Ramachandra Guha: In battle against ‘Hindi imposition’, a war between two distinct visions of India

The war of words between politicians of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and politicians of the Bharatiya Janata Party has been represented in the press as a battle between two languages, Tamil and Hindi. That description is not inaccurate, yet it is incomplete. For, at a deeper level, the debate represents two very different ideas of India: one that welcomes diversity and difference in culture as well as in politics, and the other whose unspoken motto is “Standardise, Homogenise, Centralise”.

The opposition to Hindi imposition in Tamil Nadu goes back a long way, to the late 1930s, when a Congress government in what was then the Madras Presidency chose to make Hindi teaching compulsory in schools, albeit in stages. Ironically, the prime minister (as the nomenclature then ran) of Madras at the time, C Rajagopalachari, later radically changed his position.

By the 1950s, he began arguing, just as Tamil politicians do now, that if a second language was to be taught in addition to one’s mother tongue, this should be English, rather than Hindi. To those (such as Ram Manohar Lohia) who disparaged English as an alien tongue associated with the colonisers, Rajaji responded that English had become an entirely Indian language, indigenised in...

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