In India we have a language called Hindi. Many people from other countries when they come to the northern parts of the country think that Hindi is the “Indian” language. An Indian, however, knows that it is totally false. Well, not all Indians of course. Many people believe that Hindi should be the only language used and many a time they make the mistake of assuming that it “is” the only language used. There is always that section of people like anywhere else that cares little for what language or languages we have or should have. Then there are people who have a tremendous regional pride and believe that their regional language is the Language and it should become the national lingua franca. Nevertheless, no matter what people believe or don’t believe Hindi is certainly not the language of India. It is one of the languages in its current state; spoken by a lot of people, yes, but not by all of the people and in its pure form just in some regions and is highly ridiculed by many.
Well anyway, Hindi being a major language of North India shares its speakers with many regional languages and now with English or a mixed pidgin of Hindi and English in which any word of English is correct and classy and any word of Hindi is correct but cheap. In this funny language, which many call “Hinglish” (Hindi+English), when women use abusive words they tend to favor the English vocabulary and men tend to jump to the Hindi resources. Well, apart from all these competitors Hindi shares almost all of its speakers with a “ghost” language called Urdu. Urdu is the official language of Pakistan. And if Urdu is the official language at some place, Hindi has to be called the ghost. Why? There are many reasons. To understand them firstly the most important thing that you will have to understand is the origin of both Urdu and Hindi. They originated as the same language which was a mixture of local dialects with Persian and Sanskrit with influence of a lot of other languages like Turkish, Arabic and others. This non-standard language existed for some time and was finally standardized with the advent of poetry in it. There were two types of poetry being written in this new “language”: one that borrowed heavily from Persian and one that relied on Sanskrit for its more classical words. When spoken they were not two languages. This strange mix of languages has been called with many names all along the history: Hindavi, Rekhta, Khari boli etc. With time the “languages” went on getting more and more standardized with the literature written in them and then finally there came to exist three dialects or languages: Hindi (with Sanskrit classical words), Urdu (with Persian classical words) and Hindustani (the mixture of both). After independence India adopted Hindi as the official language and Pakistan Urdu, but their people went on speaking the blend of both, which I would be risking offending Pakistanis if I continue calling it “Hindustani” (literally: Indian).
Given my being exceedingly ignorant of the situation of languages in general and Urdu in particular in Pakistan we would move ahead with the discussion over Hindi as it is today in India.
Today non-standard Hindi, which is largely the spoken Hindi, is very very difficult to learn as it is merely a blend of almost any language you can find spread around the Indian subcontinent. How understandable it is depends upon the region we are talking about. If one finds oneself near West Bengal, a Hindi with some Bangla vocabulary can be understood better instead of the standard Hindi. If one goes close to Maharashtra the same becomes true of Marathi laden Hindi. In urban areas almost anywhere if you hear Hindi it will be overladen with English words and at times whole sentences.
The standard form of Hindi, however, is very complicated too. As it lives with the ghost of Urdu. Urdu nearly has all its classical terms borrowed from Persian and some from Arabic. In many cases (like in poetry, for instance) you can use almost any Persian word in Urdu and be correct. Unfortunately many words used in Urdu, of Persian origin, can be used in Hindi and it will not be considered wrong Hindi. For example the word “Sundar” (beautiful, good-looking) is the standard Hindi word taken from Sanskrit, but the Urdu word “Khoobsoorat” (Persian origin, literal meaning “great face”) can be used correctly in standard Hindi. It is just one example. There are thousands of such examples. So, here we have a strange situation. Many Persian words can be used as classical words in Urdu and many Urdu words can be used in the standard Hindi. Many Sanskrit words can be used as classical words in Hindi. So, in order to be a master of Hindi one needs to have a good knowledge of Urdu and some knowledge of Persian and Sanskrit. And at this point one realizes that this is not the language of the people. It is just the language of the government. The language of the people would include their regional influence as well as English in the equation.
There has only been one language in the history which has seen a somewhat similar complication. The Ottoman Turkish. Given the size of Ottoman Empire, its language, the Ottoman Turkish was heavily laden by other regional languages and languages like Persian and Arabic. It is said that to be good at Ottoman Turkish one needed to have a good command over both Persian and Arabic. Moreover, having the Arab religion as the state religion guaranteed Arabic a special place in the Empire. One man saw this as complicated and decided to change it forever. Atatürk made his linguists clean Turkish of Arabic and Persian Vocabulary and adopt native Turkish terms along with adopting the Roman alphabet discarding the Arabic script in favor of simplicity and “internationality”. Atatürk saw that discarding the Arabic alphabet would help preserve the language of the Turks.
I don’t know if discarding Devanagari script would be a good idea for preserving Hindi and cleaning out the Urdu words from it. The problem here is Indians don’t seem willing to preserve Hindi. And then there are others who want to preserve it all. Totally. It is very difficult as the youth is ashamed to speak it, specially the urban youth. They tend to favor their own version of accented English which is supposedly a standard dialect now, the South Asian English.
Only time will tell what will happen to Hindi. Meanwhile I write in English to reach people who are ashamed to read Hindi.
-Madhuvan Rishiraj
LAMPS OF DESERT 