English is new Hindi!

The recurrent push to designate Hindi as the official ‘link’ language across the country reminded me of the time when I was stranded in Chennai, with no way to communicate to an auto driver that I needed urgent drop to the railway station, where my train was about to depart! Desperate, I tried to convey my message in Hindi, then English, and, finally, sign language, but in vain. As we passed a chemist store, I demanded that he stop the auto immediately. I got off and made my way to the store’s proprietor. I asked him if he understood Hindi. As he shook his head, I began to panic that I would miss my train. Then, I switched to English, and, finally, we had a lingua franca. I conveyed my urgency to the store owner, who translated the message to the driver. And, thus, I was able to catch my train to New Delhi!

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This experience brought home to me what all Indians know well — that English is really the only common ‘link language’ that can be understood across the length and breadth of our motherland. Hindi, which has often been pushed by the state as the ‘official language’, is only spoken in a handful of states in North India, and, while it is widely understood in many more regions, there are large parts of the country where it is a ‘foreign language’.

Even among native Hindi speakers, many English words are retained as part of conversational language, without much familiarity to their Hindi translations. For example, hardly any cricket fan in the ‘Hindi heartland’ would be familiar with the Hindi word for the sport: ‘Golgattam lakar pattam de danadan pratiyogita’! The train, which I nearly missed, is called ‘loh path gamini’.

A professor from Uttar Pradesh shared an amusing experience when he visited Kurukshetra in the early ’60s. When he alighted at the railway station, he asked for a rickshaw to be dropped at the ‘vishwavidyalaya’. One after another, the rickshaw-pullers refused his request for a ride. Finally, one of them said he had no idea where ‘vishwavidyalaya’ was, and it would help if he could specify a popular landmark nearby. Exasperated, the professor used the English term that he thought might not ring a bell — university! It elicited a nodding approval from all gathered around him. They immediately said: ‘Oh, tusi Hindi vich university bolna si na, yahan koi vishwavidyalaya nu nahi janda (You should have used the Hindi word ‘university’ because nobody here understands vishwavidyalaya).’

The professor used to narrate this incident to emphasise the irony of English words being passed off as Hindi.