I mean, it's not some, you know, I mean people look at the effect of Bombay cinema for instance and the fact that films have actually brought this language into people's homes, this ordinary, everyday language into people's homes but it has been happening for a much longer time. Long before cinema was doing it, it was being done by people, by travellers, workers, pilgrims, so on and so forth. The ‘school Hindi’ is a different project altogether and I think it is important and I think if you read my, look at my book you will discover I make a very sharp distinction between this ordinary, everyday Hindi and what is what you're calling ‘Sarkari Hindi’ and I think of as ‘Sarkari Hindi’ or “School-i Hindi”, this is put within quotation marks, this is a different thing altogether this is a different cultural project and should be understood as a cultural project, right? It's not merely language, it is encoded with ideas of purity, indigenism, foreignness, you know? All of those things come encoded in the language.

Sidharth Bhatia: And those are the more sinister parts of this entire plan?

Alok Rai: Yeah, indeed that is the plan. Otherwise, there's no need for language policy. Otherwise, Hindi in the way in which it has evolved over the centuries is evolving anyway. It is the fact of the matter. Look, look, Sir Syed traveling in India, all right? In the latter half of the 19th century said that everywhere he went he found people who understood him. He could communicate with them. You and I can do it. That barring, as I said, pockets of rural Tamil Nadu unless one runs into ideological resistance, everyday work can be carried on in Hindi. All right? Obviously sophisticated things cannot be done but everyday stuff can go on and will happen. The reason for, I mean, the reason why there is a linguistic policy at all must be because it is serving other ends. Otherwise, everyday Hindi is there, it is thriving, it is growing and needs no help from the government.

Sidharth Bhatia: You know it's interesting that the first resistance came from Tamil Nadu, because in the 1960s there were student riots against the imposition of Hindi, and that was certainly Sarkari Hindi and that ultimately gave us the education policy which has served us well. So you have a, more than a point when you say that if things were not, things were going along well at the street level as well as the classroom level, why disturb it? And the reason for disturbing is obviously something far beyond simply suggesting that kids learn another language.

Alok Rai: Yeah. You know, I mean why have a policy at all? I mean, once again, I mean one should approach it like a puzzle. Why bother? All right? And if you're bothering then what happens? How does it play out? All right? And I'm suggesting not only that there's a resistance in, mind you, resistance in Tamil Nadu, resistance in Maharashtra where they back down. All right? They try and slip it in then realise that there is a political cost and back down. All right? So I mean if one tries to distinguish between the reactions in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra you see that there is kind of, more of a political cost involved for them in Maharashtra than in Tamil Nadu. So Maharashtra they will back down. Not in Tamil Nadu,. in Tamil Nadu they will, they will let the resistance happen simply because it will do good things at the second order level which is to say back in the Hindi belt. You know? That these difficult anti national, if you remember the whole sort of concern with Tamil Nadu you know Tamil Nadu as the name would suggest was, there was a suggestion at one point of Tamil Nadu being Tamil Nadu, being something else, something different, something separate. All right? So that at that point legislation was brought in, of all kinds. All right? So, I'm sorry I'm sort of losing myself there but, yeah so, Tamil Nadu is a different kind of story really.

Sidharth Bhatia: In Maharashtra it is quite obvious, there are municipal elections coming up, the BJP wants to dominate the other two parties more than the Shivsena, the Congress and the NCP all combined. Even if they fight separately they are a far formidable force and can possibly cause an upset because the Shiv Sena has been running the municipal corporation for 30 years. I'm sorry going into all these details but, the BJP wants to take control, which is the richest municipality in the country and it cannot afford to give a, handover something, a stick to beat them with. So they capitulated swiftly. In Tamil Nadu there is no such compulsion. Tamil Nadu as you have really, it's a very, very intriguing point. They are going to go back to their constituents in the northern belt and say, “see we tried but these people refuse to be part of the mainstream”. Except, except, isn't it correct to say that in the northern states there is no such thing as one Hindi being spoken and certainly not the pure Sarkari Hindi. So how do you reconcile that?

Alok Rai: Oh no no no no no hang on, the diversity, the plurality of ‘Hindis’ is something that is incontestable. Of course it is the case. It is the homogenizing impulse behind school Hindi which is the policy issue. See, otherwise there is no need at all. I mean the question worth ask, the question I ask myself Sidharth is why do you have a linguistic policy? All right? Languages don't grow through policy, languages evolve over time and linguistic policy rarely serves any direct ends, direct linguistic ends might well serve other ends.

Sidharth Bhatia: How do the people say you know, of course in UP itself as they say every 100 miles or 200 miles you go the dialect changes, sometimes the language itself changes. In Madhya Pradesh, in Bihar, in Jharkhand, how will they view? Don't they also view this imposition of one type of Hindi on them, not imposition necessarily through government policy but generally by social factors, don't they view it as a threat? So many languages have almost vanished. Don't they view it as a threat?

Alok Rai: Let me, you know, give you my sense of what you asked, which is to say that, what about the diversity of ‘Hindis’ in the Hindi belt itself and how is it that the speakers of various so-called ‘Hindi dialects’ which interestingly enough have actually longer histories than school Hindi. The fact of the matter is that Braj, or Bhojpuri, or Awadhi all have longer histories, richer literary heritages than school Hindi so to speak. All right? I think school Hindi is a special case and I think the speakers of say Awadhi or Bhojpuri or Braj for that matter, you know, they use or don't use their Hindi, but as far as school Hindi is concerned no one uses it that you know? There's practically no writing that is happening in that you know? If you think of writers and so on, they don't use Hindi because it's lifeless. All right? That that the attempt to make a pure Hindi which is divested of cultural influences is a futile quest and it inhibits one's, you know the ability to do anything at all with language rests on drawing all resources, drawing upon all resources rather than wondering whether what is emerging from me, from my mouth is truly indigenous, native, authentic and so on. You know? So this school Hindi is, as it were, a sterile, stillborn project except in terms of what it achieves not at a linguistic level but at a political level.

Sidharth Bhatia: But as far as the student is concerned even in parts of North India, leave alone the rest of the country, even in parts of North India, groans about the fact that he or she has to sit through classes for a year and pass and then never use it again. And I have known of even people who are very familiar with Hindi in their lives, Hindi speaking people who find it very difficult to get even reasonable pass grades. So, therefore this battle has been going on even in other parts of India, forget Tamil Nadu, who teach a kind of Hindi, and I don't know whether this, the BJP has thought this through completely, whether it has paid them, this particular policy, has paid them any dividends elsewhere. Other things may have But this this may be a pie in the sky. This is what I wanted to say.

Alok Rai: You mean, well see there is, partly, there is the politics of Hindi in the Hindi belt. All right? Which is a little of what you’re implying when you say the diversity of people's ‘Hindis’ as opposed to one homogeneous, monolithic school Hindi. All right? So there is the politics of the Hindi belt itself, which is very simply a caste politics. All right? It's a kind of upper caste politics against the diversity of people's ‘Hindis’ which obviously are mixed, have folk elements and this and that and the other. The other is the politics of Hindi, school Hindi, being extended outside the Hindi belt where everyday Hindustani in various forms is available anyway. It has been, it has been made available over the centuries by mendicants, pilgrims, you know? Workers, all kinds of things, and by cinema in our own time. That Hindi is already there. What work is school Hindi doing in the non-Hindi belt? You know partly, part of what I'm saying is what school Hindi is doing and the imposition of school Hindi is doing within the Hindi belt, then what it is doing outside the Hindi belt. Outside the Hindi belt it obviously provokes resistance which is good, which consolidates Hindi belt support, all right? And essentially you said, oh maybe I’ve missed something in what you've asked me.

Sidharth Bhatia: My question is has this policy so far, I know you have just said these two things, have different objectives in the south, in the north, but in the north has forcing school Hindi on students paid, helped them get any kind of political dividend. In fact, it may also cause some resentment, maybe of a simple kind that students don't like or of something deeper, that it is subsing our cultures. So I don't know whether there may be a kind of a very critical difference between the south and the north in the objectives, but I think it may be, is a word I've used in many contexts as far as these friends, gentlemen are concerned, “clever by half”?

Alok Rai: Well yes, yes except that you know in the north I think it not only has paid dividends. It continues to pay dividends, in that, it makes the cultural agenda. You know, this whole business about purity and pollution, it brings it to the classroom in the everyday experience of the way people use language. All right? And so, in that sense, it makes that cultural agenda always present. And that is, so the dividend they get is not linguistic because the other languages in any case carry on doing their work. All right. Bhojpuri exists in its own fashion, in its own, sometimes very perverse fashion, but it exists. Awadhi exists, I mean, I've just been traveling through Awadh and people use Awadhi constantly. There's no problem with that. They do all the work they need to do, and Tulsidas also continues to exist. So there's no problem with that. School Hindi is doing something else. School Hindi is importing within the everyday classroom the cultural agenda of purity and by implication pollution. That is what they're doing, you know? 

Sidharth Bhatia: There was a question in the beginning and you said that that's actually overblown but once and for all, I want to, and no doubt many readers want to know this. Is Hindi a creation during the Raj? Was Hindi created during the Raj?

Alok Rai: Emerges during the period before 1947. All right? Is it a product of the Raj? And is it a product of Raj policy? I would say, no. All right? Except in a very much more complicated fashion where you talk about censuses, electoral constituencies, and, you know, kind of other extra linguistic factors, yes, obviously. You know the creation of electoral constituencies, numerically countable communities, all of that brings its own politics and language plays into that. But is it colonial educational policy to divide the languages? No.

Sidharth Bhatia: Okay. So, remember that the first linguistic policy was introduced during Congress time. So there were worthies in the Congress too who wanted to push the case and cause of Sarkari Hindi.

Alok Rai: Absolutely, entirely agree with you. Of course there was. I mean, indeed one of the big drivers, who as it were exiled Urdu from UP, which is the land of its birth, was Sampurnanand, who was a Congress chief minister of UP. So yeah, party no consideration. This kind of thinking is very much Hindi belt, upper cast thinking. It's very simple.

Sidharth Bhatia: So this is a far more vexed and complex question than what we read in the newspapers. I'm so glad that we got an opportunity to talk to you. Thank you, professor Alok Rai with your understanding and your credentials, you were indeed very helpful in telling us and telling our listeners, what lies behind a simple – seemingly simple – education policy that the BJP is promoting. So thank you very much for it.

Alok Rai: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Sidharth Bhatia: We'll be back. That was professor Alok Rai who has taught in several universities and writes equally dextrously in Hindi, as well as in English. We'll be back next week with another guest. Till then, Sidharth Bhatia and the rest of the team in The Wire Talks. Goodbye.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.