The Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, recently urged the use of Hindi as the lingua franca, rather than English, in inter-State communication. He suggested (reportedly at the Parliamentary Official Language Committee) that when citizens of States who speak other languages communicate with each other, it should be in the “language of India”. It is quite natural that a leader of a political stream that raised the slogan, ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ would air such a quixotic idea. It was V.D. Savarkar, the Hindutva icon, who first advocated the idea of Hindi to be declared the national language and articulated the slogan, ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’. R.V. Dhulekar, a member of the Constituent Assembly, bluntly stated in the Assembly, “You may belong – to another nation but I belong to Indian nation, the Hindi Nation, the Hindu Nation, the Hindustani Nation.”
India has a harmonious symphony of linguistic pluralism; it is not a disarranged cacophony. Ganesh N. Devy, in ‘Indigenous languages’, a UNESCO lecture in October 2008, and also in a media article, “Tribal languages in a death trap” in August 2011, has mentioned how Sir George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903-1923) had identified 179 languages and 544 dialects in India. The 1961 Census reports mentioned a total of 1,652 ‘mother tongues’, out of which 184 ‘mother tongues’ had more than 10,000 speakers, and of which 400 ‘mother tongues’ had not been mentioned in Grierson’s survey, while 527 were listed as ‘unclassified’. In 1971, the linguistic data offered in the Census was distributed in two categories — the officially listed languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, and the other languages with a minimum of 10,000 speakers each. All other languages spoken by less than 10,000 speakers were lumped together in a single entry ‘Others’. That practice continued to be followed in subsequent enumerations. This practice made many languages invisible, says Prof. Devy.
Also read: Explained | The anti-Hindi imposition movements in India
