http://www.sulekha.com/articledesc.asp?cid=306470
I was at the New Delhi International Airport, flying out of Delhi to the USA. There was the routine immigration check, manned by a routine Hindi(only)-speaking immigration officer. Looked at me and my passport, once and then another time again, with that skeptical look only an Indian government officer could manage, he said something to me in Hindi, in a heavily-accented rural Hindi. I know Hindi, Hindi as in Hindi Prachar Sabha, and I can understand terms like raashtriya karyakram, samachar, pradhan mantri (from the days when Hindi-only TV was broadcast in Madurai) and can recite 1 to 1000 in Hindi, and know enough of the language to follow cricket scores in Hindi. But that utterance from the immigration officer was totally incomprehensible. I said, “Pardon me, Sir, can you repeat that again?” and he did that, and it was a digitally correct reproduction of the last one.
Okay, I thought, let me throw in the towel, and said, “Sorry! I don’t know Hindi.” He stared at me for a second and tore up my immigration form and gestured me out of the queue, and I was made to understand that I would have to fill the form once again and come back to the queue. I thought I had broken some written-in-blood-only-for-red-tape-not-explained-to-public rule of the Indian immigration act and so faithfully did what I was told to, only to find out the officer asking more questions in Hindi and thoroughly examining my passport, and then he said in Hindi that he suspected the authenticity of my passport. I assured him that I’d got the passport through legal methods and had used it several times while travelling abroad and had never had a problem before. He proceeded to inspect my passport with the cap of a well-used ballpoint pen. I requested him not to damage my passport and demanded to see his supervisor.
When the supervisor came, they both muttered a few short fast words to each other and then pronounced that I had been cleared and could proceed. Being the inquisitive spirit that I am, I asked that question, “Why?” The answer was that the officer had become ‘suspicious’ of me because I hadn’t answered his questions ‘properly’ and so thought it might have been a stolen passport, and wanted to ‘test’ me by sending me out once and since I had come back it was proven that I was a ‘genuine’ case. Wow! What an uncanny law-enforcement technique! If I were fluent in Hindi, would I have been a ‘genuine’ case then? I was appalled by the people who let Dawood Ibrahim go with a normal visa and passport, but are ‘suspicious’ of a person not ‘properly’ answering questions in Hindi, even after insisting that I don’t speak that language, or at least not that officer’s version of it!
I know you might want to think of this as an isolated incident perpetrated by an ignorant or chauvinist individual. Sadly, that is not the case. This happened to me again at the Indian embassy in London, when a group of our friends was there since one of our passports was stolen.
Once when I was visiting Toronto and had, like a typical tourist, got lost, I started asking directions from a group of cabbies idling in a street corner. A Sardarji promptly asked me if I was from India, and then proceeded with rapid instructions, of course in chaste Hindi. I know ‘left’ and ‘right’ from my days in the National Cadet Corps, but couldn’t keep up with his instructions. I stopped him for a moment and said that I didn’t know Hindi (I said that in Hindi! “Hindi Nahi Maloom!”) and he was surprised by that and said he would only give instructions in Hindi. I replied, “I would have to ask somebody else then!” A similar incident also happened in another unlikely place – a US federal government office, where we met a Punjabi-American who was appalled when I told her I don’t speak Hindi, and yes, I am from India.
See, I am ready to speak Hindi when I am in a place like Haryana or when I’m with a Hindi-speaking friend. These cases are entirely different. Why should I speak Hindi because I am an Indian? Why should it be automatically assumed that I know Hindi since I am from India? That too in ‘neutral’ venues outside India. As an Indian citizen it is not my duty to learn Hindi, and hence, the embassy or the immigration official should not expect me to speak the language. I could never really figure this out.
Whenever I bring this point up, I am accused of being an anti-national or a Dravidian chauvinist or a Tamil extremist. It is not fair at all, and I assure you I am none of the above. I’m just someone who’s puzzled about this Indian-Hindi identity and am trying to make sense of it. Looking at the history of anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu and the eventual backing-off of pro-Hindi imposers and the later irrelevance of Hindi education after liberalization, it is very clear that this ‘expect to speak Hindi’ syndrome has historical roots. This problem has some analogs in the world. The Scots and the Irish have also suffered under similar linguistic domination, and their languages and cultures are now over-shadowed and buried by the English. Back home the ‘Hindi-like’ languages like Punjabi and Marathi have suffered heavily from the domination of Hindi. How many Marathi movies are released nowadays? I am not implying that the number of movies released reflects the health of any language, but it is one of the many signs of health.
I am also appalled by the South Indians’ amazing ability and willingness to speak Hindi/Urdu and the opposite attitude of northerners to speak any of the four languages from the South. Udit Narayan and Sadhana Sargam continue to bludgeon Tamil and Telugu to death with their excruciating renditions of movie songs, but S. P. Bala or Chitra always do justice to their salaries when they do Hindi numbers. Millions of Tamils speak, read and write Hindi so fluently, even if they haven’t been anywhere further north of North Chennai, but a group of northies lending money in Madurai since the ice age speak a pathetic Tamil with no tense, knowledge of numbers or grammar. So, learning Hindi does not come under the banner of cultural exchange, since it is not two-way, even in the most dilute interpretation of the term.
Emotions aside, why should anyone learn Hindi at all? You could learn Urdu or Arabic or Bengali or Tamil or Sanskrit for their rich literature and poetry; Telegu for Carnatic music; or for that matter German to read original Nietzsche. I just wonder what Hindi has to offer, except possibly for the unrealistic-cloying-nonsense from Bollywood?!
In today’s globalized world English makes the most sense as the language of communication even within India. You have to learn English anyway. And even as a communication language, Hindi is a bit handicapped due to its starkly different flavors – you can not speak like Laloo Prasad and be understood in rural Punjab. Can you? The Sanskritized Hindi that I can speak would be laughed at in any UP hamlet.
Diversity is the greatest asset of India. An Indian could be a Muslim, a Jain or a Parsi, a tribal or a fisherman, and shall speak in Hindi or Assamese or Malayalam. Let us brand ourselves with our diversity, rich cultural history and heritage and with our Indian identity, let us not brand ourselves with a language that is not spoken by all and which was ‘invented’ as a ‘convenience’. It has nothing to do with the languages of the South/East, and since it is similar to the languages of the North, it has the potential to fade them all into itself.
