[Modern Hindi – one of the youngest Indian languages – is based on the Khariboli dialect (vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding region) and its literary tradition evolved towards the end of the 18th century.]
By Devdan
Chaudhuri
My late maternal grandmother – who had
studied philosophy and biology in the 1940s Calcutta – had told me once during
my boyhood, that Calcutta was the birthplace of the modern Hindi language: it
was ‘invented’ by the British in Fort William College, Calcutta.
I remembered my grandmother’s words when I
read the news reports about the recently concluded ‘Hindi Divas’ day when the
Union Home Minister Amit Shah pitched for Hindi as the national language of
India.
This prompted me to consider and figure out
why my maternal grandmother said what she did.
I wanted to know about the ‘suppressed truths’ and understand the ‘secret
history’ of Hindi.
Now I wish to share with you what I found;
and have to begin by recalling few essential facts about the languages of
India.
Linguistic
Diversity of India
Papua New Guinea – with a population of just
over seven million – has world’s highest number of languages: 852 (840 are
spoken and 12 are extinct). It tops the Linguistic Diversity Index (Source:
UNESCO 2009) with 0.990. India comes at #9 with a score of 0.930.
But if we measure linguistic diversity by
total population, India with 1.3 billion people (#2 by population) is much
ahead of the rest, including China (1), United States of America (3), Indonesia
(4) and Brazil (5). And hence, one can say, India is the ‘most populated
linguistic diverse country in the world’.
Census of India of 2001 said that India has
122 major languages and 1599 other languages. It recorded 30 languages which
were spoken by more than a million native speakers and 122 which were spoken by
more than 10,000 people.
There are 22 scheduled languages of India –
Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithali,
Malayalam, Marathi, Meitei (Manipuri), Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit,
Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu – and two official languages of the
Union Government: Hindi and English.
In addition to the above, the Government of
India has awarded the distinction of classical language to 6 languages which
have a ‘rich heritage and independent nature’: Kannada, Malayalam, Odia,
Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu.
Tamil is also one of the oldest living
languages in the world and this Dravidian language predates even Sanskrit (a
part of the Indo-Aryan family of Indic languages).
Contrary to the perceptions formed by
boisterous disinformation campaigns, Hindi is not the national language of India.
India has no national language.
As per the 2011 census, only 26.6% of the
Indians identify Hindi as their mother tongue.
Hindi
Language
Modern Hindi – one of the youngest Indian
languages – is based on the Khariboli dialect (vernacular of Delhi and the
surrounding region) and its literary tradition evolved towards the end of the
18th century.
Khariboli itself had evolved to replace
earlier dialects such as Awadhi – the sweet-sounding language of the commoners
in which Tulsidas’ Ramcharitamanas was composed in the early 17th century. The
Awadhi bhakti poem popularized Lord Rama all over North India; that in turn is
influencing the politics of modern India.
I have recounted the fascinating story of How
did Lord Rama become a Hindu god? in an essay published in 2018.
Hindi evolved at a time, when Urdu – another
form of Hindustani since the 1800s – underwent significant Persian influence
and acquired linguistic prestige.
In the late 18th and early 19th century,
under The East India Company, Hindustani was developed into separate Hindustani
standardization: Hindi and Urdu.
This was also probably done under the cunning
imperial ‘Divide and Rule’ policy to linguistically segregate religious
communities – namely the Hindus and the Muslims – and build schisms, weaken the
collective and incite demagoguery which will last through generations, and even
centuries.
But this ‘linguistic division’ wouldn’t have
been possible without one particular person who is virtually unknown in our
‘common collective memory’ of Indian history: the unsung father of modern
Hindustani languages, John Gilchrist.
John
Gilchrist – the Father of Modern Hindustani Languages
John Borthwick Gilchrist (1759-1841) was a
temperamental Scottish trained-surgeon and self-trained linguist – a failed
banker in his native city Edinburgh – who spent his early career in India where
he studied Hindustani languages.
Chambers’ Biographical Dictionary describes
him in his advanced years as “his bushy head and whiskers were as white as the
Himalayan snow, and in such contrast to the active expressive face which beamed
from the centre of the mass, that he was likened to a royal Bengal tiger – a
resemblance of which he was even proud.”
In 1782, Gilchrist was apprenticed as a
surgeon’s mate in the Royal Navy and travelled to Bombay, India. There, he
joined the East India Company‘s Medical Service and was appointed assistant
surgeon in 1784.
During Gilchrist’s travels in India, he
developed an interest to study Hindustani languages. In 1785 he requested a
year’s leave from duty to continue these studies. This leave was eventually
granted in 1787 and Gilchrist never returned to the Medical Service.
His first publication was A Dictionary:
English and Hindoostanee, Calcutta: Stuart and Cooper, 1787–90. He popularized
Hindustani as the language of British administration and suggested to the
Governor-General, the Marquess of Wellesley, and the East India Company, to set
up a training institution in Calcutta. This started as the Oriental Seminary or
Gilchrist ka madrasa, but was enlarged within a year to become Fort William
College in 1800 within the premises of Fort William in Calcutta. Gilchrist
served as the first principal of the college until 1804, and continued to
publish a number of books including The Hindee-Roman Orthoepigraphical
Ultimatum, or a systematic descriptive view of the Oriental and Occidental
visible sounds of fixed and practical principles for the Language of the East,
Calcutta, 1804.
Gilchrist inducted Indian writers and
scholars into the college, and offered them financial incentive to write in
Hindi. The contributions by the Indian
writers and scholars enabled rapid strides in Hindi language and literature in
a short period of time. Gilchrist’s initiative produced the popular Premsagar
(Ocean of Love) by Lallulal (1763-1825). Subsequently, a Hindi translation of
the Bible appeared in 1818 and Udant Martand, the first Hindi newspaper, was
published in 1826 in Calcutta.
Gilchrist wrote ‘bifurcation of Khariboli
into two forms – the Hindustani language with Khariboli as the root resulted in
two languages (Hindi and Urdu), each with its own character and script.’
In other words, what was Hindustani language
was segregated into Hindi and Urdu (written in the Devanagari and Persian
scripts), codified and formalised.
Santosh Kumar Khare on the origin of Hindi in
Truth about Language in India wrote in his essay: ‘the notion of Hindi and Urdu
as two distinct languages crystallized at Fort William College in the first
half of the 19th century.’ He added: “their linguistic and literary repertoires
were built up accordingly, Urdu borrowing from Persian/Arabic and Hindi from
Sanskrit.’
In the words of K.B. Jindal, author of A
History of Hindi Literature: ‘Hindi as we know it today is the product of the
nineteenth century.’
Contemporary Dutch historian Thomas De
Bruijin says that Fort William College in Calcutta was ‘more or less the birthplace
of modern Hindi.’
George Abraham Grierson, noted Irish linguist
of the late 19th and early 20th century, said that the standard or pure Hindi
which contemporary Indians use is ‘an artificial dialect the mother tongue of
no native-born Indian, a newly invented speech, that wonderful hybrid known to
Europeans as Hindi and invented by them.’
Hence, my late maternal grandmother was
right: the birthplace of modern Hindi is Calcutta. And it was in Fort William
that this invention took place under the tireless efforts of John Gilchrist.
If the Anglophone Indians are derided as
‘Macaulay’s children’, then the Hindi speaking Indians can also be called
‘Gilchrist’s children’.
The Mother of All Ironies
In 2017 I published an essay to write about
‘How Hindus Became Hindu and Why Hindutva is not Hinduism’.
Now I also wish to point out – what I call –
the mother of all ironies.
RSS-BJP-VHP or the Sangh Parivar’s Hindutva
ideology is based upon four key words: Hindi, Hindu, Hinduism and Hindustan.
The Sangh ideology considers Muslims and
Christians as phirang invaders into India. But it was the Persians who coined
Hindu and Hindustan; and it was The East India Company and the British Empire
which developed Hindi language and added ‘ism’ to Hindu.
Hence, the entire ‘identity, world view and
nationalist’ politics of the Sangh Parivar is based upon what the ‘Muslims and
the Christians’ gifted to us!
There can be no greater irony than this. This
is the mother of all ironies; the height of all heights.
Conclusion
In our ‘civilisational state’ of modern India – whose history goes back to 8000 years or more – a language that is just over 200 years old and a construct of our colonial imperial masters – that too by an employee of a rapacious private corporation, The East India Company – cannot possibly be considered as the national language of India.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s statements on the Hindi Divas day are indicative of the broader Hindutva agenda and the political attempt to impose Sanskrit as the ‘mother language’ and Hindi as the ‘national language’.
But Sanskrit isn’t the mother language of India. No single language can be called as the ‘mother language’ of our ancient land that contains such linguistic diversity that has emerged from several language families: Indo-Aryan or Indic, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai and Great Andamanese.
Neither Hindi – as pointed above – can be imposed as the national language of India. India needs no single national language; diversity is the fundamental national characteristic of India, and it should remain that way.
We – the Indians who don’t come from the Hindi-Hindustani cow belt – clearly understand that an organised ‘socio-cultural engineering mission’ is going on in India that wishes to ‘colonise’ – euphemistically ‘unify’ – all plural Hindu communities under the flag of singular ‘Hindutva’.
The imposition of Hindi language upon all Hindus who don’t speak Hindi is part of the larger political mission towards the establishment of ‘Hindutva Rashtra’ masquerading as ‘Hindu Rashtra’.
Article 29 of the India Constitution ensures us equality for all citizens of India as far as conservation of their language is concerned, their culture is concerned and their script is concerned.
Imposition of any single language upon the rest is constitutionally invalid, and the effort to do so – in midst of such linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity of modern India – is likely to boomerang and cause more regional stresses, disharmony, disunity and disaffection.
India doesn’t require the ‘unity’ of ‘one language, one nation’. India needs to assert its own sovereign and unique ‘civilisational spirit’ of ‘Unity in Diversity’.
India doesn’t require the ‘unity’ of ‘one language, one nation’. India needs to assert its own sovereign and unique ‘civilisational spirit’ of ‘Unity in Diversity’.
