India’s Home Minister Amit Shah recently said that those who speak English in South Asian country will “feel ashamed soon.”
So he instigated people to speak his mother tongue with pride. “I believe the languages of our country are jewelry of our culture. Without our languages, we are really a matter of being Indian,” he said.
He emphasized that India should lead the entire languages globally instead of using English.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is growing rapidly in English in English in official work.
Legal instructions require Hindi in official communication, documentation, courts and recruitment, in Hindi speaking states, specificly, the goal is to promote the role of Hindi and reduce the dependence on English.
A rich linguistic diversity
However, the push to elevate Hindi is controversial-partially in non-Hindi speaking states.
Language is a poignant subject in the world’s most populous country, where its 1.4 billion people speak more than a hundred languages and thousands of dialects.
There is not a single “national language” in India. Instead, now it has 22 official languages. At the federal level, both Hindi and English have been designated as official languages, while individual states have adopted one or more languages as their official languages.
The internal, state borders are mostly drawn with linguistic lines.
Hindi is the most spoken language in the country, with more than 43% of the population (more than 528 million people), capable of communicating according to the final census held in 2011. This is followed by Bengali, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil.
“Unlike Western nation-states, which are mostly monolring, India embraces many official languages, which reflects its rich linguistic diversity, from which this tension arises,” said a professor at the political study center at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, a professor at the political study center at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
English as ‘colonial heritage’
In the past, Hindi was built in the past to create the only official language at the federal level, but they all met harsh resistance in non-Hindi speaking sectors.
Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, has been campaigning for a long time to promote Hindi.
Prafulla ketkar, editor of the organizer, the ideological parents of the BJP, the ideological parents of the presidents, the ideological parents of the nations said, “English as a colonial heritage should be repeated as a colonial heritage as other languages, as every Indian language has national importance.”
While the BJP insists that it wants to promote all the native Indian languages-Hindi-these efforts have been controversial to expand the use of Hindi, critics accused New Delhi of trying to put Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states.
The southern states, whose languages are not very common with Hindi, have particularly opposed Hindi push.
Samuel Asir Raj, a sociologist and Professor at the University of Manonmanium Sundarnar at Tirunelveli, is in the form of English for non-Hindi speaking states, “a sociologist and Professor at Manonmanium Sundarnar University in Tirunelveli East.
In the western state of Maharashtra, which is run by the BJP, the government recently announced that young students would be tight Hindi as the third language. But a terrible backlash quickly forced it to scrap the move.
School as a tool in controversy on identity
In Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister MK Stalin is engaged in a bitter line with Modi’s government on language policy.
Dispute centers around India’s National Education Policy (NEP) were first introduced in 1968 and recently updated by the Modi government in 2020.
The original policy imagined a three -long language formula.
Hindi -speaking states in northern India had to teach Hindi, English and third Indian languages in school. Meanwhile, non-Hindi-speaking states will teach regional language, Hindi and English.
When modified in 2020, NEP retained the three leguse formula, but provided more flexibility to states to choose three languages. However, it is mandatory that at least two languages should be native to India, although Hindi is not mandatory.
Tamil Nadu, however, remains a terrible rival of the policy and wanted to live with his school children teaching in only two languages – Tamil and English. And it sees the three-language plan as an attempt to put Hindi on the state through the back door.
The theme and cultural identity of concern have promoted resistance.
Sociologist Raj said, “South India’s opposition to NEP is not about Hindi, but the central government has used a policy to culturally appropriate its identity.”
Can Hindi change English completely in India?
Despite the blow of the Modi government for Hindi, English is widely used in India, including education, commerce and courts, even in Hindi -speaking sector.
People across the country learn the language as economic and social mobility. They rapidly send their children to English medium schools, in the hope that it will help achieve access to better and high sports jobs.
Against this background, it is unlikely that Hindi will completely replace English in English in India.
But Hindi has been spreading across the country in recent years, thanks to the Hindi film industry, or Bollywood, which has been popularized Hindi language in the non-Hindi-speaking field. There is a contradiction for spreading from northern, Hindi speaking regions to southern states.
Bhattacharya said that the Modi government’s “heavy financial assistance to Hindi” creates a sense of imposing. “
He called for talks between New Delhi and the state governments to end language disputes. “Ekta should not mean uniformity affected by the state. While it saves this savings regional opposition, it will not move towards major conflict. Ultimately, and communication between states and compromises, thesis are necessary to solve the thesis tension.”
Edited by: Srinivas Majumdaru
