There's no national language in India

From the e-mail I received:-

Why Chennai can't and won't speak Hindi

Recently, I’ve been barraged on facebook with status messages from my friends who when to Chennai for their summer internships. To summarize all the status messages in one line, people weren’t exactly happy with Chennaites not being able to speak in Hindi. To all those people, let me ask you a simple question –why should they?

People who can speak only Hindi expect that everyone else in India should speak Hindi and this is based on the assumption that Hindi is the national language of India and it should stand true to its name by being spoken across the country. Allow me to correct such beliefs by quoting that as per the constitution of India, Hindi is not the national language. In fact, India doesn’t have a national language and it doesn’t need one. This fact acknowledged by Gujarat High Court as well. So it would be prudent to lower the expectations which were supported by a myth rather than a fact.

Now to the most important question. Why won’t Chennai learn Hindi? There is a two edged answer to this.

One – Love of Tamil. Do you know that Tamil is the only classical language (amongst the eight in the world) still to be in practice? Being more than 2300 years old, the language has stood its time and is currently spoken by more than 8 crore people across the world. It even has official status in three countries other than India.  Sanskrit, India’s oldest language and mother of Hindi couldn’t do that. Why? Because People just love the Tamil language. Fortunately or unfortunately, the language is very close to the people than you can imagine. And this reflects in being supportive any to Tamil community outside the country irrespective of what is right or wrong. Read the article by an American Professor why he thinks that Tamil deserves the classical language status. (Tamil as Classical Language)

Two – Fear. The more you love something, the more you’ll be afraid that you’ll lose it one day. And you’ll do everything at your power to protect what you love dearly. That’s what people in actual power in 1960s did by opposing point blank to the proposal of making Hindi as the national language based on the fear that nationalizing Hindi will slowly erode Tamil. A fair and a justified fear.

There are several points that I can put forward to enforce my side of the argument.

If you travel to Tokyo/Beijing, do you expect people to speak in Hindi? Obviously not Hindi when you can’t expect them to know English either! Will you complain that English is a global language and they should have known it? On the same note, why should you expect someone in Tamil Nadu to do so? Because, it is a part of India? The greatest strength of India is its diversity in languages and sustainable cultural diversity. Don’t try to nullify that strength by expecting the entire nation to speak in a single language.

If you are moving to a land that doesn’t speak the language you do, the onus is on you to learn the new language and not the other way around. When I moved to Hyderabad, I knew neither Telugu nor Hindi, but I managed to learn a bit of both. And even in Mumbai, I managed to survive with the half cooked Hindi I knew. Most importantly, you should have sorry-i-don’t-know-please-help-me attitude and not something like god-you-dont-know-hindi. The latter will get you nowhere.

And finally it comes to personal choice. Nobody in this country stops anyone from learning Hindi. It’s just people don’t choose to.

The above arguments are not only for Tamil. It stands true for other regional languages such as Telugu (another language that I’m very fond of), Kannada, and Bengali which are much older than Hindi and boasts of richer literature. These regional languages have stood their time too and I would watch with glee when they make it to the classical status as well. It's sad that Indian government has done nothing to further the growth of the regional languages across the country. And the state governments take it upon themselves to protect the language and their actions sometimes come as being fanatic (sometimes they really are!).

I do agree that not knowing Hindi does add to the communication problem when people from different region interact. But I would prefer the solution in the form of English rather than Hindi. My rational is that English is already the language of the world and it has reached almost every part of the world. So why can’t English be the unified language in India? Why Hindi when it’s penetration in India is less successful than English? Think and think hard!

And remember both our national anthem and national song are in Bengali!