Hindi as a farce

[J.B. Sharma]

Dear Listmembers,
 Hindi remains a language which is the lingua-
franca for hundreds of millions in contemporary
India. It has a beautiful literature and is a
very expressive language dear to many who are
proud of its roots in Sanskrit. There is nothing
insidious about that as it represents the
personal choice of millions in a free country.
As Indic polity has just become representative
of its masses just a few decades ago, the
evolution of Hindi has been dictated by the will
of this polity. This is the essence of
democratic process. To call it a farce is
equivalent to representing a personal disain for
the language, which once again is a personal
choice. This is just fine, and it is better to
not have anything to do with a language you
dislike, but to make polemical proclamations
dispariging a language in the name of
scholarship is quite sad indeed !
 Urdu is a beautiful language too with its own
tradition of poetry and prose. It too is a
product of historical forces, just like any
other language. The word 'Ordo' is the Turco-
Mongol name for a military camp, and the genisis
of this language was indeed in the military
camps of the Turks and later the Mongols. These
camps were full of slaves captured as booty of
war. There were way many more slaves in these
camps than the turco-mongol masters. These
slaves were of Indian origin and their language
was rooted in the north-Indian dialect. As time
went by, the turco-mongol masters retained their
turkik and persian languages as the language of
the new aristocrats, but the language of the
'booty of war', forced converts, and willing
converts remained rooted in Indic dialect. With
time, and the creation of this new muslim
culture in the Sultanate of Hind, and Mughal
India Urdu has generated its own literary corpus.
 So, neither Hindi, nor Urdu is a farce, and
both are dear to their speakers, very much like
the case for anyone holding the language and
culture they were born into as dear to them. It
really is not a subject for rational debate.
Best to all,
J.B. Sharma