It has been noted with some amusement that Shashi Tharoor, a Congress Party Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, has begun to occasionally tweet in Hindi. If English is the language of the global economy, then Hindi is—and I say it with some despair—the language of Indian political discourse.
“The Hindi stuff is an acknowledgement that a lot of our national discourse now is taking place principally in Hindi and people like myself and other leaders from the South, who have tended to work nationally in English, find ourselves at a small disadvantage in reaching the sort of the Hindi heartland as it were (in the North) which in terms of national agenda setting is necessary,” Tharoor told Maya Mirchandani of The Wire in a video interview.
Tharoor, who is an enormous presence on social media with 6.69 million Twitter followers, clearly wants to make inroads into the Hindi heartland by using the language that the Hindi heartland speaks, namely Hindi. With close to 500 million people reading, writing and speaking Hindi either as their first language or second language, it makes profound political sense for Tharoor or any other non-Hindi politician with national aspirations to do that. I would not call it a decision of expediency but it is very nearly that even while being a decision of necessity.
Let me explain why I said “some despair” about Hindi being the language of India’s national political discourse. As a native Gujarati speaker I have written far more in Hindi/Urdu since my early teenage than my own mother-tongue. In fact, I find poetic expression comes much more easily to me in Hindi/Urdu than in Gujarati. My despair has nothing to do with linguistic prejudice. It is one of the world’s great languages but then India is home to many of the world’s great languages spoken by hundreds of millions of people.
Hindi’s political primacy in India is undisputable and it would be pointless to work on a counter. Just as it would be pointless to replace English as the language of the global economy and even popular culture, it would be futile to try and replace Hindi. My despair comes from the fact that a language necessarily comes attached with regionalized culture which in turn means piggybacking on the political primacy are also many of the cultural predilections from the Hindi heartland. In any case with the enormous success of Hindi cinema Hindi has long been the lingua franca of popular Indian culture. If it is a contest, it has already been won by Hindi.
Notwithstanding that fait accompli I think it is essential that all other great Indian languages have some political clout as well. At this stage it seems inconceivable that a politician from the so-called Hindi heartland with national aspirations would even academically consider learning other politically influential languages such as Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and Tamil for instance. I chose these four because they represent states with sizable parliamentary seats at Maharashtra (48), West Bengal (42), Andhra Pradesh (42) and Tamil Nadu (39). Of course, given India’s splintered center and left-of-center political world smaller states with different languages can also be decisive. My point is there has to be some effort to reach out in other languages as well by Hindi speaking politicians with national aspirations.
Perhaps I am belaboring the point too much but this Monday morning I do not have anything better to do. As for Tharoor occasionally tweeting in Hindi in recognition of the language’s political primacy, the ambitious politician must do what he’s got to do.
* The Malayalam headline is intended to read ‘Shashi Tharoor now in Hindi’. I have used the Google translation tool to translate but cannot at all vouch for its linguistic accuracy.
I just know a couple of sentences in Malayalam such as “ennik sanskarikkanam’ (I want to talk) or “pattida monay” (son of a dog).