Congress abandoning the linguistic aspect of Gandhian nationalism
It remains a spectator as some allies attack Hindi and Hindi-speakers. Hindi as the national link language was an essential part of Gandhian nationalism, without which Congress is but a party without a programme.
Prakash Raj’s performance as a skilful weaver who steals silk for his daughter’s wedding saree in Priyadarshan’s Kanchivaram (2008) is an unforgettable experience, perhaps one that earned him his immortal place in the pantheon of India’s great actors. But that does not qualify him to speak on land acquisition and fair compensation at a Parliamentary panel, where he was invited early this week. The Congress party, while embracing him, seems to have confused his anti-Hindi activism for his acumen in land acquisition. Well, therein lies the rub.
The actor made an infamous statement on March 15 against the Hindi language with a social media post, “Don’t impose your Hindi language on us. It is not about hating another language; it is about protecting our mother tongue and our cultural identity with self-respect…” The argument has an inherent flaw: how does learning Hindi rob one off his cultural identity while speaking English strengthen it? In fact, if any language acts detrimental to one’s mother tongue, it is the alien tongue of the coloniser not that of the north Indian commoner.
Meanwhile, the Congress’ newfound regional allies in Mumbai have begun attacking those who speak Hindi. Since when has the Congress party begun to endorse people who attack Hindi? Secularism as professed by the Congress and all anti-BJP parties is but one part of a package called Gandhian nationalism, which included the propagation of Hindi as a national link language.
Gandhian nationalism offers the central idea that despite Partition, despite India being torn by the British into Hindu and Muslim nations, people belonging to these two religions can and should live together in peace and prosperity. Largely, this coexistence --- however tenuous --- has been made possible by the strength of the founding principles of Gandhian idealism. It was utopian to believe that after Jinnah’s Direct Action Day in August 1946, the great Calcutta killings, the massacre at Noakhali, the retaliatory riots in Bihar, with all of it ending in the genocide of 20 lakh people during the Partition a year later, Hindus and Muslims would still settle down to live together to thrive as a nation.
Then came the next round of genocide and exodus --- 30 lakhs killed and over a crore of refugees --- in 1971 when Pakistani army targetted Hindus and Bengali Muslim intelligentsia in East Pakistan. Yet, India remained the Gandhian Republic of Hindus and Muslims and all other communities. The BJP has been in power since 2014. Still not a single family of Muslims has migrated to Pakistan or Bangladesh over religious oppression. True, India is an imperfect nation with warts all over and every single time there is a riot or police atrocity Indians themselves term it genocide and ethnic cleansing, still Hindus and Muslims have live together. Even Gujarat had recorded an increase from 45.9 to 58.4 lakhs in Muslim population between 2001 and 2011 after one of the worst anti-Muslim riots in the recent history.
India owes this miracle to Gandhi and his brand of all-embracing nationalism. The Congress party has been the greatest beneficiary of this politics and still claims to adhere to Gandhian ideals. But then there is no Gandhism without nationalism. Coexistence of Hindus and Muslims cannot be merely for the sake of Muslim votes to gain power, but to build a prosperous and powerful nation celebrating its glorious civilisation. And the “prachar” or propagation of Hindi as a national link language was an essential part of the rebuilding of the Indian nation. Gandhi sent his youngest son, Devadas Gandhi, to Madras in 1918 as the first missionary to teach Hindi to south Indians, thereby setting up the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachara Sabha.
Ramachandra Guha in his book Gandhi; the years that changed the world 1914 – 1948 refers to the Mahatma telling the famous physicist CV Raman that English cannot be India’s link language and that it had to be Hindi. How can a post-colonial society retain the coloniser’s language as its link language while rebuilding a civilisational nation? Language like religion was one of the fault lines that the coloniser tried to exacerbate while making Indians fight among themselves. The entire anti-Sanskrit and anti-Hindi movement in the Madras presidency, which came to be termed as Dravidian ideology, can be seen as an attempt at repackaging the pro-British Justice Party of the non-Brahmin elites into a secessionist vehicle impeding the national movement. The Brahminical stranglehold of the bureaucracy and its omnipresence in the higher echelons of society made the anti-Brahmin rhetoric credible.
But then there is nothing Dravidian in south India. A Malayali will never accept Tamil as a link language, he would rather speak English or Hindi to a Kannadiga or Telugu and vice versa. In the last three decades, English has made considerable inroads into the Indian cultural space, primarily due to the mass media --- TV soaps, music, movies, gadgets, software --- and foreign-controlled or foreign-funded platforms. The idea of Hindi as a link language is losing its grip as English is becoming synonymous with modernity.
The Hindi proponents are to be blamed entirely for this predicament, particularly the Hindutva-affiliated Hindiwallahs who want to impose a national language instead of nurturing an organic link language. They condescendingly refused to learn another Indian language, thereby defeating the three-language formula and the idea of bilingual or trilingual Indians. It is dishonest to ask south Indians to accept Hindi when north Indians have no concept of learning another language.
However, that is not going to help the Congress. This is a moment when demands for deletion of the word secular from the Constitution’s preamble are being made by the Hindutva advocates. How can secularism be divorced from the idea of an Indian link language? If Hindus are to be asked to restrain their majoritarian instincts and accord equal status and equal space to all religious groups in the spirit of inclusive nationalism to build a prosperous new nation, then that society ought to have a post-colonial language to talk to each other.
Mahatma Gandhi was the president of the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha from 1918 to 1948, then Rajendra Prasad took over the mantle, which was passed on to Lal Bahadur Shastri and then to Indira Gandhi and later Rajiv. Strangely, Sonia and Rahul never seem to have bothered to steer this institution, which has lost all its relevance. Congress without Gandhian nationalism is a political party without a programme. And when it invites those who want English as a national link language into its fold, it would be getting reduced to one of those many petty projects the colonialists devised to keep India divided.
No comments:
Post a Comment