Persian played a similar role during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal times, and after Independence, English. The Prakrits, which were mostly mutually intelligible, and considered less prestigious than Sanskrit, allowed the elites to stay in a single conversation across a huge spread of territory. And one argument that has come up this time to counter the demand for Hindi is that it is only something ‘devised’ at Fort William College, Calcutta, by a Scottish linguist named John Gilchrist working for the East India Company, and so it could never be India’s National Language.įirst, the more important issue: does English need to be replaced? I am not convinced that that could work.įor as far back as we can remember, India has functioned with the elite linguistically separate from the rest of the society. This move has raised hackles outside the Hindi belt, awakening memories of 19, when the South agitated in opposition to what it saw as the imposition of a language that would put it at a disadvantage. ![]() ![]() There is a curious debate on social media these days in the wake of the assertion by Union home minister Amit Shah that Hindi should take over the role of English in all states, and grow into our national language.
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