Can Hindi Unite India?

Discarding diversity for a purely majoritarian reason will be disastrous

Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement last week that Hindi can unite the country once again evoked sharp disapproval from political parties, especially in south India. Mr. Shah later clarified that he meant Hindi as a second language. G.N. Devy and Yogendra Yadav speak on the perils of monolingualism in a country as linguistically diverse as India in a conversation moderated by Anuradha Raman. Edited excerpts:

Is Hindi everyone’s language?

G.N. Devy: The name ‘Shah’ is of Persian origin. Our languages are interlinked and we have many languages in the country. The 2011 Census listed 1,369 ‘mother tongues’ in the country. Hindi is only one among them.

So, even in a majority of Hindi speaking States like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, what is spoken is not Hindi as we understand it?

GND : I will go back to the Census data. When the languages were enumerated, Hindi subsumed Bhojpuri, which is spoken by a little over five crore people. The Census has put Bhojpuri as a subset of Hindi. So, it may be true that Hindi is spoken by a large number of people in India, but it is equally true that it is not spoken by a majority of Indians.