Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

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Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by prasen9 »

So, now that the election is over, the BJP is trying to push Hindi down the throats of the country. TN parties have protested against this.. That then provoked the response, "oh, this is a draft only". Whatever. If you don't want to do it, why is it in the draft? Maybe this is sort of a trial balloon by the BJP to see how hard people will fight back. While I can understand Hindi, speak a bit, and have spoken with friends, put my daughter in Hindi classes, etc., I firmly oppose the imposition of any language on anyone. I applaud the Tamils who have vehemently fought for language rights. Some of the other language speakers are benefiting because of their activism.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by jayakris »

Hey, if you complain too much, they will impose samskRtam on you, okay? You would hate that even more, I assume?

But to be serious, I thought this issue had kinda died away because everybody (except me) speaks Hindi in India, anyway. Even in Kerala, where even fewer Hindi speakers existed than in Tamil Nadu, say 40 years ago, when I was in high school. I don't know if there is that kind of opposition to Hindi like there was, before we opened up all of India for television in the 80s.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by prasen9 »

I would love to learn Samskritam. Even by imposition. Because it is a beautiful language. And doing so, does not really choose winners and losers among the country's languages. If you really insist, give people a choice between Samskritam and Tamil. As a computer scientist working on natural language processing, I believe Samskritam would possibly be *the* language on which a computer would perform best (provided large corpora were available for training). Speaking loosely, that is because it has the least amount of context-sensitiveness among spoken languages. I regret my parents and my school system did not insist that I learn that.

Like I said, I know (some) and can speak Hindi. But, if it is imposed, I will rise up in opposition. If the whole country learns voluntarily, I have no problem. I would encourage it. Learning as many languages is a good thing. In this case, it is about principle.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by prasen9 »

So the centre dropped the clause. The good folks in TN saved the day.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by Kumar »

Sorry for dredging up this old topic!

When I was in India recently, I was talking with a call driver in TN! He basically knew only one luggage Tamil and he was hired to be a driver for party from north India! He was basically clueless how to guide them and felt that he really missed out on the opportunity to impress them and make money!

Would he have learnt Hindi if it was forced ow this throat! probably not! But the attitude of Dravidian parties does not help! Even in 90s and 2000s, Knowing Hindi was a very important survival tool in most parts of India! I Not sure if that is still in the case! By nursing this Hindi hatred, I don’t believe they serve Tamil people a whole lot!

I am against imposition of Hindi, and iNdian government definitely should not mandate it! but TN govt should have provided / encouraged ways for them to learn Hindi! What is the harm in offering that or even mandating Hindi as third language! so that poor students have the opportunity to learn Hindi?
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by prasen9 »

I am in favor of offering as many languages as possible to students. My daughter possibly is fluent in four languages and is working on a couple more. But, I do not think it should be mandated. That will actually create more opposition. Forcing things down people's throats is not the right thing to do. Maybe for people in the hospitality industry, let them have the opportunity to get a crash course in conversational Hindi. And, while we are at it, get them the opportunity to learn Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu too. Chances are that they get more people from their neighboring states even though the Hindi speaking population is larger. I do not know the numbers.

The TN government should certainly offer it along with other neighboring languages and in today's world maybe even world languages such as Mandarin. The harm in a mandate is the time one has to spend learning that language. That will come at the expense of learning something else. So, the question is what is the best use of the student's time. More Math, Science, Tamil, literature, geography, history, civics, or Hindi or Mandarin or Thai? At the end, it is a zero sum game. Let people choose what they want to learn and live with the consequences.

Wrt the Dravidian parties, it would perhaps be better if the central government overtly or covertly did not try to push Hindi down the rest of the country's throats and tried things more tactfully. For example, if the Hindi belt forced the students to learn one of Bangla, Marathi, Telugu, say and the rest of the country say had the choice of Hindi, a neighbouring state language, etc. then a lot of people would not oppose things that much. It has become a power issue. The center wants to impose things by power and some of the states want to oppose things as vehemently as possible. So we have this unfortunate situation where it has become an ego/identity issue. Essentially, nobody wants to feel they are second-class citizens and someone is more equal than the others. That seems like subjugation and that is the interpretation although from a pragmatic point of view, knowledge really is power.

I do not hate Hindi per se and can understand it fully and speak in some broken gender-mangled (Bengali verbs are gender-neutral) Hindi with my friends at times. And, I am fine when at other airports (Delhi, Mumbai) the official tries to speak in Hindi, but at Kolkata airport when the counter people talk to me in Hindi, I reply back in Bangla and feign not to understand Hindi. :-) Or speak in English. If you are in Bangla, learn Bangla. The Hindi chauvinism at the customs/immigration desks has gotten worse in the last decade, but, it does not get them anywhere because they really cannot deny me entry just because I cannot speak Hindi even though some of these bureaucrats would want to. They tell me I should learn Hindi if I am coming to India, and I tell them they should learn Bangla if they are living in Bengal. :-) It is fun needling them. At the end, they relent. Essentially, I am all for voluntary use of languages but not for mandates.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by RohitG »

How many people related to the hospitality industry in north are willing to impress their customer parties say from the southern states or Bengal or Maharashtra or Gujarat or Punjab or say the North East?
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by jayakris »

RohitG wrote: Sat Apr 24, 2021 5:01 amHow many people related to the hospitality industry in north are willing to impress their customer parties say from the southern states or Bengal or Maharashtra or Gujarat or Punjab or say the North East?
If enough people are visiting from any of those states, I bet they will learn the particular language. Otherwise, some enterprising Malayalis from Kerala will go there, learn Hindi and all of those languages, and take away all those tour operator businesses :) ... He will call himself Karun A Karan to sound NorthIndian-ish, while he may actually be just Karunakaran. Or MA Dhawan, while he is actually Madhavan.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by jai_in_canada »

You think India has a problem with imposing Hindi when there are 500 languages? Come to Canada and see how it is with TWO languages! They’re a distinct society! Now we have a Punjdemic with Punjabi spreading like butter on a hot tandoori roti! “Shastri Called, Gee!”

Anyway, this is a short term problem.
We’ll all be speaking Mandarin by 2030! 🇨🇳
“Ni Hao!”

P.S. Anyone who doesn’t speak Hindi have this experience overseas where you go to an Indian gathering and some over friendly desi dude saunters up to you and starts yammering away in Hindi? Irritates a friend of mine from TN no end. I told him to take a chill pill and tell the guy in Tamil with a smile that he forgot Hindi when he got COVID-19.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by prasen9 »

jayakris wrote: Sun Apr 25, 2021 1:29 am If enough people are visiting from any of those states, I bet they will learn the particular language. Otherwise, some enterprising Malayalis from Kerala will go there, learn Hindi and all of those languages, and take away all those tour operator businesses :) ... He will call himself Karun A Karan to sound NorthIndian-ish, while he may actually be just Karunakaran. Or MA Dhawan, while he is actually Madhavan.
Precisely. I have seen many of these in Doha, where I lived for two years. And, they managed to learn just enough to go by. The Tamil driver will also do so if there are enough business reasons to survive. We do not really need to do this in schools at the cost of other things that are more useful. Of course, language learning has its own benefits and a selection of languages should be provided to learners across the country.

If there is a government imposition, I would not mind an experiment with Sanskrit, because it will be equally hard and interesting to everyone. And, perhaps, as a computer scientist, that language would be the easiest to automate processing if we had enough corpora and interest. I think everyone learning Sanskrit would possibly be a good thing. I guess the Dravidian language speakers will not be happy. But, even in Dravidian languages the number of words that have their roots in Sanskrit in Telugu or Kannada are more than perhaps those from the original Dravidian language(s).

I thought Canada has 200 languages. Well of course, the 3rd language is perhaps around 3%. :-)
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by jai_in_canada »

Canada does have hundreds of languages, but only two official languages – English & French.  Of course, immigration over the past 100 years has brought in hundreds of World languages. These get special support from Official Multiculturism of Canada adopted with the passing of the Multiculturism Act that made it part of the Charter of Rights & Freedoms. These imported languages are mostly concentrated in the big cities and are not regional - unless you classify city neighbourhoods as regions. 

Canada has over 600 First Nations.  Many of them had their own language.  The Inuit to the North, MiqMaq to the East, Algonquin in the North Central, Mississauga in the South Central, Cree/Chipewyan in the West etc. had their own languages.  Those languages got decimated when the Europeans arrived, much of it due to forced integration in residential schools.  They were vulnerable languages anyway because they were only spoken by small numbers of people and many had no written script let alone body of literature. The imposition of English & French resulted in mass linguicide of these native North American languages. 

If that history is anything to go by then forced imposition of a language on a regional minority is akin to cultural genocide.  History will not regard it kindly.  So I am opposed to imposing Hindi in non-Hindi speaking regions.  Gandhi started the Dakshin Bharath Hindi Prachar Sabha to expand the adoption of Hindi in South India.  I wonder if that still exists.  I remember taking the tests for Prathamika and Madhyama.  In fairness, it wasn’t imposition.  Just subtle encouragement.  Now there are Tamil social media influencers ranting on YouTube about Biharis coming in and buying up properties and businesses in Tamil Nadu and taking over entire neighbourhoods where Hindi is becoming predominant.  And there is a conspiracy theory floating around that the BJP is going to rename TN to Dakshin Pradesh. There is growing Dravidian jingoism – or may be the more diplomatic term is protectionism driven by insecurities caused by increased movement of people of different backgrounds into Tamil Nadu.  TN seems to be a lot more strident about language than Telugunadu (AP/TS), Karnataka & Kerala.

In Canada, Quebec, which is a French island completely surrounded by an ocean of English, has protected its French by enacting strong laws.  It is very fearful that English will submerge it and wipe out French.  So there are laws. In public spaces in Quebec there must be twice as many French signs as English signs, and they must be twice as big.  There is a language police that goes around counting and measuring.  Quebec is officially a distinct society and they don’t care as much about multiculturism.  So the recent immigration wave from mostly Islamic countries has forced Quebec  to pass laws for Official Secularism – where no religious symbols like crosses, turbans, hijab, burka etc. can be worn by public service employees, and face cannot be covered on public transit – well, before the pandemic, NOW everyone MUST cover their face.  Funny how a virus changes the definition of secularism.  Quebec has control over who immigrates into the province – they prefer those from French speaking countries.  Of course, once you immigrate into another part of Canada nothing stops you from moving to Quebec.  Well, a pandemic will – because right now there are barriers to inter-provincial travel.

There are other language problems cropping up in urban English Canada.  In some parts of Vancouver there is a large Chinese population.  A friend of mine, who is English Canadian, went to the Annual General Meeting of his Condominium in Richmond, B.C. and found that it was being conducted in Mandarin.  His building is 90% Chinese.  He asked for the meeting to be conducted in English or French.  The condo board dismissively told him that they would send him the minutes in English.  He told them that wasn’t good enough, he wanted to follow along and participate in the meeting.  They refused.  So he got his lawyer involved and sent them a letter.  They got scared and held the meeting again – in Engrish (so racist am I!), I guess it was easier than doing it in Flench (dang, double racist!).  But now he gets dirty looks in the hallway and the cold shoulder when he tries to participate in the meeting.

Many years ago a Tamil friend of mine said he wants English to be the National Language of India.  When I asked him why he said that it was because English does not belong to anyone in India so there would be no surreptitious, subtle and subversive subjugation, substitution and suspension of a Southern spoken syntax (someone had to take over while Shashi Tharoor is in hospital, get well soon). My friend cared less that English was a vestige of Colonialism.

Multilingual societies have language tensions, multi-racial societies have racial conflict, multi-religious societies have religious strife, multi-gender societies have gender war.  In its quest for commonality and connection humans unwittingly create communalism and conflict.  And it seems like it will only get worse as movement and resettlement of people increases across the world due to emigration/immigration leading to more culture clash.

 
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by Atithee »

India will never reach the lofty heights it is capable of reaching if we keep being mired in multitude of these multi things. Unity in diversity is the bane of India.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by jai_in_canada »

Humanity will never reach the lofty heights it is capable of reaching if we keep being mired in multitude of these multi things. Unity in diversity is the bane of Humanity.

Search-and-replace works perfectly in that sentence. 🙂
This is a problem everywhere and all the time.

But it is all Modi's fault! 😋 Sorry, I couldn't resist.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by Atithee »

JIC, no other part of humanity is as besieged by this menace as India. I’ll give you one thing though, in your quest at levity—all leaders get pilloried. I think the only one showered with universal love today is the NZ PM. Can’t think of anyone else; maybe a Scandinavian leader.
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Re: Imposition of Hindi... Pros/Cons of Diversity

Post by jai_in_canada »

Atithee wrote: Mon Apr 26, 2021 2:55 pm JIC, no other part of humanity is as besieged by this menace as India.
I don't know Atithee. What about the Balkans in 1990's, Northern Ireland in 1970's & 80's, the former Soviet republics, Nazism, race relations in the US, the Middle East, Rwanda, China today, Canada and its treatment of First Nations, Australia & its treatment of Aboriginal people? Hard to compare. And India does have a unique problem with the unparalleled amount of diversity - ethnically, religiously, linguistically, culturally. Nowhere in the World is one country as diverse. In fact, given that diversity and the resulting potential for conflict, India is actually a relatively good example of mostly peaceful coexistence. Despite the ethnic slaughters that occur, there hasn't been a holocaust, systematic genocide or large scale eradication of people. Has there? A Jewish friend of mine in Canada tells me that India is the only country in the World where Jews were never persecuted. He thought it funny that when he landed in India and saw Swastikas everywhere. Still room for improvement for India, mostly stymied by politics.
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