The irony of "Hindi as the official language" charade is the Congress asking the government to proceed with caution. If the Constituent Assembly debates are anything to go by, then it was a congressman, a certain Mr. R.V. Dhulekar who sparked off the debate that Hindustani be made the official language of India. Dhulekar started his aggressive campaign by demanding that Hindustani be used as the language of constitution-making in India. He ruffled several feathers in the assembly starting his rather aggressive speech with the words "People who are present in this House to fashion a constitution for India and do not know Hindustani are not worthy to be members of this Assembly. They better leave.”
Prior to Dhulekar's browbeating though Hindustani had been accepted as the national language of India in the 1930s by the Congress led by Gandhi. Hindustani was regarded to be as a language which had absorbed loans from several languages in India and thus represented India's "composite culture" . But truth be told Hindustani in the latter half of the 20th century had begun to lose its "composite culture". The communal discord in the subcontinent ensured that there was a rapid Sanskritisation of Hindi and Persianisation of Urdu. Hindustani was being purged of all its loans with its shuddhikaran on the rise. Thus, Dhulekar's Hindustani was no longer the amalgam Gandhi vouched for.
Dhulekar's demand was met with a severe opposition and the debate continued. Meanwhile, the Language Committee of the Assembly had looked into the matter and had decided, although not declared, Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of India. In order to not irk the opposition the transition was to be gradual. Thus for the first fifteen years English would be the official language and one of the regional languages could be used for official purposes.
But Dhulekar was not really satisfied. His demand was now to make Hindi as the national language. In his speech he said
"Sir, nobody can be more happy than myself that Hindi has become the official language of the country … Some say that it is a concession to Hindi language. I say “no”. It is a consummation of a historic process"
Dhulekar's demand further raised the suspicions of the non-Hindi speaking belt. What followed was an excellent speech by G Durgabai, an activist from Madras.
"Mr President, the question of national language for India which was an almost agreed proposition until recently has suddenly become a highly controversial issue. Whether rightly or wrongly, the people of non-Hindi-speaking areas have been made to feel that this fight, or this attitude on behalf of the Hindi-speaking areas, is a fight for effectively preventing the natural influence of other powerful languages of India on the composite culture of this nation".....The opponents feel perhaps justly that this propaganda for Hindi cuts at the very root of the provincial languages ...I am shocked to see this agitation against the enthusiasm with which we took to Hindi in the early years of the century.”
Durgabai, I am told, was one of those people who had taken to Gandhi's call of accepting Hindustani as the national language of India. But having witnessed its "purification" had become increasingly suspicious of it. Pertinent words I'd think. Perhaps the current government should take a cue. It's intergrationist agenda will open a Pandora's box. In a country as linguistically diverse as ours, linguistic puritanism seems an impossible agenda if not downright stupid!
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