“Children studying in English-medium schools are alienated from their culture and traditions.” Thus lamented the Culture and Tourism Affairs Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Dharmendra Singh Lodhi at an event on September 14 to celebrate Hindi Diwas. He added that such children have started imitating western culture.
The minister, speaking in Hindi, offered an example to illustrate his contention: “Our ancestors used to say, ‘asato ma sadgamaya, tamaso ma jyotirgamaya’, meaning lead me from ignorance to truth and darkness to light. But children studying in English-medium schools light a candle and blow it out, moving from light to darkness. And when the cake that is blown and spat on is eaten by all, they feel that they have become progressive.”
The minister seems to have forgotten the images of his own supreme leader cutting a cake and feeding it to his former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal Krishna Advani. Social media abounds with images of cakes being cut to celebrate Narendra Modi’s birthday. On Modi’s 71st birthday, for instance, events ranged from a 71-kg cake being cut to to 71 cakes being sliced as well as a 71-foot-long one.
“Earlier, on their birthdays, children used to go to temples, light lamps and have feasts, but now they have moved away from all these things,” the minister claimed. His contentions may seem ridiculous but he is not the only one who thinks like this.
It is not only sympathisers of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh who believe that using Hindi brings the speaker closer to Indian culture. It is a widespread belief.
On the occasion of Hindi Diwas last week, in a speech at a prestigious college in Delhi, I heard that Hindi is more than a language – it is, in fact, our identity. While glorifying Hindi, the speaker did not find it necessary to define the “we” that Hindi claims to represent.
Hindi speakers often make the arrogant claim that their language embodies the identity of India. But we often hear complaints from our friends from Kerala and Karnataka that Hindi-walas do not even care to pronounce the names of their states or languages correctly. In one manifestation of this phenomenon, journalist Anuradha Bhasin notes that the capital of Kashmir is “Srinagar”, not “Shrinagar”. The willful ignorance of Hindi speakers and their propensity to “Hindi-ise” other cultures causes alienation.
It isn’t the residents of Assam or Kerala who are annoyed about this. Many residents of Madhubani, Ayodhya, Chhapra, Dungarpur and Kaithal in North India similarly refuse to accept that Hindi is their identity.
For instance, I was brought up in Siwan in Bihar among Bhojpuri-speaking people. Whenever I spoke to my friends in Hindi, they would turn around and say, “Don’t speak English.” For Bhojpuri people, Hindi is English – a language to be learned. It is a language of schools and offices, not their first language.
People ignore the fact that Hindi is a second language even in the so-called Hindi states. The first language for most of us is Maithili, Bhojpuri, Malvi, Haryanvi or something else. But in all these regions, when the speakers of these languages fill out forms that ask about their mother tongue, they write Hindi.
This bolsters the contention that there are 53 crore people who speak Hindi. It also strengthens their other claim that they have the first right over India and that India will be defined by them.
Accepting Hindi as the mother tongue has an impact on school education. We normally do not think that Hindi is something that needs to be taught or learnt. This is why we are shocked when we read that in Uttar Pradesh, the “motherland” of Hindi, about 8 lakh of 60 lakh students failed the subject in the secondary-level examination in 2020. You can safely conclude that the situation has not changed significantly.
This should have led to comprehensive brainstorming about more effective approaches to teaching the subject in schools. Nothing happened. One can assume that the examiners have been instructed to be liberal while evaluating the Hindi answer sheets. As long as the people who fail in Hindi have the lung power to continue to shout slogans in Hindi praising Ma Bharti, Hindi-walas need not worry.
Hindi is not treated as a language of learning and teaching seriously. The result of this negligence is evident to us who teach at the postgraduate level. It is painful to see our students struggling to write a coherent paragraph or even a good sentence in Hindi.
Things are not better at the PhD level. Supervisors are mostly concerned about students getting the spelling and syntax right. Faced with this challenge, we should have considered revising the undergraduate curriculum. But we also chose the easier path of the principle of being liberal with the marks. As a result, the Hindi syllabus does not address the reality of Hindi.
When the world sees that a Hindi department is registering 200 students for PhD every year, they would naturally think that the scholarly world of Hindi is very rich. By creating this illusion, the real problem is avoided. That fundamental challenge remains: how to learn to read and write in Hindi.
Do we all know how to read? What is the correct method? Why is it a conscious process in which initiation is necessary? The same thing applies to writing. What pedagogy should we adopt? Explaining the reason for students failing in Hindi, a teacher said that students write confidence instead of “atmavishwas” and “safar” instead of “yatra”, or journey. This statement is a good example of the attitude towards language teaching. Teachers focus on the “correctness” or purity of the words: which words are pure Hindi and which are not. The sentence is not thought about. The real challenge is to learn to form a proper, neat, logical sentence in Hindi.
Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University.
