Modern Hindi
Language, nation, and popular culture
The present article is a preview of a forthcoming long essay (c. 25,000 words), in which I seek to explore three related and complementary dimensions of the vigorous renewal and popular nationalist self-assertion through which Hindi language and literature have effectively reinvented themselves over the twentieth century.
By HARISH TRIVEDI
Through the process initiated in 1893 with the founding of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Hindi fought to reverse the colonial divisive discrimination against itself and the preferential patronage given to Urdu by the British since 1835. With this battle rapidly won in 1900, Hindi not only gained the extensive ground from which Urdu now retreated in a virtual rout but also sought to 'modernize' itself through an internal dynamic by determinedly adopting the variety of Hindi that is know as khari boli as the medium of both prose and verse to replace the bhakti-laden Braj and Avadhi. Next, with the founding of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in 1907, Hindi aligned itself closely with the Gandhian Congress nationalist mass movement and was soon adopted by it as the rashtra-bhasha, the national language, thus becoming not only the chosen vehicle of nationalism but indeed one of its major planks.In literature, Hindi moved from a phase of revivalist cultural nationalism (represented in the writings of Maithili Sharan Gupta etc.) in the 1910s to mainstream Gandhian nationalism (Premchand etc.) in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Over the following two decades Hindi, while firmly rooted in native ground, opened up and responded to various international literary movements by going through phases of Romanticism (Chhayavad; represented by the poets Nirala, Mahadevi Varma etc.), Progressivism (Pragativad; Muktibodh, Yashpal etc.), and Modernism (Prayogvad; Ajneya and the Tar Saptak poets). Through these greatly speeded up and therefore sometimes apparently contrary stages of development, Hindi now came abreast of contemporary literary trends and movements sweeping the world.
With the coming of Independence in 1947 and the framing of the Constitution in 1950, Hindi, the popular national language, was installed as the controversial 'official language' of the partitioned state. Ironically, its anti-imperialist role in colonial times was now eclipsed by the charge of 'Hindi imperialism' from several other Indian languages. Just as a nationalist agenda is believed to be exhausted upon the attainment of a nation-state and to give way in turn to some alternative (sub-)nationalist agenda, so Hindi was now forced to give way to the competing political and cultural claims of the regional languages. Its nominal promulgation and artificial construction as the language of the state, intended in time to replace colonial English, failed to persuade the public at large until it has now been given up as a lost cause, especially in the face of the irresistible globalization of English and the recent international success of Indian Writing in English. At the same time, at a wider common level of Indian society, the remarkable spread of Hindi, largely through the popular media of film and TV, has given it a pan-Indian reach perhaps unequalled by any other language in the history of India.
Meanwhile, Hindi literature since Independence has performed a peculiarly complex post-colonial, post-nationalist function, by voicing its increasing disillusionment (mohabhanga) with the aspirations initially raised by the liberated nation (Shrilal Shukla, Raghuvir Sahay, Harishankar Parsai). While on the one hand it has sustained its exploration of the hybrid and the cosmopolitan (Mohan Rakesh, Nirmal Verma, Surendra Verma, and many dedicated translators of world literature), on the other hand it has continued to represent the grass-roots authenticity of the local predicaments of the religious minorities (Rahi Masoom Raza, Manzoor Ehtesham, Asghar Wajahat) and the marginalized figures of the woman (Jainendra Kumar, Krishna Sobti, Maitreyi Pushpa) and the subaltern (Renu, Nagarjuna, Vinod Kumar Shukla). Altogether, Hindi's chequered progress through the last century of Indian nation-building constitutes a major strand of our modern history, just as its literature of the period is an index of our social and cultural transformation. *
Harish Trivedi, educated at the universities of Allahabad and Wales, is Professor of English at the University of Delhi. He is the author of 'Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India' (Calcutta 1993; Manchester 1995), and has translated from Hindi: 'Premchand: His life and times' by Amrit Rai (Delhi 1982; rpt. 1991) as well as works of modern poetry and short fiction. He has also co-edited 'Interrogating Post-colonialism: Text and context' (Shimla 1996), and 'Post-colonial Translation: Theory and practice' (London 1999).