Why India Should Choose English and Regional Languages Over Hindi
The passing of an Indian hero, M. Karunanidhi, reminds us of the importance of investing in India’s regional languages along with English. Doing so would drive economic growth, increase upward mobility, and build trade ties while fostering harmony and equality among India’s multi-ethnic, multilingual population.
This August, India lost a patriot, a poet, and a revolutionary in M. Karunanidhi. It also lost a man who proudly stood up for Indians from non-Hindi speaking regions.
Mr. Karunanidhi reminded us all of India’s powerful linguistic diversity. Indians speak over 780 documented languages using more than 66 different written scripts. At least 30 different Indian languages have over a million speakers, yet India’s constitution recognises only 22 of them as official languages. Many of these languages come from completely different linguistic families — Mr. Karunanidhi’s Tamil, for example, bears almost zero relation to my native Bengali.
India’s linguistic diversity presents a practical problem: no single language is spoken by a majority of Indians.
Less than half of all Indians speak Hindi, the most widely spoken language. It is the mother tongue of only 26% of India’s population. The second-most widely spoken language, English, is spoken by around 10% of Indians. The majority of Indians speak a variety of regional languages, many of which use distinct scripts and have little linguistic relation to each other.
For several decades, India’s national government — led by Hindi-speakers — promoted Hindi nationwide to become the country’s singular mode of communication. Non-Hindi-speaking Indians, such as Mr. Karunanidhi, tried to thwart such efforts, worried that Hindi imposition would erase their own languages and cultures. Instead, many non-Hindi-speakers such as Mr. Karunanidhi emphasized their desire to invest in their own regional languages alongside English — the global language of science, technology, and business.
In this essay, I contend that India should carry forward Mr. Karunanidhi’s legacy by investing in regional languages along with English. Dual investment in English and regional languages will empower Indians to preserve their cultural heritage, improve education outcomes, and lift low-income Indians out of poverty.
The Origins of Hindi Imposition: The Search For a “Link Language”
When India’s founding fathers fought for independence, they struggled over how to unite their multilingual country. Indians from different regions spoke distinct languages and could not communicate with each other. The founding fathers concluded that they needed a “link language,” a tongue that would be “most convenient and suitable to enable the different States… to communicate with one another.”
They clashed intensely over which language to choose. The idealistic Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi favoured the Hindustani language, a hybrid of Hindi and Urdu that would bring together Hindus and Muslims and symbolise a united India. This idea was quickly drowned out by Hindu nationalists after the communal bloodshed of Partition; the Hindu nationalists instead advocated for Hindi in the Devanagari script — the language used by Hindus in North India. “Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan,” declared the rallying cry of the RSS leader Guru Golwalkar.
Non-Hindi-speaking leaders, however, passionately opposed the choice of Hindi as a “link” language. As early as 1938, a 14-year old M. Karunanidhi organized student protests against Hindi imposition. In Chennai (then Madras), Tamil leaders formed the Anti-Hindi Command, arguing for regional languages to be used locally and English to be the link language between the regions.
South Indian leaders knew that use of Hindi would unfairly disadvantage South Indians and other non-native Hindi speakers. One Tamil leader would later sum up their belief: “if Hindi were to become the official language of India… we [non-Hindi speakers] will be treated like third rate citizens.”
The constitution of India, written in 1950, attempted to reach a compromise. Known as the Munshi-Ayyangar formula, the compromise called for Hindi and English to be used together as co-official languages until 1965. Yet, after 1965, the compromise required India’s government to give up English and exclusively use Hindi. This proposal wrought fierce debate — B. R. Ambedkar, the author of India’s constitution, declared that “no article [in the constitution] produced more opposition” — but it passed by one vote.
The Munshi-Ayyangar compromise failed spectacularly. India’s government, eager to promote Hindi, began a campaign to spread the Hindi language throughout India. It made Hindi compulsory in secondary schools and began to replace English with Hindi in government documents — such as state bank forms and road signs — in regions where few people spoke or understood Hindi.
These efforts to “impose” Hindi sparked a fierce backlash in non-Hindi-speaking states. Mr. Karunanidhi led hundreds of thousands to march in protest in Tamil Nadu, with support from states as far away as Bengal. The Tamilians marched for 55 days, demanding that Tamil be used locally and English maintained as India’s link language. Their efforts led to the Official Languages Act of 1963, which entrenched the continued use of English and Hindi as co-official languages.
The Costs of “Hindi First”
Despite the technically equal status of Hindi and English, as well as the official status of India’s 22 scheduled languages, successive national governments have undertaken systematic efforts to promote Hindi at the expense of regional languages and English. With the explicit goal of “driv[ing] English out of the country,” national governments have replaced English with Hindi in in street signs, government documents, and even on Twitter posts.
National leaders have implied that those who do not speak Hindi are un-patriotic or un-Indian. Even President Pranab Mukherjee, supposedly an apolitical figure, called Hindi “the soul of Indianness” — even though India’s first Nobel Prize-winning poet, his fellow Bengali Rabindranath Tagore, wrote in Mr. Mukherjee’s native Bengali rather than Hindi.
This decades-long “Hindi first” policy has come at a major cost to India’s social and economic development. It has smothered India’s regional languages, marginalised linguistic and ethnic minorities, and perpetuated income inequality.
First, national governments’ efforts to promote Hindi outside of Hindi-speaking regions have been catastrophic for local and regional languages. Since 1950, nearly 250 Indian languages have gone extinct, with another 40 endangered today. Even India’s largest regional languages, such as Marathi, Telugu and Tamil have seen fluency decline by 9%, 14%, and 16%, respectively, between 1971 and 2001. These languages — and the oral histories, stories and songs they contain — are irreplaceable. The government’s efforts to homogenize India by promulgating Hindi undermines the very diversity and cultural richness that makes India unique.
Second, “Hindi first” emboldens discriminatory behaviour and marginalises those who do not speak Hindi. As Mr. Karunanidhi noted bitterly in 2014, non-Hindi speakers are treated like “second class citizens” by Hindi speakers. Linguistic and ethnic minorities from South India and Northeast India frequently endure racial and ethnic discrimination when they travel to Hindi-speaking regions. Even the legendary boxing champion, Mary Kom, suffered years of discrimination because she hailed from the Kom-speaking, ethnic Kom tribe of Manipur. “We’re called Nepalis, or Chinkies,” wrote Mary Kom in her autobiography, “and people call out things like chingching chong-chong.”
Instead of promoting the unity that India’s founders sought, Hindi-first policies have fuelled separatism and ethnic discord. Non-Hindi-speakers have flocked to join separatist fighters who speak the same language. As the historian Ramachandra Guha warned recently, “one should remember that Pakistan split, and Sri Lanka plunged into civil war, because of the mistaken belief in a single national language.”
Finally, “Hindi first” has perpetuated India’s income inequality. Lack of English proficiency remains a barrier that keeps the poor from entering into the middle class. Only India’s elites can afford to send their children to private English-language schools, to hire English tutors, and to attend India’s top (English-language) universities. India’s poor lack the funds to learn English and are shut out from the kinds of stable corporate jobs that can lead to a middle-class life. The “most vocal demands for English teaching,” noted Zareer Masani in 2012, “come from India’s most disadvantaged communities.” States that have invested heavily in English teaching have seen corresponding decreases in poverty: Tamil Nadu, for example, went from poverty levels similar to Bihar in the 1980s to one-third of Bihar’s today.
A New Way Forward — Investing in English and Regional Languages
India’s investment in regional languages alongside English should have three components. First, government schools should educate children in their mother tongues. Second, all children should be given the opportunity to learn English, particularly with technology such as Duolingo. Third, the government should invest in cultural exchange programs with other English-speaking nations — not just in the West, but in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
Government primary schools should be required to conduct basic education in the local language rather than in Hindi or English. Numerous studies show that education outcomes are best when children are educated in their mother tongue. Local language education will also help schools recruit teachers from local neighbourhoods to fill India’s dire shortage of teachers. The government should also invest in the academic study of India’s regional and tribal languages, all of which are unique to India and many of which are at risk of extinction. Most of all, the tone of India’s leaders should change — instead of single-mindedly promoting one regional language (Hindi) as ‘more Indian’ than others, India’s leaders should encourage Indians everywhere to be proud of their own mother tongues.
At the same time, India should invest in English as a “link” language for inter-state commerce and communication. In an era when India’s IT trade association, Nasscom, found that 17 of every 20 engineering graduates are unemployable because they lack English communication skills, India needs to move beyond its colonial past and think about its future. English provides the best prospects for lifting low-income Indians out of poverty and driving India’s economic growth.
India’s leaders must invest in English wisely. They should make sure English is taught all across India, to rich and poor alike. One challenge is the lack of Indian teachers who speak English fluently and can teach in local languages. This challenge, however, can be addressed by supplementing the efforts of teachers with technology apps such as Duolingo. Duolingo already offers or is developing free English courses in five Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. India’s government could partner with companies like Duolingo to deliver English education cheaply and effectively in a variety of regional languages, accessible to India’s masses. India could also establish programs, analogous to Teach For India, whereby young English-speaking teachers could spend a year or two teaching English in Indian classrooms.
Finally, India’s leaders should leverage English to promote cross-cultural exchanges with other English-speaking nations. This will help build trade and cultural ties, catalysing economic growth, and it will and India’s “soft power,” India has natural alliances with countries that share a common colonial history, including both emerging markets (Nigeria, Malaysia, South Africa, Kenya, Trinidad, Jamaica, Belize, the U.A.E.) and mature economies (the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong). Many of these countries share India’s love of cricket, tea, and Bollywood movies. Several also have centuries-old local Indian communities. India must speak their common language — English.
Additionally, Indian university students’ English could be improved through exchange programs. India should provide scholarships for students from Africa, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia to study at Indian universities in exchange for Indian students to do the same abroad. The Indian Premier League is all the better for having Indian cricketers playing alongside teammates from the West Indies, Africa, and the South Pacific. Why shouldn’t Indian pupils study alongside classmates from these countries?
The India of Tomorrow
The soul of India is not just Hindi — it is the hundreds of languages and dialects spoken across this wondrous land. Only in India can there be not just Bollywood, but Tollywood (Bengali), Mollywood (Malayalam), and Kollywood (Tamil) too. Every Indian language, as renowned Professor G. N. Devy notes, provides “a unique world view and a repository of traditional knowledge.” This is the very heritage Indian patriots should seek to preserve.
The India of tomorrow should be a proudly multilingual country, one that embraces its own diversity. Every Indian should feel free to be proud of his or her mother tongue, and no Indian should feel marginalised because of an inability to speak Hindi.
The spread of English proficiency across India will make India more connected to the world, wealthier, and less economically unequal. English will no longer be the tongue of the elites, but a tool to lift low-income Indians into the middle class. It is no longer a “foreign” language — Indians are already Indianising the English language with characteristic local flair, just like Singaporeans, Jamaicans and South Africans have done. And if India invests in cultural exchanges with other English-speaking countries, we can make the 20th century “British Commonwealth” into the 21st century “Indian Commonwealth.”
Mr. Karunanidhi showed us the way forward back in 1938. He is no longer be able to fight for regional languages and English, but we can carry his torch forward. India will be the better for it.
Gaurav Sen is a JD/MBA candidate at The Wharton School and Penn Law School, University of Pennsylvania and board member of the Wharton India Economic Forum. All opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
