The ongoing face-off between Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-led (DMK-led) government and the Bharatiya Janta Party-led (BJP-led) National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, over perceived attempts to impose Hindi upon the Southern state, is reminiscent of a curiously bizarre parallel that emerged in Haryana some six decades ago.
Carved out of Punjab’s western districts in 1966 on linguistic considerations of separating Punjabi and Hindi-speaking populations, the newly instituted state of Haryana arbitrarily declared Tamil as its second official language soon after, in an obvious fit of pique, annoyance and above all defiance.
Determined vehemently to turn its back on Punjabi, despite it being the lingua franca of several of its prominent districts like Ambala and Karnal, Haryana’s ruling Congress party at the time cast its linguistic net purely whimsically as far from the North as possible by opting for Tamil.
It could not have opted for a language so totally and completely foreign to the state’s predominant Jat population. No one in Haryana of those times, or even later, can recall any school or educational institute ever providing or attempting to even make available any instruction in Tamil, after its adoption as the states’ second official language. But, despite such obvious neglect, and almost unanimous public ignorance of even its linguistic standing, Tamil miraculously retained its stature in Haryana for 44 years, replaced by Punjabi in 2010.
In the intervening years, it was also evident that practically no local had acquired even a nodding acquaintance with Tamil, let alone the ability to understand, speak or read and write it. Tamil’s official status, it seems, stemmed entirely from senior Haryana politicians’ characteristic impetuosity in spurning Punjabi and denting its obvious popularity and widespread usage in the new province by unceremoniously evicting it from all educational curricula.
Replacing it with a Dravidian language from thousands of kilometres away, was an additional slight to Punjabi, that continues to be spoken widely across Haryana even today. Expectedly, Tamil is heard nowhere in Haryana.
And though Haryana in this regard was an extreme case, its introduction of Tamil only serves to underline the criticality of language across newly independent India, and one which eventually emerged as the sole factor for determining the boundaries of the many states as we know them today. Decades before the ongoing row over Hindi with Tamil Nadu and Haryana adopting Tamil as its second language, India’s history of linguistic politicisation has been long, complex and acrimonious.
Language has been employed here frequently for political mobilisation, with regional parties chauvinistically championing their local languages and dialects, often in opposition to the imposition of Hindi or English, or both by the Central administration.
One of the major aspects of Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian movement, launched at the turn of the last century, for example, was its opposition to the dominance of Hindi. Unsurprisingly, this still remains critical to the state’s politics even today, with chief minister M.K. Stalin taking his opposition to Hindi to an extreme, by dropping the official rupee symbol in the state budget logo last week, and replacing it with the Tamil equivalent of ‘Ru’. This was despite the new rupee symbol, adopted in 2010, being created by a graphic designer from Tamil Nadu.
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But this enduring row tends to ignore the reality that the introduction of Hindi in Tamil Nadu, under the National Education Policy (NEP), does not make it mandatory for it to be taught in state schools, or anywhere else for that matter. The NEP leaves it to the states, regions, and of course, the students themselves, to opt for two of three languages native to India, alongside English or any other foreign language.
Earlier, in 1936, Orissa (later Odisha) became the first Indian state to be formalised on the basis of a common language. Some 11 years later following independence emerged the eventual creation of states based on linguistic lines, starting with the reorganisation in 1956 of Andhra Pradesh. Others followed similar linguistic criteria, further reiterating the ascendency of local cultures over centralising tendencies.
But these extended showdowns were combative and contentious.
In the 1960’s, for instance, the Congress party-led Union government’s attempts to make Hindi India’s sole official language triggered violent agitations across Tamil Nadu, in which scores of people died. Over the following years, such protests successfully highlighted the fear of linguistic dominance, like presently, of Hindis proponents and, in turn, stoked emotional public responses which regional governments manipulated cleverly to their political advantage in order to successfully ensure their respective linguistic individualities.
The linguistic movement in the sixties, and subsequent agitations, eventually resulted in a compromise across which, apart from the local state/regional language, Hindi and English were officially approved as mediums to conduct official business. But this too was not without glitches, as the official thrust for English as a medium of educational instruction created fissures. And, while large sections of the population considered English, and still do, as a social mobility and employment tool, some political parties consider it a form of ‘colonial imperialism,’ aimed at side-lining Hindi and other regional languages.
In 2022, the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language, chaired by Union home minister Amit Shah, recommended using Hindi as the medium of instruction in central educational institutions and giving preference to it in government functions and even in the defence services. But states like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have taken centre stage in summarily rejecting the imposition of Hindi as a direct threat to federalism and linguistic diversity and have, for now, stemmed its march temporarily.
Meanwhile, Pakistan too faced similar linguistic predicaments problems after its formation, albeit to a lesser extent compared with India’s multi-lingual fabric.
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Addressing a special convocation at the Curzon Hall of the University of Decca (now Dhaka University) on March 24, 1948, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared that “Urdu and only Urdu” would be Pakistan’s state language, though none of the provinces which then comprised East and West Pakistan, spoke it as their mother tongue. Many in Pakistan presently believed that making Urdu the official language was an error of judgment by Jinnah which only added to the long list of grievances between their country’s two halves and one which led to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971.
The importance Jinnah attached to Urdu was the outcome of the political conflict between the proponents of Hindi and Urdu in colonial India in the 19th century, alongside the weaponisation of Hindu and Muslim culture and religion that led to Partition in 1947. This linguistic confrontation had already become acute many years earlier and had in 1900 led the Colonial government characteristically granting equal status to both Hindi and Urdu in a move to placate advocates of both languages.
Thereafter, this linguistic faceoff became so heavily politicised that the Muslim League Central Parliamentary Board included protection and promotion of the Urdu language and script in its agenda for the 1936-37 provincial elections. And, despite Mahatma Gandhi intervening to pacify both linguistic lobbies, it continued to simmer till Partition, following which it began smouldering domestically in the respective neighbouring countries and has presently erupted in Tamil Nadu with serious political and federal ramifications.
