Table of Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Defining Hindi: An Introductory Overview Rahul Peter Das . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Hindi Revisited: Language and Language Policies in India in Perspective Heinz Werner Wessler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Traces of Sacredness in Imaginings of Hindi Hans Harder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Depoliticising Hindi in India Selma K. Sonntag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Hindi as a Contact Language of Northeast India Anvita Abbi and Maansi Sharma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Linguistic Relationships: Bhojpuri and Standard Hindi. A View from the Western Hemisphere Surendra K. Gambhir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Filmī Zubān. The Language of Hindi Cinema Anjali Gera Roy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani in the Metropolises: Visual (and Other) Impressions Christina Oesterheld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 A Mixed Language? Hinglish and Business Hindi Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fraś and Dagmara Gil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 foreword The genesis of this volume lies ultimately in the longstanding academic cooperation on contemporary South Asian languages, particularly Hindi/Urdu, between the Südasien-Seminar of the Orientalisches Institut of the Martin-LutherUniversität Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Instytut Orientalistyczny of the Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie (JU). The cooperation includes delving into the issue of what “Hindi” does and does not encompass. Building on ideas thus developed, the matter of delimiting “Hindi” was taken up in a workshop in Halle (Germany) on the premises of the MLU, but in the context of the official university partnership between the MLU and the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (JNU). The workshop, on Where Linguistics and Politics Meet: Defining Hindi, was held on November 21–22, 2008; it was organised by Rahul Peter Das and Anvita Abbi, and funded by the MLU and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. The participants were Anvita Abbi (JNU), Rahul Peter Das and Felix Otter (both MLU), Heinz Werner Wessler (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn), Christina Oesterheld and Hans Harder (both Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg), Surendra K. Gambhir (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) and Anil Biltoo (University of London). Though, unfortunately, the attendance of JU participants from Cracow (Poland) could not be realised at the time, it was decided subsequently that the workshop would be followed up cooperatively, not only, but particularly through the publication of a volume on the subject, to be prepared at the JU. The papers presented at the Halle workshop were, of course, to constitute an integral and major part of this volume. To this end, the workshop presentations have been reworked by the participants, with the exception of three which could not be thus prepared, namely one (on Indian government policy on Hindi and the three language formula) of Anvita Abbi’s two presentations, and the presentations of Felix Otter (on nonIndian government policies in South Asia, particularly Nepal, regarding Hindi and its “dialects”) and Anil Biltoo (on “Hindi” in Indian Ocean states). The paper 8 Foreword of Anvita Abbi published here has been co-authored by Maansi Sharma (JNU). Further, three additional papers have been solicited and most kindly submitted for inclusion, namely one by Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fraś and Dagmara Gil (both JU), and one each by Anjali Gera Roy (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur) and Selma K. Sonntag (Humboldt State University, Arcata CA). Sincere thanks are due to all the contributors for their immense patience and forbearance with the tortuous development of this volume. The Roman transliteration used in the volume follows the systems developed for the Nagari/Bengali script and the modified Arabic script respectively. Single words, phrases, quotations and titles coming from Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu have been transliterated according to the rules given in the following tables. The systems adopted attempt to be exact, so that the reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of transliterated words or texts. In the English main text of the book, the simplified phonemic transcription applies to foreign words and phrases that have become common in English—like geographical and proper names, names of languages (e.g. Punjabi, Assamese), cultural or religious terms (e.g. Sufi, Guru), etc. Cyrillic has been Romanised according to the British standard used by the Oxford University Press, which can be found, e.g., in: The Oxford Style Manual, ed. by Robert M. Ritter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 350. Nagari and Bengali (Assamese) Consonants: क / च/ ट/ त/ प/ य/ श/ ka ca ṭa ta pa ya śa ख / छ/ ठ/ थ/ फ/ र/ ( ष/! kha cha ṭha tha pha ) ra ṣa ग / ज/ ड/ द/ ब/ ल/ स/" ga ja ḍa da ba la sa घ / झ/ ढ/ ध/ भ/ व/( ह/# gha jha ḍha dha bha ) va ha ङ / ञ/ ण/ न/ म/ ṅa ña ṇa na ma Modifications: क़ / - ḵa ड़ / $ ṙa ख़/ढ़/% La ṙha ग़/-/& Ma ẏa ज़/- za फ़/- fa 9 Foreword Vowels: अ/' ऋ/- आ/( ā ए/. e a ṛ इ/) i ऐ / / ai ई/* ओ/0 ī o उ/+ u औ / 1 au ऊ/, ū * a which is not pronounced is indicated by ᶥ, except at the end of a word * ऑ is indicated by ā̆ * word-initial '23 is indicated by ä anusvāra ·/ ং Ò visarga Á ḥ anunāsika (candrabindu) ¡ ṁ Urdu script " ! # $ % & ' ( ) * + , * a ā b p t ṭ s̤ j č ḥ x d ḍ . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ẕ r ṙ z ž s š ṣ ẓ t̤ z̤ c ġ ‫ ے‬is transliterated as e and ‫ ں‬is transliterated as ṅ. ; = ? @ A C D F G K ] f q k g l m n v, ū, o, au h y, ī, e, ai ð virāma ~ · Traces of Sacredness in Imaginings of Hindi Hans Harder Let there be no mistake: Hindi is definitely not commonly regarded as a sacred language, or at least no more than German or Italian or any other modern ‘vernacular.’ The expression “sacred language” is, of course, not a rigorous category, and there may be different opinions and varying estimations regarding the sacred nature of any given linguistic entity. But in whatever way we may understand the term, in the case of Hindi we do not see any community, pressure group, or lobby, either in the past or at present, that would try to openly promote it as a sacred language. So are we not devoting attention to an entirely irrelevant topic? Not quite; for on a closer look, we do find traces of sacredness indirectly attributed to the Hindi language in various debates on the topic. It is well-known that there have been sustained efforts throughout the twentieth century in various scholarly, political and public spheres in India to invest Hindi with status. The point of departure for the present contribution is that strategies to enhance Hindi’s standing have at times also included drawing on sacrality as one specific kind of symbolical capital. The following will attempt to identify some of these threads in a very preliminary and somewhat random fashion, in the awareness that deeper research on a much more profound material basis would be needed to tackle this issue satisfactorily. The article will take into account the arguments of a few proponents of Hindi, but also note voices from outside the Hindi public sphere, namely from Bengal, present-day Maharashtra and Britain. A good anecdotal opening for this article is a short story by Rajshekhar Basu1 alias Paraśurām, a famous mid-20th century Bengali prose writer. His Rāmᶥrājya, written in 1949, depicts a séance in Calcutta. A group of Bengalis and one or two ‘Hindustanis’ (the common Bengali term for people from the socalled Hindi belt) regularly gather and have conversations through Bhūtanāth, a fellow-participant acting as medium, with historical celebrities like Candragupta, Sirājuddaulah, Napoleon, Hitler, etc. In the session narrated in the story 1 The names of modern South Asian authors and oganisations are given in their anglicised forms when these are both available and common. 82 Hans Harder they decide, frustrated as they are with post-Independence political developments in India, to call upon Rāma himself to explain the way to rāmᶥrājya for them, i.e. to the ideal of statehood that Gandhi had propagated with recourse to Rāma’s mythical rule in Ayodhya. There is a rustling sound in the medium’s voice, and Subodhᶥbābu, retired judge and host of the séance circle, asks in Bengali: “Who are you?” Abadhᶥbihārī said: “Ask in the national language Hindi. Rāma does not understand Bengali. Who are you, Master?”2 (…) From Bhūtanāth’s mouth came the answer: “ahaṃ mārutiḥ.” Abadhᶥbihārī said: “O, but that is Chinese!” Kabiratna said: “Not Chinese, he’s speaking in the gods’ language [(debᶥbhāṣā, i.e. Sanskrit)]—‘I am Māruti.’ Hanumān, the Son of the Wind himself has appeared [before us].” Abadhᶥbihārī: “Victory, o Bajᶥraṅg, powerful esteemed Great Hero. ‘For Rāma’s work have you been incarnated. You are gold-coloured, your body is mountainlike.’3 Lord, please speak in Hindi, the language of rāmᶥrājya.”4 This excerpt—subsequently culminating in a punch line which will be given at the end of this article—conveniently leads us into the topic: firstly, whether Hindi, “the language of rāmᶥrājya” of this short story, can at all be considered as a “sacred language,” and if so, under what aspects and circumstances; secondly, whether there have been, or are, agencies that try to project it as such; and lastly, how the relationship between Hindi and Sanskrit has been imagined. Thus, in the following, I will first introduce criteria for sacred languages and discuss whether Sanskrit can be called one. Thereupon I will look for sacredness in connection with Hindi. Particular attention will be given to the relationship of Hindi with Sanskrit and the role of the Nagari script therein. After a brief look at the role of Hindi in Hindutva ideology, I will go into some popular misconceptions regarding Hindi, and conclude. 1. Sacred Languages and the Case of Sanskrit To start with, a sacred language may very generally be defined as (1) a language in which revelations or holy scriptures are uttered/written, and (2) a language in which the sacred can be evoked and addressed. John F.A. Sawyer, in his book 2 3 4 The passage reads: rāṣṭrabhāṣā hindīme puchiẏe, rāmᶥcandrajī bāṃlā samᶥjhen nā. ap kaun haiṁ mahārāj? The form samᶥjhen nā is, of course, Hindicised Bengali as used by many North Indians attempting to speak Bengali. Mahārāj is used to address spiritual leaders also, therefore “master” was chosen as translation rather than “king.” jaẏ bajᶥraṅg· balī mahābīrᶥjī!—‘rāma kāja lagi taba abatārā / kanaka barana tana parbatākārā.’ The latter part is a quotation from Tulᶥsīdās’s Avadhi Rāmᶥcaritᶥmānas, apparently Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa 3.30, though with slight alterations. The edition I consulted has: rāma kāja lagi tava avatārā / sunatahiṃ bhayau parbatākārā // Cf. TULᶥSĪDĀS 2010: 790. BASU 2003: 302. Traces of Sacredness in the Imaginings of Hindi 83 on sacred languages in the beginning of the Christian era (SAWYER 1999), isolates some basic characteristics that commonly occur in languages held to be sacred: first, they are bound to ritual, whose effectiveness has to be assured by the correct wordings and pronunciation. In this sense, one may add, sacred languages also have a magical element in as far as certain utterances are invested with the power to create, perform etc. Second, sacred languages are often clearly distinguished from day-to-day speech; they may, e.g., be obsolete varieties of the latter (p. 23). Their mastery can be monopolised by a class of experts (ritual specialists, clerics etc.), and their phonological stabilisation and preservation become a prominent concern (p. 24). In the extreme case of their unintelligibility, Sawyer points out, that becomes a functional feature in master-disciple relationships for raising their mystical status. These tendencies to cling to old linguistic varieties in religious communication, according to Sawyer, are motivated by respect for the original revelation (hinting at the first part of our definition of sacred languages above), as well as by what he calls a general religious conservatism (p. 25). Sawyer quotes Sanskrit as an example both for the remoteness from ordinary speech (p. 24) and as giving rise to Pāṇini’s phonology as an extreme case of language preservation, and we can thus assume that he takes the sacred status of Sanskrit for granted. And indeed, it is the obvious first candidate for a sacred language on the Indian subcontinent. So to what extent do these criteria apply to Sanskrit? As our excerpt from Paraśurām’s story in the beginning suggested, Sanskrit5 has come to be considered the devabhāṣā- or devavāṇī-, the language of the gods. Also outside India, as far as its reputation is concerned, Sanskrit is commonly perceived as the sacred language of Hinduism. Historically, the designation devabhāṣā- first appears in the Rāmāyaṇa.6 Sanskrit as “language of the gods” suggests that it is the medium of communication among the celestials, the Devas, and also that Sanskrit is the language to communicate with the realms beyond humanity and the means to enter into contact with the divine. It is thus also a ‘divine’ language and the natural medium for sacrifices in the sense of interactions with the divine. From a contemporary, early 21st century perspective, then, Sanskrit does indeed possess the attributes spelt out above for sacred languages: it is quite unintelligible to the general public and requires special training; it is archaic (especially if we think of Vedic), it has a static, ‘frozen’ quality and is ‘removed’ from daily change. Moreover, Sanskrit is extensively used for liturgical pur5 6 “Sanskrit” here subsumes Vedic. MORRETTA 1975–1976: 340. 84 Hans Harder poses, has an intimate relationship with ritual; it is supposed to be magically effective, and is definitely associated with high culture. But this may not always have been so. Even if the term devabhāṣā- is very old, there is good reason to follow Sheldon Pollock in supposing that the notion of Sanskrit as a sacred language grew in direct proportion to its vanishing from many domains of communication at the time the vernaculars came up. In these circumstances, it was the realm of Brahmanical ritual, scriptures and religion that remained Sanskrit’s stronghold and actually received a boost in colonial times from the impact of Orientalism.7 In any case, labelling Sanskrit a sacred language apparently had become common practice by the nineteenth century, and it is in this tradition that Savarkar, one of the ideologues we will have more occasion to deal with, makes it one of the criteria why India outweighs even China in terms of national excellence: Only in the possession of a common, a sacred and a perfect language, the Sanskrit, and a sanctified Motherland, we are so far as the essentials that contribute to national solidarity are concerned more fortunate.8 Today, it appears, both devavāṇī- and devabhāṣā- have become frequently employed epithets for Sanskrit and are readily used in India and (in translation) elsewhere to mystify the character of the language and to market, among other things, Sanskrit primers.9 But it would, of course, be wrong to suppose that Sanskrit was given such a central position in linguistic imaginings only by virtue of its presumed sacredness. In nationalist circles it has also been instrumental in arguing for the ancient unity of India, linguistic and otherwise. Even Savarkar in the quote given above stresses not only Sanskrit’s sacredness, but also its commonality. Some decades earlier, and ignoring the discovery of the Dravidian language family that had by then long been established, Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, in his famous Sāmājik prabandha of 1892, had portrayed Sanskrit as the common element that binds to7 8 9 Cf. POLLOCK 2006: 28, with reference to Grierson: “The vision of Sanskrit as a sacred language ‘jealously preserved by the Brahmans in their schools’ may not be the pure illusion of the colonial officer who gave it expression, yet it is undoubtedly something that developed late in this history of the language, when, for reasons very likely having to do with vernacularization itself, language options shrank for many communities and Brahmanical society reasserted its archaic monopolization over the language (…).” SAVARKAR 1940: 113. A search of library catalogues with devabhāṣā- and devavāṇī- as search terms yields a number of Indian publications, apparently mostly from Bengal, as well as German and American ones, and as far as the latter is concerned, infused with a new age type of language mysticism. Cf., e.g., Houston Vyaas who runs the American Sanscrit Institute, on the devavāṇī, <http://www.americansanskrit.com/read/a_sacred.php> (Dec. 13, 2011). Traces of Sacredness in the Imaginings of Hindi 85 gether such diverse languages as Gujarati, Bengali and Tamil without hinting at its sacred character.10 These instances suggest that there are different ways in which Sanskrit is construed into modern identity narratives, with the ‘sacred language’ as not the only, but only one option. 2. Sacred Texts in “Hindi” If, in this sense, the sacredness of Sanskrit can be shown to be an optional attribute that may or may not be highlighted depending on the context in which it is evoked, we can reverse our interrogation in the case of Hindi and ask whether this language, while generally not being considered sacred in any sense, does allow for such an optionality, i.e. whether there are cases in which Hindi defies its reputation and in fact functions as a sacred language. The most obvious way to go about this would seem to be to ask whether there are sacred texts in Hindi, and in what kind of relationship these stand with the language as such. It is wellknown that there are a number of such texts. The Gurū Granth Sāhib of the Sikhs, to start with, contains hymns by different authors, among them Sikh Gurus, but also Bhakti and Sufi saints such as Šayx Farīd and Kabīr. There is a common misperception that these are specimens of early Punjabi; in fact, most of them are written in varieties such as Sadhukkari (sādhukkaṙī) or Avadhi that would today officially be subsumed under the label of “Hindi.” The Gurū Granth Sāhib is a strong case also insofar as the status of this book is exceptional: in Sikh ritual, it becomes personified as the one true successor of the spiritual lineage of the Gurus.11 Kabīr is another case in point also, apart from the Gurū Granth Sāhib, and by himself: his songs, collected in the three branches of the sākhī, ramainī and sabad, have the status of sacred texts in the Kabīrpanth. They enjoy high prestige also beyond this group and have, even more than other Bhakti traditions, a very marked reception history as documents of non-Brahmanical, non-Sanskritic religiosity. A similar example is the Dādūvāṇī, the message of saint Dādū, for the Dādūpanth: by followers, the Dādūvāṇī is considered śabd or revelation, became canonical soon after its inception and also acquired the status of a revered book. The texts are part of the liturgy of the Panth and are learnt by heart by disciples for their spiritual education.12 Another famous example, and probably the first that would 10 MUKHOPĀDHYĀẎ 1948–1949: 8; he particularly points out the commonality of the writing system and argues for introducing diacritics (dots under the Bengali letters ja and kha to represent /z/ and /x/ respectively). 11 For references, cf. THIEL-HORSTMANN 1988. 12 THIEL-HORSTMANN 1992: 37ff. 86 Hans Harder have come to most Hindi speakers’ minds, is the text that was quoted in the initial short story fragment by Paraśurām, namely Tulsīdās’s Rāmᶥcaritᶥmānas. Even Dayanand Sarasvati’s Satyārthᶥprakāś would appear to be a central and sacred text for Arya Samajists. For all of these texts apart from the last, it is true that they are relatively old, contain archaisms, are preserved in a fixed status quo, are used for liturgical purposes, and even have a magical effectiveness, e.g. Tulsīdās’s version of the Rāmāyaṇa, hearing which one attains merit, as in the case of the Sanskrit text. All this appears analogous to the conditions we find for Sanskrit texts, as especially the example just mentioned shows. Nevertheless, it is problematic to claim for Hindi the status of a sacred language on this basis, mainly because of a difference in scale. Hindi literature comes nowhere near the abundance of original mythological and liturgical texts in Sanskrit, and those which are in Hindi are sometimes renderings of Sanskrit models, such as in the case of Tulsīdās who apparently transcreated a primarily Sanskrit tradition in Avadhi. The mention of Avadhi leads us to the second point: there may be hesitations to claim sacredness on behalf of Hindi when the texts in question are not in Khari Boli but in what used to be independent literary languages such as Avadhi and Braj. Paradoxically, among the texts mentioned above the Sadhukkari hymns included in the Sikh Granth would seem to be linguistically closest to Khari Boli Hindi, but their cultural (and sacred) capital goes to Sikh/Punjabi for obvious reasons of group identity. The weightiest argument against Hindi as a sacred language, however, is that similar arguments could be made on behalf of nearly every other modern literary language in India, and lowering the standard in this way we would end up with each and every such language being sacred. Hindi would be nothing special in this regard. Therefore, while admitting that Hindi may be considered to have aspects of a sacred language, the comparison with Sanskrit reveals a considerable difference in degree. To this must be added Sanskrit’s present aloofness from the profanity incurred by day-to-day use. Thus, if Hindi and Sanskrit were set in relation to each other in terms of their respective sacredness, it would appear quite commonsensical to call Sanskrit the sacred and Hindi the profane language. 3. Hindi as Heir to Sanskrit and the Nagari Linkage But there are other ways of putting Sanskrit and Hindi in relation to each other and for making Hindi at least indirectly partake of the sacred halo surrounding Sanskrit. A common strategy for avoiding the complex historical interaction of various high and low linguistic varieties in India is to envision a simple successive relationship between them. Simplifying statements by earlier-generation Traces of Sacredness in the Imaginings of Hindi 87 linguists such as the following by John Beames, author of A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India (1871), may have helped such imaginings: Hindi has the largest number of Tadbhava words, it started with a tolerably pure form of Prakrit and had 400 more years than Sindhi and Punjabi to undergo developmental changes, which can not be called corruptions. Hindi is a legitimate heir of Sanskrit.13 Also Bengali intellectuals of the nineteenth century encouraged Hindi and stressed its connections with Sanskrit. The above-mentioned Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay—like earlier Keshab Chandra Sen in his famous advice to Dayanand Sarasvati in 1873 to preach in Hindi rather than in Sanskrit,14 but in contrast to some of his contemporaries who dreamt of a bright, all-Indian future for Bengali15—saw Hindi-Hindustani as the main variety and suggested that it would at some point become the basis of one common Indian language.16 In Hindi nationalist circles, such reasoning was taken up. A good example is the eminent critic and editor of the famous journal Sarasvatī, Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi. At the very beginning of the 20th century, with the Hindi-Urdu controversy still in sway and himself figuring as a staunch supporter of Hindi, he readily took up the arguments of European Indologists to bring out the excellence of the Nagari script.17 He also put forward a mixture of linguistic and cultural arguments to prove that among the modern Indo-Aryan languages it was Hindi that had the closest relation with Sanskrit: The main group [(vṛnd)] of those Aryans whose original language had been Sanskrit was always in the country in which we people are living these days—the country which lies between the Ganges and the Yamuna. The more the Aryans grew, the more did they set foot upon areas beyond this country. Therefore it must be said that the language of the inhabitants of this country will have the closest relation with the Aryans’ original language, Sanskrit. And since it has a special relation with the original language, it will definitely also possess some likeness with the other [modern Indo-Aryan] languages.18 13 BEAMES 1966: 32. 14 See FISCHER-TINÉ 2003: 314. 15 Cf. also RĀẎ CAUDHURĪ 1883–1884: 5: While Sanskrit is the common language of the past of India, Bengali will be the common language of “new India” (nabyabhārat). 16 MUKHOPĀDHYĀẎ 1948–1949 [1892]: 257. This text also has an interesting sociolinguistic discussion on whether or not English would become the dominant language of India (pp. 254–257), claiming that it would not because people cling to their religious traditions, of which vital parts are transmitted in vernaculars (pp. 255–256). 17 DVIVEDĪ 1995b: 135. 18 DVIVEDĪ 1995a: 129. 88 Hans Harder Typically, and somehow only a little step ahead of the “relation” (sambandh) Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi speaks about, images of parentage were used to characterise the relationship between Sanskrit and Hindi. According to Alok Rai, this was linked to the process of Sanskritisation that Hindi started to undergo in the late nineteenth century: But in the case of modern “Hindi” at any rate it can be stated confidently that the Sanskritising impulse was driven also by a concern with status and pedigree: for the pauper to be recognized as a prince, after all, there had to be a climactic revelation of a direct filial relationship with Sanskrit! But the fake Sanskrit pedigree didn’t come cheap. In the face of linguistic evidence (both lexical and syntactical)—it was sought to be established that Hindi had such a direct filial relationship with Sanskrit—elder daughter to be precise, jyeshtha putri! The eldest daughter, then, takes precedence over the other daughters—Bangla, Marathi, Gujarati.19 Imagery of parentage implies the aspect of inheritance: some of the qualities of the father or mother will eventually be found in the child; and the child is entitled to partake of and one day claim all the wealth of its parents. It is likely that, in tune with Rai’s argument, the projection of Hindi as Sanskrit’s daughter is intended to raise its status and lend it some of the dignity and authority of its ‘mother’ Sanskrit. It is not at all clear, though, if this inheritance included the holy nimbus of Sanskrit even in the imagination of those who promoted this notion, i.e. mainly the activists of the Nagari Pracharini Sabhas. In this connection, it appears sensible to look at the slogan of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan,” taken up by writers such as Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi and later by the RSS. This slogan originated as part of a poem apparently composed in 1889 by Pratap Narayan Mishra, the Kanpur-based editor of the periodical Brāhmaṇ who is counted as part of the Bhārᶥtendu maṇḍal, the circle of authors inspired by ‘Bharatendu’ Harishchandra: cahahu ju sāṁcahu nija kalyāna / tau saba mili bhārata saṃtāna! // japo niraṃtara eka jabāna / hindī, hindū, hindustāna // 20 If you really want your own well-being, / then, O children of India, unite / and incessantly chant this one slogan: / Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan! The first stanza has been given in the original also to show that Pratap Narayan’s language in this poem is not Khari Boli Hindi but Avadhi, meaning that the case of Hindi is here made in the Avadhi medium, and that consequently for the author these two were coterminous. As we read on, the poem tells its readers that for those who have given up selfishness (nijᶥtā) being alive or dead does not matter as they recite the mantra of hindī, hindū, hindustān: gratified is that soul 19 RAI 2001: 77–78. 20 MIŚRA 1992: 534. Pronunciation has been ignored in the transliteration here. Traces of Sacredness in the Imaginings of Hindi 89 which is sacrificed (kurᶥbān) for these three, and blessed the life which is governed by them day and night.21 What we find in these verses is—quite apart from the Hindi chauvinism that may be attributed to it―an evocation of national unity that draws on the imagery of sacrifice in a nationalist and fairly modernist sense. It may in fact be read as a modernist’s elevation of the vernacular in conscious contrast to the age-old aloofness of Sanskrit. And despite the persistent religious idiom with mentions of the divine triad (trideva-), the bhagᶥvān etc. in the poem, it is also a new kind of sacredness that is celebrated here, namely a sacredness that has been transposed from the sphere of ritual to the nation and its attributes. This means that it is not Hindi as such which is sacred, but the aura of sacredness bestowed to the nation reverberates on what Pratap Narayan projects as its common language. The same seems to be true for Purushottam Das Tandon, leader of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha and staunch fighter for Hindi in the Nagari script as the Indian national language: if Hindi was to succeed Sanskrit, this would not, as such, make Hindi sacred; or if it did, this would be in quite a new sense, namely in the realm of sacrality that surrounds the modern nation.22 This is not to say that the continuity between Sanskrit and Hindi was not crucial—it certainly was. But it seems that in the minds of these ideologues, traditional sacredness was not a part of this transfer; metaphorically speaking, the mother could step back into a highly revered traditional sacredness, simultaneously lending strength to the daughter to make a stand in the arena of practical modernity. Hindi thus becomes the sacred language of a new divinity: Mother India. The linguistic continuity between Sanskrit and Hindi that was highlighted in some of these approaches in order to borrow from Sanskrit’s dignity was supplemented by another crucial link: the Nagari script, particularly with the appellation Devanagari (devᶥnāgᶥrī). Devanagari, the “urban script of the gods” or “divine city writing,”23 seemed to correspond directly to the devabhāṣā- or lan21 Ibid.: 534–535. 22 The continuing controversial nature of Tandon’s pro-Hindi stance is very well brought out by a comparison between the English, Hindi and Tamil Wikipedia articles on him (Dec. 21, 2011). While the English text claims that his pro-Hindi attitude “bordered on chauvinism,” the Hindi text praises him for not giving in to opponents in his hindī kī sevā (“service to Hindi”) versus Hindustani, and the Tamil page has only one laconic sentence on his advocacy of Hindi in the Constitutional Assembly. 23 The latter according to MONIER-WILLIAMS 1986: 493: “N. of the character in which Sanskṛit is usually written (probably from its having originated in some city).” For a more detailed discussion, cf. SEN 1996: 1428–1433: while Sanskrit was “traditionally thought to be the deva-bhāṣā” and nāgarī- was an old (if obscure) designation of the script in question, the term devanāgarī- was apparently introduced by Bhudeb Chandra Mukhopadhyay in the late nineteenth century (p. 1428): “The name Devanāgarī which 90 Hans Harder guage of the gods, i.e. Sanskrit; and the alternative appellation (incidentally found in an Urdu lexicon) is šāstrī akšar, i.e. the letters of the Śāstras.24 Writing Hindi in Devanagari would thus make its succession to Sanskrit visible and enable it to function as the common language of the present, which in turn would reinforce national unity. In Mahavirprasad Dwivedi’s words: As soon as the script becomes one, it will penetrate the minds maybe not of all people, but certainly of the educated, that we are Hindu, our language is Hindi and our country Hindustan.25 And if partaking of Sanskrit’s holiness may not have been the primary aim of this move, it was an additional surplus if the script could evoke some of its aura and transplant this to Khari Boli Hindi. The repeated highlighting of (Deva-)Nagari in the fact that the most important society for the promotion of Hindi was not called Hindī Pracāriṇī Sabhā but Nāgᶥrī Pracāriṇī Sabhā, makes such a linkage very likely; it would, however, need a proper study of the sources to substantiate this particular point.26 4. Hindutva and Hindi The reception of Pratap Narayan Mishra’s slogan (hindī, hindū, hindustān) in Sangh Parivar circles would suggest that the Hindutva movement did engage strongly with Hindi as one common language, and one might conjecture that part of the sacredness that the ideologues bestowed upon the last two words of the slogan might also reverberate on the first, Hindi. However, this does not seem to be the case. It is true that Hindi is a lasting concern of the Sangh Parivar, but not quite in the way one might expect. Savarkar in his Who is a Hindu (1923) opposes Hindi to the sacred language Sanskrit, and the passage in question is worth quoting in full, not only because it reveals that Savarkar was hardly interested in distinctions between “Hindi” and “Hindusthani”: Although the Sanskrit language must ever remain the cherished and sacred possession of our race, contributing most powerfully to the fundamental unity of our peoundoubtedly is a good example of a folk-etymologically back formed compound on the semantic level has, however, come to stay and for good.”—To my knowledge, (Deva-) Nagari was promoted as the script used for and associated with Sanskrit in colonial times, and had by the end of the nineteenth century gained the status of the Sanskrit script par excellence (or even simply “the Sanskrit script”). 24 SABRI 1985. 25 DVIVEDĪ 1995b: 136. 26 Much material for this issue can be found in KING 1994. Traces of Sacredness in the Imaginings of Hindi 91 ple and enriching our life, ennobling our aspirations and purifying the fountains of our being, the honour of being the living spoken national tongue of our people is already won by that Prakrit, which being one of the eldest daughters of Sanskrit is most fittingly called Hindi or Hindusthani, the language of the national and cultural descendants of the ancient Sindhus or Hindus. Hindusthani is par excellence the language of Hindusthan or Sindhusthan. The attempt to raise Hindi to the pedestal of our national tongue is neither new nor forced. Centuries before the advent of British rule in India we find it recorded in our annals that this was the medium of expression throughout India. A sadhu or a merchant starting from Rameshwaram and proceeding to Hardwar, could make himself understood in all parts of India through this tongue. Sanskrit might have introduced him to circles of pandits and princes; but Hindusthani was a safe and sure passport to the Rajasabhas as well as to the bazaars. A Nanak, a Chaitanya, a Ramdas could and did travel up and down the country as freely as they would have done in their own provinces teaching and preaching in this tongue. As the growth and development of this our genuine national tongue was parallel to and almost simultaneous with the revival and popularization of the ancient names Sindhusthan or Sindhus or Hindusthan or Hindus it was but a matter of course that language being the common possession of the whole nation should be called Hindusthani or Hindi.27 Here we notice a number of peculiarities and problems, the first of which is the ideological move of aligning those “oldest Prakrits” directly with (Khari Boli?) Hindi, which is linguistically highly problematic. Secondly, Savarkar skilfully ‘Hinduises’ the state of affairs by evoking a “sadhu or merchant” travelling from the south to the north of the country, whereas the infrastructure responsible for the spread of the lingua franca he refers to as “Hindi or Hindusthani” was decidedly of the Mughals’ making—and even then it is extremely unlikely that it was understood in Tamil-speaking Rameshwaram or that Chaitanya ever preached in it. And thirdly, of course, even if there is no doubt that the appellations sindhu/hindu are indeed old, the antiquity of the Sanskritised compound “Hindusthan or Sindhusthan” is clearly questionable. But, most importantly for our present concern, there is no trace in Savarkar’s book of declaring Hindi a sacred language; this credit goes entirely to Sanskrit. After him, Golwalkar (‘Guruji’) continued Savarkar’s promotion of Hindi and appears to have been the one who first adopted the slogan “Hindi, Hindu, Hindust(h)an” for the RSS. But here, again, it is the ‘mother’ Sanskrit that is the repository of the sacred; and, as Prabir Purkayastha summarises in an article (2003): “The language riots of the 60’s forced the RSS to give up, at least publicly, that Hindi should be the only national language.”28 A search of a number 27 SAVARKAR 1940: 32–33. 28 Cf. Prabir Purkayastha’s article ‘Defining the Nation in the Era of Globalisation,’ originally published on October 12, 2003 by Sabrang Alternative News Network, and now 92 Hans Harder of RSS and VHP web pages reconfirmed that the Sangh Parivar has become silent on the language issue; the pages are mostly in English, though some audio materials are given in Marathi and Hindi too, and there is certainly no trace on these pages of declaring Hindi a sacred language. 5. Popular Misunderstandings Searching the web for such issues easily leads into grey zones of half-understanding and also reveals a number of slips of the tongue/pen/keyboard that may be instructive at times. Here are a few random findings: Reinhard Backes, in the Vatican journal (2008), speaks of the Vishva Hindi Parishad instead of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) in the context of the recent suppression of Christians in Orissa,29 and a contributor to a blog on astronomy mentions ancient ‘Hindi Sanskrit texts.’30 More serious is the following quote from a discussion of an internet forum on sacred languages, Sanskrit and Hindi: For instance, I’ve never seen any references in East Asian studies to Classical Chinese being considered “sacred” in and of itself; in fact, some scholars (e.g. Hannas) complain that one of the difficulties of studying Standard Chinese is that the Chinese do a poor job of deliminating the boundary between that and Literary Chinese. It’s a similar story with Classical Tibetan and Modern Tibetan or Sanskrit and Hindi.31 available on the Indian American Muslims Council’s website: <http://iamc.com/newsdigest/golwalkar_fascism#S11H16> (Dec. 22, 2011). Compare, however, Neena Vyas’s contention that this was still a factor in BJP times, i.e. after 1980: “(…) only when the BJP and the erstwhile Jana Sangh started targeting the South politically did the RSS drop its strident pro-Hindi stance and its earlier slogan, ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan,’ which was equated to one language, one culture, one nation.” See The Hindu, August 26, 2001, <http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/08/26/stories/05261341.htm> (Dec. 22, 2011). 29 BACKES 2008: 42. 30 “I’ve encountered several people in my intellectual travels who express as a main objection to Christianity/the Bible two facts which they find to be supremely damning: 1. Many of the stories in the Bible were around in oral form thousands of years before the events described in the Bible supposedly took place. 2. Many of these, and some others, were around in written form even before the Bible was supposedly written. This argument, to me, seems supremely pointless. It is almost as if the Copernican heliocentric system should be less likely to be true because it was postulated in similar form in ancient Hindi Sanskrit texts and by ancient Muslim, Chinese, and Persian astronomers. Jul. 13, 2007, 03:14PM” (italics added), <http://www.ephilosopher.com/e107_plugins/ forum/forum_viewtopic.php?130304> (Oct. 10, 2008). 31 From a blog at <http://www.omniglot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=303>; comment posted on March 23, 2007 in a discussion forum on sacred languages (Oct. 10, 2008). Traces of Sacredness in the Imaginings of Hindi 93 Hindi is here facilely portrayed as the modern successor of Sanskrit (and probably without any malignant intention at all). An even easier transition from Sanskrit to Hindi can be found in a BBC educational broadcast where Sanskrit is introduced as the sacred language of the Hindus—and exemplified by what happens to be a prayer in Hindi (2001).32 6. Conclusion To conclude, we may sum up that according to this randomised examination, Hindi can hardly be called a sacred language except in very specific contexts appertaining also to other modern South Asian languages, and has hardly been claimed to be one except in the very general and noncommittal way which most language nationalisms have. No doubt a closer investigation would yield a more differentiated picture and possibly reveal more liturgical, ‘sacred language’ uses of Hindi especially in diaspora communities, but it seems unlikely that the result would deviate radically. In fact, Paraśurām, the Bengali author of the opening quote given above, does not seem to be all that convinced either that Hindi is the language of any ideal post-Independence “Rāma’s rule” in India. For his humorous culmination, let us now look at the rest of the passage, after Avadhᶥbihārī (Abadhᶥbihārī in the Bengali script), the North Indian Hindi speaker among the participants in the séance, has asked Hanuman: “Lord, please speak in Hindi, the language of rāmᶥrājya:” In Bhūtanāth’s throat the great hero once again cleared his voice and then said: “What do you know about the language of rāmᶥrājya? Now I live on Mount Gandhamādana, but my original place is in Kiṣkindhā, in Belari District close to Mysore. My mother tongue is the original and fundamental language of the world. If I speak in that language, your Rājājī and Paṭṭabhijī will maybe pick up a few things, but Jaharᶥlālᶥjī, Rājendrajī and you guys won’t understand a word!”33 References BACKES, Reinhard. 2008. ‘Schlägertrupps im Land der tausend Sprachen.’ Vatican 6–7. 40– 42. BASU, Rājᶥśekhar. 2003. ‘Rāmᶥrājya.’ In: Paraśurām galpasamagra. Kalikātā: Em. Si. Sarᶥkār äṇḍ Sans. 301–307. 32 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/schools/4_11/today/pdf/religion/aut2001/ws01e. pdf> (Oct. 10, 2008). 33 BASU 2003: 303. 94 Hans Harder BEAMES, John. 1966. A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. (First published in 1871.) DVIVEDĪ, Mahāvīrᶥprasād. 1995a. ‘Deśᶥvyāpak bhāṣā’ [1903]. In: Mahāvīrᶥprasād Dvivedī racᶥnāvalī, Vol. 1. Naī Dillī: Kitābᶥghar. 125–130. DVIVEDĪ, Mahāvīrᶥprasād. 1995b. ‘Devᶥnāgᶥrī ke guṇ’ [1903]. In: Mahāvīrᶥprasād Dvivedī racᶥnāvalī, Vol. 1. Naī Dillī: Kitābᶥghar. 134–140. FISCHER-TINÉ, Harald. 2003. Der Gurukul-Kangri oder die Erziehung der Arya-Nation. Kolonialismus, Hindureform und ‘nationale Bildung’ in Britisch-Indien (1897-1922). (Beiträge zur Südasienforschung 194.) Würzburg: Ergon Verlag. KING, Christopher R. 1994. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India. Bombay [et al.]: Oxford University Press. 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