The Making of Modern Hindi

Hindi is widely regarded in contemporary India with considerable apprehension and some condescension — especially by speakers of the  “lesser” Indian languages. The apprehension derives from two main factors. The first is that Hindi is big, out of all proportion to other languages. It is spoken as a mother tongue by more than five times as many people as the next biggest language, Bengali. A scarier way of putting this may be to say that there are more native speakers of Hindi in India than there are of the next eight biggest languages put together: Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kannada and Odia, in that order.

The other reason for regarding Hindi with suspicion is that in 1950, it was adopted in the Constitution as the Rajbhasha, the official language of the nation, and was set to replace English in that capacity after a transitional period of 15 years, in 1965. These have proved to be very long 15 years, for they are still continuing, more than five decades after the designated date. But the prospect that this calamity could yet happen hangs as the Sword of Damocles over the heads of all non-Hindi speakers.

The condescension toward…