Hindi medium, rare

In Uttar Pradesh for the first time in my life, I am captivated most by hearing spoken around me a language I actually understand. Growing up in Shillong, I was known by classmates and friends as ‘a Hindi’. But to be a Hindi who happened to have no Hindi hometown to visit during the winter holidays, who spoke Hindi haltingly, who didn’t quite fit in with the other more resolutely Hindi Hindis, was an awkward sort of Hindi to be. My parents were, in their childhood, with their native tongues of eastern UP Bhojpuri and Northwest Frontier Punjabi, perfectly at home with Hindi — even if not born Hindis. Before moving to Shillong, they would live in cities such as Delhi, Agra and Allahabad, where that language is mixed with the very air, and they have, all their lives, written, read, spoken and taught in it.

This ought to have been my legacy but it melted away on contact with Shillong’s babel. Most people in that city speak several languages and the degree of each person’s adeptness with different tongues usually holds the key to who they are. Being surrounded by this linguistic excess, I grew up recognising languages rather than knowing them. The surfeit of tongues became farcical to me, and my siblings and I expressed our amusement in the only language we really knew. Hindi was the medium of dull school textbooks, grandparents’ stories, the everyday gossip and chatter with helps and in the bazaar — all of which receded as I cleaved to English. In the strenuous tussle with that language, trying to transform it from the language of literary exoticism to the medium of one’s own experience, one could end up losing all else. “English fill my right hand, silence my left,” writes the poet Jeet Thayil in ‘English’. The silence of my own left hand is, when held to the ear, punctured with the echoes of languages I have never been able to make entirely mine.

Living in Bengaluru meant adding to my store of partial languages, even as I missed the familiar ring of my parents’ Hindi. The city is less cacophonous than Shillong but gradually filling up with the strains of the whole subcontinent. Over the close to two decades that I have been here, the field of sounds outside my window has grown richer. I hear workmen talk in Maithili, children playing in English, vendors calling out the names of vegetables and flowers in Kannada, and neighbours talking in Hindi, Telugu or Bengali. The department store next door is run by Malayalis. The waiters in the local restaurants are Nepali speakers from Kalimpong or Tulu speakers from South Canara. The knick-knack shops are Marwari-owned. All these people speak to each other too, and the lingua franca is Kannada and English and, of course, Hindi.

This linguistic congeniality is a strength but it could also suggest a casual, if good-natured, functionalism. We need to get by. We are using all our languages for daily commerce and in that realm the words for things tend to take precedence over the expression of ideas. Apart from the tongues in which people buy and sell, serve and order, one is also curious about those in which they dream, remember, meditate, think, read and write. What is it like, the inner life of those with several languages clashing or conjoined inside them? Are we creating a new, richer, polyglot way of apprehending the world or just becoming indifferent speakers of many languages?

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On my visit to the, by contrast, starkly monolingual UP, I am hearing Hindi everywhere and delighted. But the first person I speak to about the language says it is ‘ phoohar ’ and I’m dismayed by her dismissal but enchanted by that word, which I have not heard since circa 1990. It means ‘uncouth’. An entire language, rather than some of the people who speak it? My acquaintance, whom I will call SK, ran an English coaching centre in Allahabad for a decade and she aimed to teach her students not just English but also manners, the two things being one in her mind. She could be firm in the face of the city’s gun-toting goondas who tried to threaten their way for free into her highly popular course. They either had to learn English — and, of course, the manners they sorely lacked — on her terms or let the bullets fly if they so pleased. (They once threatened to set off a bomb inside the institute and the police had to be called in.) SK’s students included retired bureaucrats, housewives, and youths taking competitive exams. She lectured on the idioms — turn a blind eye to, turn a deaf ear to, turn over a new leaf — and synonyms, because English has so many. She instructed them in the difference between commenting on a girl and complimenting her, how to open doors for women, the proper way to shake a female hand. She also taught them how to dress well, eat with a fork and knife, use chopsticks, not pick their teeth in public, not blow their noses at the table and then study the contents of their handkerchiefs because “it is not silver or gold” that lies therein. Emerging from a restaurant, one must have the name of one’s driver announced, not run after one’s car.

A restaurant, in fact, seemed to be the imagined context for putting to use much of this English education. The anglicised world that SK had created could have been a reality show set in a fine-dining venue and only those with the right etiquette, respect for women, correct grammar and a mastery of chopsticks could make their way out of the place with their dignity intact. Her own English is not perfect — she says “aksed” and drops articles with aplomb and sometimes prepositions too — but it is perfectly serviceable.

This restaurant fantasy isn’t weird — eating in them as a lifestyle is quite new to us, as is the dream of a universal familiarity with English. Better still, we would like to eat out and talk in English at the same time. Spending time in Allahabad’s old-world El Chico, which is from 1964, I realise that even in the established places the hankerings are new and so are the conversations. Two couples at the next table are talking, one afternoon, about their vacations — one pair already gone and come, and the other about to embark. The tulips will be in season in Holland, don’t forget to buy chocolates in Switzerland, you must visit the Murano glass factory, the Eiffel Tower is fine. Europe seemed to be the creation of a brochure, a place to imbibe in easy images, fold away and put in one’s pocket. It could be as simple as knowing a handful of the right English phrases. Where is Frankfurt? Is it in Amsterdam?

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So the longing for English and the embarrassment with Hindi — but this is not the whole picture. There is also an increased informality with Hindi and a creeping sense of estrangement from English. The latter has become, with the middle-class bloating at both ends — the once homebound, upper-class El Chico wallahs starting to take their leisure abroad, and those within touching distance of the bourgeoisie wanting for themselves or their children an English education — the language we have to learn all over again. SK now teaches at a residential school that once housed the sons of aristocrats and is today open to anyone with the money, and these boys, she tells me, speak to each other — on the playing fields and in the dorms and, sometimes, even in the classroom — in Hindi. This is not the Modern Standard Hindi of the school textbook, which has become foreign even to native speakers, nor the crystalline language of a perfectly articulate user of the language, but a casual, even crude patois with more than a smattering of English thrown in. It is the no longer new hotchpotch that we all recognise — the one Bollywood and TV anchors and the upper half of Delhi speaks. If it’s not a phoohar language, it’s certainly not an elegant one.

Rashmi Sadana, who has studied the contemporary life of Hindi, wrote some years ago, in her essay ‘Managing Hindi’, about the experience of teaching at the IITs in Chennai and Delhi. At the Chennai institute, students from all over the country communicated with each other in Hindi — and “this went against some of my assumptions about ‘the South’” — and at IIT-Delhi it was Hindi, too, except that here it was the “mother tongue of the vast majority of students […] It was also the language that some students spoke to me in after class, if they had missed many lectures or turned in assignments late. Their heads would drop a little and their faces turn soft; they looked to me for sympathy and out came Hindi, often in a low, muffled voice. […] When I told students who I knew were more comfortable in Hindi that they were welcome to make comments or ask questions in class in the language, they nodded but never did so. I soon realised that in the competitive atmosphere of the IITs, to do so would be to mark oneself in the classroom, even if everyone broke into Hindi the minute class was over.”

“Chetan Bhagat is all very well, but where are the stories that represent the lives of those who still live in the villages?” asks a student after a lecture I give at Allahabad University in a dreadful mixture of Hindi and English. His question is just and his Hindi irreproachable. We cannot limit our discussion to English and the middle class, we have to ask what the rest are reading, he emphasises. What are they reading, I ask him.

Not much, he says. Reading always has been and still is limited to a small section of the population. But this doesn’t make his concern irrelevant. I am still thinking of it as I chat with a former professor of English, and he tells me how Allahabad University students have always been viewed as EMT or HMT — English Medium Types and Hindi Medium Types. He is tired of the stereotype and recently had to put down a speaker at a public event who was going on about the atrocious HMTs.

He ran into a former student on a train once, a ticket examiner who, recognising him, insisted on refunding his fare. That’s not fair, replied the professor, to which the ticket examiner said, quoting his college Shakespeare, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.”

So the literature had trickled in despite his pronunciation not being the tops, said the professor.

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If superciliousness about posh accents feels like jaded elite humbug, lamenting the decline of Hindi has become a tired pastime too — more effort seems to be expended in talking about the language rather than doing things in it. The two came together for me when I heard the poet Suresh Rituparna thunder at a large, near-empty hall about the undermining of his language and the scourge of Westernisation; he rounded up his speech with the following couplet: “ Aane waale samay mein ‘ Ma ka aanchal ’ kahavat ban ke reh jayegi / Jeans waali Mummy ma ka aanchal kahan se layegi ?” (Trying to render this in English brings me up against the classic challenge of translation — one could carry over the words but how to communicate the culture? The cultural loss Rituparna is worried about here is that signified by the sari’s pallu or anchal — which is not just a free-flowing segment of the garment but also, for its sheltering potential, a metaphor for maternal affection. So what happens to that canopy of love when all the mummies become jeans-clad?)

The Hindi language as subject matter of Hindi thought need not be grounds just for breast-beating though, and other poets too have given the theme voice, such as Kedarnath Singh in the poem ‘Hindi’ where he says, in Harish Trivedi’s translation, “Not official language –/ but let my language be language, just language./ So full is it of its neighbourhood and surroundings/ and of the essence distilled drop by drop/ of many sounds from near and far/ that when I speak it/ there lies in its depths/ Arabic-Turkish Bangla Telugu/and even the stirring of a little leaf.”

In my own life, Hindi stood not for these organic bonds but was an utterly uncool association, until I left it behind and then, gradually, started to notice it again through my parents. My mother has taught Hindi in Shillong for more than four decades. Her students are usually speakers of several languages, often have mixed parentage, and are strugglers with Hindi. Many are academically sound — can write grammatically perfect essays from memory or answer questions about the stories of Agyeya or the essays of Sanskritayan — but never manage a spontaneous conversation in the language. Their speech grates on the ear. They do not live in Hindi and the only joy they take from it is succeeding in an exam. And yet, between my mother’s passion for the language and these boys and girls trying, out of choice sometimes, to fit the shape of it to their mouths and minds, there seems to lie something worthwhile.

On my annual visits to Shillong, I have tried eavesdropping on Hindi — heard my mother laugh at the neologism ‘ khabar-kagaz ’ that a student of hers has invented for ‘newspaper’, or despair over how another will never get Hindi’s grammatical gender; I’ve heard my father tell of his encounters with pioneers of Hindi-Urdu who were also veterans in the language — Firaq Gorakhpuri or Rahi Masoom Raza. A couple of years ago I attempted, with trepidation, to translate two of Premchand’s Hindi stories into English. The drift of the texts was clear to me but there were sentences, turns of phrase, idioms, allusions and, of course, dozens of words that I didn’t recognise or only vaguely did. His was a difficult language to me, but exactly how difficult it was in general, how it sounded when heard against the wider landscape of Hindi prose, was impossible for me to know.

Yet reading Premchand also reminded me that many writers like him had made a deliberate move towards Hindi and that they had magisterially, and for decades — as I was doing in a tiny, flailing way — grappled with the language too. Premchand, as is well known, wrote his fiction in Urdu for the first several years of his career, and then switched to Hindi; his Urdu stories and novels were later translated, even rewritten, into Hindi by himself and others.

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Singh’s apparently indigenous relationship to Hindi is disrupted by another poem in the same collection I’ve just quoted from ( Banaras and Other Poems ), in which he writes of his dual relationship to Hindi and Bhojpuri. “Hindi is my country/ Bhojpuri my home/ I step out of home/ and enter my country/ When let off by country/ I come back home.” And later in the same poem, “For the last sixty years/ I have been looking to find/ one in the other.” (‘Home and Country’). Hindi held a deep attraction for those who sought a country and the modern — that is, early 20th century — writers who decided to turn to it did so precisely because it promised a different kind of homeland from the more intimate but provincial habitation of the native tongue, which was usually any one of the many north Indian languages and dialects. It is marvellous to remember that just a hundred years ago, Khari Boli, the variant of the language that we today call Hindi, was a new vehicle requiring votaries and seeking practitioners.

‘Incessant Search for Languages’, an essay by the novelist, poet and painter Teji Grover, first revealed to me that some contemporary writers in the language may have, likewise, come into Hindi and are not necessarily native to it. Growing up in a Punjabi household, with an Urdu-poetry loving father, going to an English language school, Hindi was at some remove from Grover till she discovered it in literature — Nirala’s poems, Mahadevi Varma’s stories and Nirmal Verma’s novels. “Hindi’s initial strangeness filled me with longing for it…” writes Grover. “In a Nirala poem, words like ‘pulin’, ‘trin’, ‘nirjhar’ haunted me without letup, but I was not the least bit interested in knowing their meanings. For me the delirium of sound was meaning enough. In this delirium I began to write.” A similar arc has been followed, through accident and design, by other Hindi writers such as Krishna Sobti and Geetanjali Shree. And examples abound in earlier generations too. In Allahabad in the early 1910s, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, the to-be-famous poet but then still a student in the Urdu medium, heard a speech titled ‘Hindi: Our National Language’ and decided to switch over. Nirala too, a few years older than Bachchan and considered the greatest poet in the language after Tulsidas, took to Hindi rather than being born in it. “Nirala grew up speaking two languages…” writes Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in The Last Bungalow , a collection of writings on Allahabad. “Baiswari, which was the language of his home, and Bengali, in whose literature, especially Tagore, he was deeply read. Standard Hindi he taught himself later, by studying back issues of magazines like Chintamoni Ghosh’s Saraswati, published from Allahabad.”

The literary adventure that was Hindi, the exciting novelty of the language, is forgotten when we set it up against English as the timeless native versus the upstart invader. Between the two extreme views — Hindi or any Indian language is rooted, natural, Indian, ours; English is imposed, foreign, theirs — there are a variety of dissatisfactory positions that one can take. The least uncomfortable one, that of a thoroughgoing bilingualism, is increasingly rare today but the hallmark of so many speakers, thinkers and writers from one or two generations ago: Bachchan, say, who not only became known as the author of Madhushala but was also one of the first Indians to get a Cambridge PhD in literature. Other Hindi-Urdu writers — such as Firaq and Agyeya — too were both teachers of an English-language literature and creators of an Indian one.

Today, in our metropolises, more commonly heard than the two distinct languages is the detritus resulting from their amalgam — Hinglish, about which it is hard to not feel what George Orwell did 70 years ago, witnessing the decline of both English expression and English thought, in his well-known ‘Politics and the English Language’. Our tongue has become, he says, “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Hinglish speakers are unable to express anything but foolish thoughts because their dialect is a floundering for the right word. If the English one is not at hand, they resort to the Hindi but they don’t know Hindi well enough, so they make do with bits of English. Does this broken language make us shallow or is our shallowness best expressed through it?

In either case we face a painful binary. The students at the English coaching centres and the IITs are, without wanting to, stuck at that halfway point between their own languages and English — they must leave one in order to be able to speak the other and they are, in the bargain, likely to know neither well. SK told me that many of the younger aspiring English speakers at her institute are poor in Hindi too. Sadana writes in her essay how she encourages her students to develop both or all their languages but she also realises that “real bilingualism, let alone multilingualism was something they were not given the time to practice or excel at in the space of their education…”

The question the Allahabad University student put to me was also a question about himself. He said he was the first person from his village in UP to be studying for a PhD and his implied worry was — where do I fit in? I realise he was the obverse of me. His English was as dodgy as my Hindi was poor. We both really had just one language and we both felt marooned in it. Perhaps, instead of crowing about the richness of India’s languages it is time to write this story: the one about the great impoverishment of our tongues.

Anjum Hasan is a writer based in Bengaluru

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