Why do you despise the culture of the language you speak every day of your lives, the only language which your mother and sister understand? — Dr. J. Ballantyne (Title of an essay he gave his students in an attempt to “improve” their Hindi)
One of students spoke on behalf of the group
We do not clearly understand what you Europeans mean by the term Hindi, for there are hundreds of dialects, all in our opinion equally entitled to the name, and there is no standard as there is in Sanskrit… If the purity of Hindi is to consist in its exclusiveness of Mussulman words, we shall be required to study Persian and Arabic in order to ascertain which words are habitually issued every day in Arabic or Persian and which are Hindi. With our present knowledge, we can tell whether a word is Sanskrit or not Sanskrit; but if not Sanskrit, it may be English or Portuguese instead of Hindi, or anything else—we cannot tell. English words are becoming as completely naturalized in villages as Arabic and Persian words, and what you call Hindi will eventually merge into some future modification of Oordoo, nor do we see any great cause for regret in the prospect.
As the late Ravindra Kumar used to say, “history is futuristic.” You can run away from history as much as you like, but history always catches up with you. In India, nothing is ever finished: the “sack” of the Somnath temple is avenged a thousand years later in the fetid fields of Bhagalpur and in the alleys of Bombay. If you want to understand anything about India, first get her history right.
As a child, I was made to believe that Hindi originated from Sanskrit—its loyal eldest daughter—and that other languages such as Bangla, Marathi, Gujarati, etc., were either younger daughters of Sanskrit or evolved from Hindi. With all the “Mera Bharat Mahan” and “Proudly say Hindi–Hindu–Hindustan” drilled into my head, believing this was easy—and even lovable. Then you open a page of history and bang—disillusionment.
History in India is a hot potato. Write one honest line and they will come after you. A sentence on Shivaji can vandalize a library. Write about Ram or Krishna and you may be beaten. History has always been part of Indian nationalism and has been weaponized by the opportunistic middle class. Perhaps that is why we have all these Hindiwallah who once forced this nonsense on us and now boast children who cannot read or write their own mother tongue—yet lose their minds when someone questions why Hindi is a “national language.”
Double standards are the hallmark of the Hindi/Bangla middle class. The Hindiwallah moralize loudly about corruption in public while hobnobbing with the corrupt in private. A Bengali may march with a party at twenty and work in a U.S. university by forty. Over time, they have learned to do all of this simultaneously.
Anyway, let us restrict ourselves to Hindi.
My biases should be clear. Hindi is an emotional matter for me. But I do not use English as a replacement for Hindi, nor Hindi as an excuse for not learning English. If English lets me reach a wider audience (even with broken grammar), Hindi lets me write my diary. I do not mind being emotionally bilingual. Learning multiple languages is always beneficial.
You may have heard the saying:
हिंदुस्तान की अजब कहानी,
कोस कोस पर बदले पानी,
चार कोस पर वाणी।
(An odd tale is Hindustan’s: every mile the water changes taste; every four miles the language changes.)
Post-Bollywood Hindi has become too homogeneous, and city dwellers may never have witnessed these nuances. In villages, the differences are vivid. Just two kilometers from my village, people use buhari for jhaadu and are unaware of the other word. The reason is simple: only women use the buhari, and women from that village never visit ours. They are Vishnoi; we are Chauhans.
What Ballantyne wanted was the killing of these vernaculars for the sake of one standardized language, just as Europe had done. His student’s response was closer to the truth: India is a melting pot of cultures and languages and must evolve at its own pace—however slowly.
Those who pride themselves on being “modern” hate this slowness. They want to change the world on demand, and when people resist, they label them uneducated, conservative, fundamentalist, yokels, villagers, or indecent. Society changes slowly. People adopt what makes life easier. Pajamas replaced lungis not because of Westernization, but because they were practical. T-shirts replaced kurtas for the same reason. Fashion weeks and MTV matter, but their reach is limited.
There is no escape from language. As speakers change it, it changes them—often more strongly. Languages carry traits. Bangla comes with chauvinism, Tamil with tradition, Hindi with arrogance.
Speak English with a Tamil; another Tamil joins and the conversation stays in English. Speak English with a Bengali; another Bengali joins and suddenly you are invisible. Speak a non-English language with a Hindi speaker and you will be nudged toward Hindi. Add another Hindi speaker and the “national language” argument appears.
English is spared—unless the speaker is uneducated. Yet the same person will lecture you on why you should learn Hindi, even if he cannot read or write decent Hindi.
It is not entirely their fault. It is how Hindi was raised. The invention of Hindi was a heroic project. But if a child is born with polio, what can one do?
Purani Hindi
Chandradhar Sharma Guleri’s Purani Hindi demands careful reading—probably a B.A. in Hindi. The evolution looks roughly like this:
Root Language
└─ Vedic Language
├─ Sanskrit
└─ Prakrit → Apabhransh
Sanskrit was the language of elites, declared ajar-amar. It was not the language of the masses—and that is why it did not survive. One social movement could wipe out English just as Sanskrit was wiped out. The real challenge is defeating the Hindiwallah first.
Vedic language split into two streams. One flowed freely as Prakrit. The other was dammed into Sanskrit by Panini’s grammar. Sanskrit became sacred; change was allowed only in Prakrit.
Examples abound:
* देवा: and देवास: → only देवा: in Sanskrit
* अस्मिन → ममी → म्म्ही → में
Ashoka’s edicts, Buddhist Pali, Jain Magadhi, Kharosthi—these show the flow. Politics followed. If Sanskrit was the language of gods, Magadhi claimed to be the original language of humans and gods alike.
Out of this linguistic promiscuity was born Apabhransh, the mother of Hindi—Purani Hindi—between the 7th and 11th centuries. Many believe the first Hindi poetry was Prithviraj Raso by Chand Bardai.
If Hindi evolved solely from Sanskrit, why is Hindi gender-sensitive (jata/jati) while Sanskrit and Bangla are not? In Vedic language, purush meant both man and woman. Panini masculinized it. Brahmins were excellent at polluting what they touched.
Let us jump to the 18th century, when a section of the middle class—the Hindiwallah—began searching for identity in a linguistic melting pot they named Hindi.
They Called It Hindi
From Allahabad to Bombay, I conversed in Urdu everywhere—and people replied in Urdu… Hindi was created by replacing Perso-Arabic elements of Urdu with Sanskrit ones.
— Chandradhar Sharma Guleri, Purani Hindiकरवा बसते गए, हिंदुस्तान बनता गया।
(The caravans rested and settled; thus Hindustan came into being.)
“When people say Hindi is not a language, I feel pain,” said Bhartendu Harishchandra, the Ramanujan of Hindi. He died at 36, leaving behind the Bhartendu Yuga. He wrote prose in Khari Boli, poetry in Braj Bhasha.
To fight for an idea, you must name it. A simple name—so it can later be bent, emptied, weaponized. That is what happened to Hindi.
As Alok Rai says:
“Meaning is a conspiracy—one that includes and excludes.”
One person’s Hindi is another’s Urdu. Linguistically it hardly matters. Politically, people kill and die for names.
Kill Braj Bhasha, She Is Too Old
Braj literature is the life-breath of Hindi.
— Seth Govind Das, 1952Braj Bhasha is used by illiterate rustics; Khari Hindi by the educated.
— King, 1990
Ayodhya Prasad Khatri argued that Khari Boli could do poetry. Bhartendu disagreed. Khatri was mocked—by future Hindiwallah who later buried Braj.
Khatri identified five styles of Khari Boli:
1. Theth Hindi
2. Eurasian (today’s Hinglish)
3. Pandit (Sanskritized)
4. Maulvi (Persianized)
5. Munshi (Premchand)
Today, Hinglish dominates urban North India.
Bhartendu was right: Khari Boli was stiff. It took Nirala, Agyeya, and Raghuvir Sahay to make it poetic.
By 1911, Khari Boli had won.
देख रेल का सिग्नल तुम किस कारण झुक जाते हो?
संसारी जीवों को इससे क्या तुम कुछ सिखलाते हो?
Braj was finished. She was declared old and overly ornamented.
Braj Is Dead. Now Get Urdu.
Urdu was not killed only by Hindiwallah. Urduwallah helped—often unknowingly. In the 19th century, Urdu was as dominant as English today.
That, however, is another story.
Resources
- Acharya Hemchandra’s works on early poetry are available at
http://www.jainlibrary.org/ (registration required)