Yes, we write in Indian...

DO you write in Indian?’ Almost all Indian writers would have been asked this question by some foreigner or the other. I was asked this in England decades ago by someone I thought should have known better. Someone who was dating an Indian. My answer then was, ‘Yes, I write in Indian… English.’ Something that I read recently made me think of this. I had circulated a poster about a translation contest for new translators from any regional language into English. I thought this was a good opportunity for many of my old students who had translated from Indian languages into English for my courses over the years. But this was a general post for all my Facebook ‘Friends’. My attention was grabbed by a reaction on the wall of the person from whose wall I had taken the post. Someone asked if they could translate from Hindi into English. After all, this was a contest for translation from regional languages into English, and Hindi, in their opinion, wasn’t a regional language.

When you call some language a regional language, you imply that there are languages that are national languages. In their opinion, as in that of countless others, Hindi is the only national language. And all other Indian languages are regional languages. It didn’t quite bother them that the only language that has the prefix Indian often added to it is English; we say Indian English. This has created enough confusion in the past since many anthologies of Indian writing would only include works written in English as if only that language could represent India as a whole. From this point of view, even Hindi couldn’t represent the whole of India, only particular regions. This may raise the hackles of Hindi speakers since they often ask us non-Hindi speakers to speak in the national language. They would argue even now that Hindi is spoken by a majority of Indians and, therefore, it was the duty of all fellow countrymen and women to speak the language which was the only one that could aspire to be truly Indian.

This chauvinism leads to interesting distortions — a high-ranking bureaucrat once said proudly to me that we finally had a PM who spoke to all officials in his mother tongue. I was genuinely puzzled and asked, ‘How do you understand him then? Do you know Gujarati? My father learnt Gujarati as a Central government employee. Did you do so too?’ He was shocked and spluttered. ‘Hindi. I meant Hindi! It is our mother tongue!’ Actually, it wasn’t his mother tongue either. His language, like 50-odd languages, had been clubbed under Hindi by the census commission. Many of these languages have been fighting for recognition as independent languages, to be given their due status in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Hence, many regional languages have been clubbed together and yet this doesn’t make Hindi the national language as opposed to regional languages.

All regional languages (a huge lot more than the 22 our Constitution recognises) are Indian languages, our national languages. Anyone and every one writing in our host of languages is writing in an Indian language. Sahitya Akademi, our National Academy of Letters, worked this out a long time ago, when they adopted the slogan ‘Unity in Diversity’ and attested that all writings in our different languages (all compositions since some may still not have a script) constitute Indian literature(s). In their recent international literary festival held in Bhopal, Sahitya Akademi showcased nearly 90 Indian languages. And this is still a fraction. If you write in any of the 200 and more languages of the Northeast or in the tribal languages from other parts of India, or the other local tongues of the country, or any of the state languages, any of our official languages (which includes English) or our not-so official languages, you are writing Indian, you are writing in an Indian language. The numbers are not exact since the census needs 10,000 speakers at least for a language to be recognised as one!

So, the question I began with has a straightforward answer — yes, we write in Indian. We are Indian writers, whatever Indian language we write in!

— The writer is an author and translator