This is the second part of a debate on whether Hindi or English are weakening other Indian languages and constricting linguistic diversity. Read the first part here.
English has done remarkable damage to India’s linguistic progress by stifling other Indian languages. Instead, that blame is conveniently laid on Hindi. Blaming English forces one to confront a hard truth that India’s systems are designed to keep most Indians outside the gate. It is easier to blame Hindi, performing critique, while staying inside the inherited structure.
It is time to break this structure down.
India is a “linguistic surplus” nation. However, the main problem with Indians is that they are somewhat ignorant about what to do with this linguistic surplus, ability and strength. Indians are inherently multilingual, but live in a monolingually institutionalised world.
When I say monolingual world, I don’t mean that there is only one functioning language on earth. Don’t count the number of languages but look at how they operate in the post-industrial world and in the binary of the nation-state. Monolingualism is the favoured approach of colonial and post-colonial institutions. It is how institutions scale, status is produced and knowledge is certified in contemporary times.
India is a peculiar case because, in some exclusive quarters, it practices acute monolingualism, but at other socio-cultural levels it tries to retain its old multilingual character. The higher one climbs, the more the system demands that one abandons their linguistic plurality and kneel before one code. That code is English.
For instance, school education is multilingual, but as one progresses towards higher education, it starts becoming more and more monolingual – and that is by design.
When many Indians transition from cultural multilingualism towards institutional monolingualism, language attrition in Indian languages starts happening. Language attrition is the gradual loss of a language or parts of a language when someone stops using it regularly, or the degree of its usage changes.
But the real question is what kind of bilingualism is being demanded of Indians and what kind of linguistic recovery is possible post-language attrition in India?
Here is the hard science that people treat like poetry.
Cognate languages, which are descended from the same ancestral language, function differently. Hindi and “regional” languages, which are considered victims of Hindi, share genetic nativeness: they have the relatively same structures and syntax and share large sets of vocabulary.
The kind of bilingualism in Indian languages is fundamentally different from bilingualism with English. You can switch between cognate tongues with less cognitive effort and regain linguistic strength faster post-language attrition. English shares no such apparent properties with any Indian language.
Hindi is India’s linguistic modernity and political and civic ingenuity. Not because it is perfect on any linguistic parameters, rather, it is the first large-scale attempt at a shared public language that has neither historical priesthood and traditional (or cultural) exquisiteness, nor colonial power like English. That is why the rise of Hindi provokes scathing reactions from other Indians, such as anti-Hindi movements seen in some states. People are witnessing a language, ie, Hindi, claiming linguistic autonomy and strength in front of their eyes and this generates resistance.
The way many academics look at Hindi has made us believe that the real villain is Hindi and its rise. However, English remains the language of elite certification. It is still the language of the Supreme Court, the top bureaucracy, the “serious” university and the “world”.
Everyone more or less accepts the might and legitimacy of English. That itself should make one suspicious. When a gatekeeping tool is accepted as natural, it means people have internalised their place in the hierarchy.
Some will say Hindi has prestige too and it weakens mother tongues. To some extent that is true. Middle-classes shift their linguistic preferences, even for Indian languages. In Bhojpur, people shift to Hindi. But look carefully at the direction of aspiration. The Indian middle-class shifts to Hindi from their mother tongue only to go further to English. Hindi is a ladder. Because they don’t or can’t jump to English directly from Bhojpuri, they shift to Hindi. Hindi gives them the same linguistic feeling for a while, but the ultimate destination is English.
When one sees a Bhojpuri speaker becoming a Hindi speaker, don’t stop the story there and declare Hindi the murderer. Instead, see what higher education, the courts, corporate hiring and social prestige demand. The machine pulls one upward into English. Hindi is the corridor, English is the gate.
That is why a certain kind of anti-Hindi argument often feels incomplete. It critiques the corridor while keeping the gate untouched. Further, Hindi is probably the only language that has, post-independence, real democratic roots – in the sense that it grew as a mass public language in the modern political churn. It belongs to rallies, pamphlets, cinema, street speech, and everyday exchange across sub-regions. That doesn’t mean it is automatically innocent but that it carries a different social energy.
So what do we do with English? We start calling it what it is: a bottleneck. A colonial design and inheritance that still organises who gets to think and who gets to speak in India. Further, to strengthen the sister languages, don’t just fight Hindi. Build a structure where multilingualism is not punished as you climb. “Vernacularise” higher education without making it a tribal trophy. Make the apex institutions linguistically accountable.
Otherwise, Hindi can be replaced with a dozen regional prides and the gate will still be English. That gate will still turn linguistic surplus into linguistic shame or burden.
Finally, the real question is whether India can build a multilingual modernity or keep feeding a monolingual machine and blaming the corridor for what the gate does.
Krishna Kumar Pandey is an assistant professor of Linguistics at the Central Institute of Hindi, Agra. He has been a Fulbright scholar at the University of Michigan.
This is the second part of a debate on whether Hindi or English are weakening other Indian languages and constricting linguistic diversity. Read the first part here.
