I am both sad and outraged by the diatribes against Hindi by those who speak in Indian English and shout against “Hindi imposition”. They include many educated Indians from the Hindi heartland. This is a cop-out. The English used here, one can see, has segued smoothly from being the language of India’s former colonial masters to being the code that identifies the UN-certified thought leaders in India, from science to the arts, philosophy to warfare.

India before the 20th century was a deeply multilingual nation. Each region had a language, each language had its own tradition of oral literature and area dialects that fed into the pool. And then there was a particularly fractious history of Hindi vs Urdu. For long, Hindi, Hindvi or Hindustani in spoken form had been the people’s language in the area.

Controversy and bitterness first began to be crystallised after the Bhakha Munshis appointed by the British carved out two languages from Hindustani. One was Hindi written in Devanagari (or Nagari for short) script borrowed from Sankrit. The other was Urdu, in a slightly indigenised version of the Persian script. Hindi and Urdu thereafter were propagated through school books and governmental correspondence as the languages of Hindus and Muslims, in that order.

The term bhasha that the anti-Hindi lobbyists are using freely to underscore its Hindu roots (backed perhaps unknowingly by the venerable JLF) is baffling. Bhasha or........

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