Aymen’s Page

As much as Indian nationalists would like us to believe that Hindi is our rashtra bhasha, it is not. We are, as a nation, as diverse as humanity itself.

It is widely accepted among the various political thinkers that a nationality can never be  strong until there are a few common threads that attach people of that nation. Few of them have been mentioned below:

1.Common Heritage

2.Common Language

3.Common Religion

4.Common History and

5.Commong Government.

Of the principal five, none apply to the subcontinent in general and India in specific. As a secular democracy, no government has ruled us long enough with the same policies for us to develop unity, neither do we have a common religion to our benefit. As for History or Heritage – it has been as diverse as our own country.

Our neighbours, namely, the Chinese have benefited from the fact they 90% of their people speak Han Chinese, the remaining 10% can be taken care of by the dictatorship. 

India has long suffered from regionalistic pride and separatism – the reasons can be many – but the principal reason being our North India centric policies and treating Hindi as the soul language.

This has resulted in deep resentment and xenophobia among the North Eastern, Southern and West Indians. 

Common language is of paramount importance not only for vague ideals like nationalism and nationality, but also for trade, commerce and better governance.

An Uighur Chinese can easily be act as an employer for, say, a Mongolian ese – the reason? one may ask,simple. Both of the people in question were educated in a school where, apart from Uighurese and Mongolian, Han Chinese was taught.

However, this can hardly be expected in India, which has no one “dominant” language. In such a case, English would surely come in handy.

We might despise the use of a foreign language in our halls of learning or the dusty bazaars.  But English is no more foreign, it is, and will hopefully remain, another language in the huge list of languages that already exist.

Indian English, as we may call it, has a distinct stamp of being Indian, just like the imported jeans or the east european dancers who dance behind Himesh Reshammiya.

We Indians are someone who are quick to accept, modify and tailor things according to our likes. The languages that we have today, have enriched themselves to include words like “computer”, “light”, “car” etc. Just like we have the distinction of enriching English with words like “arrey!”, “na” and other regional words.

Jawaharlal Nehru Discovered India in English, just as Khushwant Singh wrote his columns in the same language. 

English in India, will and has been treated as it was treated by Australians and Americans. For example “check” became “chuck” for the Americans, “today” became “to die” for people of the Down Under, likewise “Chinese” became “chines”  and “yes” got converted to “haan”.

This is, in no way a disrespect to our regional languages, just like it is no disrespect for Malaysian to be written in the Sanskrit, Arabic and Latin alphabet in different times. 

The benefit might not only encourage Tamils to live comfortably in Assam, but may also help a Maarwari to do business in Mizoram or help Shashi Tharoor to stand in elections from Malapparam. The politics of division will give way to the politics of unity, and then, we might expect of our leaders to offer us better employment conditions than “self-pride” or “protection of the culture”. 

It is time that English comes out of the halls of justice and the parliament, and reach into religious sermons, bazaars, docks and our sign boards.