Triumph of Hinglish: How shuddh Hindi lost its groove
anshul jain
In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s comedy classic Chupke Chupke (1975) language
purist Raghavendra Sharma (Om Prakash) is given a taste of his own
medicine in the form of deliberately abstruse shuddh Hindi thrown at
him by his Hindi-premi Ilahabadi chauffeur Pyare Mohan (Dharmendra).
Of course, in reality, no Hindi speaker ever talks of travelling by
lauhpathgamini agnirath (the fiery chariot that travels on an iron
path), smoking a dhoomra-shalaaka (smoke-emitting stick), or wearing a
kanth-langot (neck-loincloth).
These super-Sanskritic words — said to have been coined by Hindi’s
guardians to combat the onslaught of English words like ‘train’,
‘cigarette’ and ‘tie’ — have long been mocked in popular culture. As
the late comedian Johnny Walker once famously said of Doordarshan,
“They should not announce ‘Ab Hindi mein samachar suniye‘ (Now listen
to the news in Hindi); they should say, ‘Ab samachar mein Hindi
suniye‘ (Now listen to Hindi in the news)”
Yet in 1975, when the film’s dialogue writer (the wonderful Gulzar)
made fun of shuddh Hindi for its distance from the speech of the
common man, it was (like Dharmendra’s treatment of his jijaji) a
gentle, almost affectionate form of trip-taking. For in the world of
Chupke Chupke – the educated North Indian middle class world –
speaking shuddh Hindi still had a certain cachet: a sense of
national-cultural authority backed by Doordarshan, All India radio and
school textbooks.
But by 2011, in the world of Bheja Fry 2, speaking Hindi without
interruption marks Bharat Bhushan not as erudite or well-educated, but
merely as ridiculous.
How has this come about?
Tyranny of the Hindi purists
It is clear that in post-globalisation India, English is an essential
component of upward mobility. It is the only linguistic status-marker
that counts. In this deeply screwed-up world, the adoption of English
words into spoken Hindi is thus an indisputable way to display status
– to establish yourself as not being a Hindi-medium-type.
But Hindi, too, has done its bit to aid the rise of Hinglish.
One of the crucial problems faced by India immediately after
Independence was of creating a common language of communication and
official discourse. If there was to be a national language, it could
not be English, which was perceived as colonial and elitist.
In the shadow of Partition, the Hindiwallas in the Constituent
Assembly managed to press their claim for the first official language
of the Union to be Hindi, written exclusively in the Devnagari script
(rejecting the original recommendation of “Hindustani written… either
in Devnagari or the Persian script”). This Hindi was characterised by
a Sanskritic uniformity that deliberately rejected the hybridity of
the people’s vernacular.
“Pure Sanskrit words are used in the same form everywhere. Therefore
only that language can be acceptable all over India which is rich in
pure Sanskrit words,” declared the President of the Hindi Sahitya
Sammelan, KC Chattopadhyaya, in 1949.
As Alok Rai decribes it, the years “between the unconsummated triumph
of 1950 and the anticipated climax of 1960, when the enforced
cohabitation with English… would come to an end” were spent by
Hindiwallas like Dr. Raghuvira in grooming Hindi for its exalted
“national” role. In 1960, the Commission for Scientific and Technical
Terminology was set up, to provide an expanded lexicon that would
match that of English.
While the non-Hindi regions’ staunch opposition to Hindi’s hegemonic
claims meant that English could not possibly be dropped (it was
retained post-1965 as “associate additional official language”), a lot
of this new Hindi lexicon gained acceptability via the school system,
bureaucratic use and state television: for example, words like
‘prayojak’ for ‘sponsor’.
But this strategy left stranded the poor who did not have a school
education and whose spoken language never encompassed the high
Sanskritic Hindi of the state. And it had no hope of gaining traction
with the educated middle class in the rest of the country, who gained
access and familiarity to Hindi mainly through the movies. On the
other hand, there was the metropolitan elite – and increasingly, a
wider middle class – who had easier access to that other status
marker: English.
Official Hindi’s insistence on purity – a positive suppression of the
Hindustani word in favour of the Sanskritic equivalent (I remember a
succession of school Hindi teachers in ’80s Calcutta and ’90s Delhi
insisting on samay instead of waqt, kathin instead of mushkil, deergh
instead of lamba, with no explanation) – left the Hindi-speaking
public two choices: they could either learn the Sanskritic words, or
adopt words from English.
But as Ruper Snell has argued, the more Hindiwallahs coined
ever-more-difficult words in higher registers, disdaining Hindustani,
the more effectively they drove the Hindi-speaking public towards
pre-existing English words, and therefore towards Hinglish.
And it is a vicious cycle: the more the literary custodians of Hindi
retreat into an ever-more-shuddh Sanskritic bastion, the more the
language of popular culture appears to them too informal, too uncouth.
The age of Delhi Belly
So Hindi today is a beleaguered bastion. The democratisation of the
Hindi cultural sphere has been greeted by its upper-caste, upper-class
custodians with deep ambivalence.
On the one hand, they have to acknowledge that the spread and
increasing visibility of Hindi owes much to the mass media. As
lyricist Prasoon Joshi put it at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011,
“Film aur vigyapan ki duniya ne Hindi ko nayi izzat bakshi” (The world
of film and advertising has given Hindi a new respect). Another
speaker on the JLF panel ‘Aisi Hindi Kaisi Hindi’ said, “If the
language is now on the tongues of those who have never before
pronounced a Hindi word, then something very powerful is happening.”
On the other hand, however, there is the recurring lament that this
filmi and media Hindi has a severely depleted vocabulary and no longer
accords importance either to the literary, or to what Javed Akhtar
calls “the softer emotions”. “Tameez kam ho gayi hai, dignity has
become outdated,” said Akhtar, talking of the changing Hindi film
lyric.
Most Hindi sessions at JLF seemed disproportionately concerned with
whether the Hindi of hit songs, films and popular blogs had, in the
name of “janta ki bhasha”, opened the floodgates to crudity and
vulgarity. “Nowadays it is being said that saala is not even a
swearword,” said one speaker sarcastically, referring to Sudhir
Mishra’s response to the Censor Board’s objections to naming his film
Yeh Saali Zindagi.
The discussion of badtameezi has recently come to a head in the heated
debates around the language of the film Delhi Belly. While some are
celebrating the film’s unexpurgated dialogues, complete with
swearwords, many are either appalled at the Censor Board, or dismiss
the film’s colourful language as a juvenile shortcut to cheap laughs.
What’s fascinating, though, is that the original dialogue of the film
– described by its producers as 70 percent English, 30 percent Hindi –
has been deliberately “toned down” in the “all-Hindi” version. “This
was a conscious decision taken to make the Hindi version more
acceptable to a wider adult audience,” said Aamir Khan’s spokesperson.
--
Anshul Jain
Regional Coordinator,Eastern Zone
Transparency International India
Ranchi (Jharkhand), India
Ph: 0651-6522632 (O)
Cell: 099391 67396
ans...@transparencyindia.org
www.transparencyindia.org
