government. Instead, the language became even more entrenched in public life and the change over to Hindi never happened. At the same time, governmental programs to promote Hindi have had long lasting effects on institutions such as publishing houses and cultural bodies such as the Sahitya Akademi. This lopsided cultural “development” kept the reins of Hindi in the firm grasp of its cultural elites, who effectively became the custodians of Hindi culture.
The place of English is defined vis à vis Hindi, and also in relation to the other bhashas. In 1956 India's Official Languages Act organized states along linguistic lines, despite the fact that nearly every state has sizable linguistic minorities. So, for instance, although Marathi is the mother tongue of nearly three quarters of those living in the western state of Maharashtra, about 8 percent of Maharashtrians count Hindi as their mother tongue and a little less than 8 percent Urdu. Literature is nevertheless largely mapped along those same state borders to the extent that bhasha literatures are often referred to in English as “regional literatures.” In addition, most of these “regional” literatures serve reading populations larger than those of most European nations. For example, there are close to 80 million Hindi speakers in the state of Bihar alone, 74 million Telugu speakers (largely in the state of Andhra Pradesh), and 83 million Bengali speakers, mostly in West Bengal.32 Hence both the size and the dimensions of a vernacular literary culture become obscured by the idea of the regional. This obfuscation becomes a veritable distortion when regional literature itself is continually juxtaposed with the “global” literature written by Indians in English. In the face of globalized English literary production and the prominence of Indian English writing, the regional has to some extent become a diminutive. Being confined to a limited geographic space has in many respects come to restrict the stature of bhasha literary texts when placed side by side with Indian English ones, as they increasingly and inevitably are.
It had not always been this way. When there were fewer Indians writing in English, in the 1930 s, 1940 s, and 1950 s, for instance, these writers (e.g., Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hossain, Kamala Markandaya, R.K. Narayan, and Raja Rao) were thought to be writing against the grain. They were thusly perceived in part because they were not taken as seriously by the English literary establishment based, naturally, in London. Yet they were also not taken as seriously in India, since at this time English was not an Indian language in the way it is today.
The change in the relationship between English and bhasha literatures is partly due to the shift in how Indian English writing has been received and published abroad, a dynamic that, I argue (in chapter 8), generates a new politics of place. Yet Indian literature in English also has more validity and social resonance because of a thriving Indian English culture in India itself. English is not tied to any region but is the “second mother tongue,” as it is sometimes called, of the urban elite.
Despite all this, the politics of language in India cannot only be understood simply in terms of the position of English vis àvis “the languages.” The languages have their own rivalries and similarities among them and have varying levels of power nationally. This power derives not only from the numerical strength of each language but also from its perceived cultural worth. This “cultural worth,” not surprisingly, is often defined by a language community's elite members in their chosen fields of cultural production.33 If we consider the language debates and commission report of 1956, we may see, for instance, how English and Hindi were in some ways pitted against each other from the start. They, and their elites, vied for the role of official language (rajbhasha) of the union as well as for the unofficial role as link language. As a result, English and Hindi are in some respects competing national languages.34 This competition exists not only in Delhi, where there is a concentration of elite discourse in both languages, but also in north India more broadly where Hindi is most often recorded as the mother tongue. What we see in the relationship between English and Hindi is a dovetailing of the cultural and the political.
Forty percent of Indians, over 400 million people, are Hindi speakers, though within the appellation “Hindi” are some forty-eight “dialects,” such as Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Marwari, and Awadhi. Hindi is not only a regional language but also, by virtue of being the most widely spoken Indian language, a national language.35 Like English, its hegemonic power is contested but for quite different reasons; for many south Indians, for instance, Hindi is a symbol and arbiter of north Indian cultural hegemony. The major south Indian languages—Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam—are Dravidian based and use different scripts from each other and from the Indo-European languages of the North. This north-south linguistic divide is as relevant to contemporary Indian language politics as the global promises and pretensions of English. Yet English is also implicated in this divide.
The South, especially the state of Tamilnadu, famously opposed Hindi becoming India's national language in a fierce and occasionally violent cultural war. In 1835, during colonial rule, the British made English the language of government (replacing Persian), and knowing English became necessary to obtain coveted government jobs, including those in the railways and the police force. Over a century later, if Hindi were to replace English at the national level in post-independence India, access to government jobs would require knowing Hindi instead.36 In this context, English was curiously a more neutral language and, paradoxically for an elite language, one that promised more equality between north and south Indians. If Hindi was to become the national language, as leaders such as Mohandas K. Gandhi had fervently hoped and planned, the practical consequence would be that south Indians would all of a sudden be at a disadvantage.37 It would be incumbent on them, and not their compatriots from the Hindi belt, to learn an entirely new language (and script) to be in a position to vie for a lucrative government job. For educated, largely Brahmin or other upper caste south Indians, English was already the language of social advancement and cultural comfort. It did not threaten their regional linguistic identities precisely because it was not the language of another Indian region; yet it allowed them a place to assert themselves on an equal footing with English educated north Indians and to excel at the national level.38 The anti-Hindi agitations in the South had the distinction of having the support of nearly all factions of the political spectrum. For non-Brahmins (the overwhelming majority) in Tamilnadu, for instance, Hindi was threatening on at least two accounts: first, it drew away from education in Tamil and represented Sanskrit based north Indian cultural hegemony; and second, if they had to learn a second language, they wanted it to be English, which they saw as a world language and one that Brahmins had already had the opportunity to master.39
Like Hindi, English is able to divide and unite depending on what is at stake; for all its documentation of Hindi and English and its comparisons to other linguistic situations the world over, what the Report of the Official Language Commission fails to stress enough is the relationship and rivalries among the Indian languages themselves. The afterglow of independence and desire for unity did not mean that upper-class Indians were going to change their linguistic priorities if they didn't have to. English thus became more deeply entrenched in the postcolonial government bureaucracy and also became the official language of higher education. The Official Languages Act of 1963 allowed for the continued use alongside Hindi, even after the fifteen-year phasing out period that was to come to an end in 1965. In 1964, when there were more attempts to institute Hindi alone, more protests in the South and elsewhere ensued. By i967 English was officially sanctioned, albeit in reluctant official prose: it would be a “subsidiary official language.” What English became instead, to use Aijaz Ahmad's phrase, was “the language of national integration and bourgeois civility.”40
Unlike Hindi, English could never be viewed as representing “the people”; hence its authenticity was always questioned, even after being accepted as an Indian language in a variety of realms. As Alok Rai makes clear in his analysis of the competition between Hindi and English elites in contemporary north India, it is only political discourse and cultural production in Hindi that may “liberate those democratic energies of the Hindi belt.”41 What Rai is pointing to here is a language's social and political potential in society. Despite its pan-Indian pose,
