Nepal: Hindi as a troublemaker
Atul Chatterjee
July 30, 2008
Parmanda Jha took the oath of office as Vice President of the Constituent Assembly, but instead of in Nepalese he took it in Hindi. This resulted in a wave of anger amongst many and street violence.
A look at the progression of Hindi in India should serve as an eye opener. It just became the national language of India by one vote. Parliament had tied between English and Hindi, at this stage the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad who was from Bihar had a casting vote, and he did so in favour of Hindi. So it is not as if Hindi had a huge following in India.
Later there was an effort to impose Hindi on the southern states, this was accompanied by violence against the move, most so in Tamil Nad. Even today Hindi is not offered as a language in government schools there.
Harivansh Rai Bacchan the father of the film superstar Amitabh Bacchan set the standards of spoken Hindi for radio (long before TV came to India). He was a poet from the Hindi heartland of Allahabad and set standards so high that it became difficult for people to understand news read out in Hindi those days. This took decades to undo.
The real motive force for the spread of Hindi came from movies. This was the Hindi that spread across India.
In the nineties Mulayam Singh Yadav as a Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and Union Minister tried to impose Hindi in government with limited success. Murli Manohar Joshi a Human Resources Development Minister in the BJP government was another avid Hindi proponent. In fact he is reputed to have submitted his Physics Ph. D thesis in Hindi, the first person to have done so. However, his example was not emulated by many.
There is not a single institute in India where an engineering or medical degree can be obtained with Hindi as the medium of instruction. The language has not been developed technologically. Doing a social sciences Ph. D using Hindi is quite easy or even a BSc, but that is the limit.
Hindi as a language is thus a lame duck, good as a link language almost all over the country on TV, the street, at rail stations, airports etc and it has its own literature which is also not very old since the language itself is barely 200 years old.
So Parmanda Jha should have thought before taking the oath in Hindi. Further, he reportedly (The Telegraph, Kolkata, India) made a very retrograde statement saying (paraphrased) that he hoped that he had not hurt the sentiments of the Nepalis by doing so and had signed all the documents in Nepalese.
While everyone knows that he is a Madhesi from the Terai region bordering India, he seems to regard the Nepalese as different, he does not seem to regard himself as a Nepalese first. This does not bode well for the Republic.
A look at the progression of Hindi in India should serve as an eye opener. It just became the national language of India by one vote. Parliament had tied between English and Hindi, at this stage the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad who was from Bihar had a casting vote, and he did so in favour of Hindi. So it is not as if Hindi had a huge following in India.
Later there was an effort to impose Hindi on the southern states, this was accompanied by violence against the move, most so in Tamil Nad. Even today Hindi is not offered as a language in government schools there.
Harivansh Rai Bacchan the father of the film superstar Amitabh Bacchan set the standards of spoken Hindi for radio (long before TV came to India). He was a poet from the Hindi heartland of Allahabad and set standards so high that it became difficult for people to understand news read out in Hindi those days. This took decades to undo.
The real motive force for the spread of Hindi came from movies. This was the Hindi that spread across India.
In the nineties Mulayam Singh Yadav as a Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and Union Minister tried to impose Hindi in government with limited success. Murli Manohar Joshi a Human Resources Development Minister in the BJP government was another avid Hindi proponent. In fact he is reputed to have submitted his Physics Ph. D thesis in Hindi, the first person to have done so. However, his example was not emulated by many.
There is not a single institute in India where an engineering or medical degree can be obtained with Hindi as the medium of instruction. The language has not been developed technologically. Doing a social sciences Ph. D using Hindi is quite easy or even a BSc, but that is the limit.
Hindi as a language is thus a lame duck, good as a link language almost all over the country on TV, the street, at rail stations, airports etc and it has its own literature which is also not very old since the language itself is barely 200 years old.
So Parmanda Jha should have thought before taking the oath in Hindi. Further, he reportedly (The Telegraph, Kolkata, India) made a very retrograde statement saying (paraphrased) that he hoped that he had not hurt the sentiments of the Nepalis by doing so and had signed all the documents in Nepalese.
While everyone knows that he is a Madhesi from the Terai region bordering India, he seems to regard the Nepalese as different, he does not seem to regard himself as a Nepalese first. This does not bode well for the Republic.
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