Language in India

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Saudi oil industry attacked

"‘How many languages are spoken in the country where you live? This week, India found itself facing a radical and controversial idea to deal with a multiplicity of different regional languages spoken by its more than 1.3 billion people. A senior government minister suggested that there should be just one official language and it should be Hindi.’...

‘Indians often cannot understand each other. And the reason is simple. Lots of them speak different languages. No other country on this planet has as many as India does. There are more than 19,500 different ones that are spoken on its streets… India has 22 official languages. Hindi is the most widely used, with more than half a billion people chatting away in it. But others like Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati, all have more than 50 million speakers. When people from Eastern India's largest city, Kolkata, where Bengali is spoken, travel to Southern India's biggest one, Chennai, where Tamil is the state language, the only way they can communicate with each other, is if they speak English. Which not everybody does.

It's a challenge I also face at home. My wife's mother tongue is Bengali, mine is Hindi. So we find that it's easier to speak in English to each other, and our kids. But it is frustrating. A friend of mine who's in the tea business recently called me whilst on a trip to southern India and shouted down the line: I cannot understand anyone here. Why can't we just have one language?

It's a question that is often asked, and one that India's Home Minister, Amit Shah, a man whose mother tongue is Gujarati, raised recently. Tweeting in Hindi, he said the country should have one language to help give it identity, And that the language which could do that was, you guessed it, Hindi.

Cue a huge political fallout, which has seen India's Home Minister, a man who rarely changes his opinion, having to do just that, on this issue. He's not the first Gujarati politician to say this. In 1925, another one you may have heard of, Mahatma Gandhi said exactly the same thing. And when India gained independence in 1947, Hindi did become India’s official, but not its national language. To appease those who did not speak it, English was to be used for all official purposes. Confused? you're not the only one.

English was supposed to have been phased out by 1965. But it never happened. There were huge protests in Tamil Nadu in southern India, with students shouting ‘Death to Hindi’. Such was their anger, some burned themselves to death, whilst more than 60 others died in clashes with the police. In the face of such huge opposition, the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri backed down, and the plans to have Hindi as the national language were withdrawn.

Because in India, regional identities are often more important than national ones. And they are shaped by language. Ask someone in Chennai what their identity is, and they'll tell you they're a Tamil, not an Indian. Ask the same question in Kolkata and the answer will be, I'm a Bengali.

Often the only time people will say that they are Indian is when the cricket team is playing. The country's Prime Minister Modi is trying to change that and give India a sense of national identity. He's using religion, Hinduism, to try and do that. And though there's opposition from the country’s secular parties, it does appear to be working. Having a common language Hindi would also help.

But some see another motive in raising this issue again. It's an attack on English, the language of its former colonizers, a language that most Indians have no access to, and which some, even those who are desperate to learn it, consider the language of the elite. A more equal India, so the argument goes, would focus on Indian languages. One of India's most popular politicians Mulayam Singh Yadav, once famously declared that he would not rest until he had driven English out of India. It's still here, whilst his political career is almost over'"