The Withdrawal of Doniger’s Book and the RSS link

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First Published on NewsYaps

“If you don't want a man unhappy, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.”
--Captain Beatty, Fahrenheit 451

On the day Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History was withdrawn by publisher Penguin under pressure from right-wing fundamentalists, it would seem rather apt to recall Ray Bradbury’s dystopic novel, Fahrenheit 451, describing a future where books are banned altogether and "firemen" hunt down and burn any that are found. And while parallels between the India of today and Bradbury’s vision are a dime a dozen, what’s interesting are the striking similarities between the character of Captain Beatty, the fire chief who hates books for forcing us to think and Dinanath Batra, chief petitioner in the case which forced Penguin to withdraw The Hindus.

A lot of people have reacted to the news of a book being banned or withdrawn with confusion. Confounded, they ask why anyone would do such a thing. What’s the point?

Good question.

To answer that we would have to delve a bit into the personal history of our modern-day, desi Captain Beatty, Mr Dinanath Batra.

A lot of us might not know off Mr Batra or might have heard of him for the first time during this controversy. Dinanath Batra, though, is a very old player at this game.

Batra is—no prizes whatsoever for guessing—a member of the RSS. And not an ordinary member, mind you. He heads the Vidya Bharati Akhil Bharatiya Shiksha Sansthan, the educational arm of the RSS. As per its own statistics, the organisation runs over 13 thousand school in almost 600 hundred districts across India.

Apart from his pioneering and thorough work in setting up these school which, as per Vidya Bharati’s website, would act as an alternative to “Christian convent-schools” and spread education “which has its roots in Hindutva”, Batra first hit the headlines approximately a decade back when the RSS’ political arm, the BJP was in power.

When the BJP took power in 1999 they came in with a clear agenda with regard to education: saffronise it. In this endeavour, Batra led the vanguard, attacking history textbooks authored by Romila Thapar, RS Sharma, Satish Chandra and Arjun Dev for being “against Indian culture”. In a book edited by Mr Batra, called The Enemies of Indianisation: The Children of Marx, Macaulay and Madarsa one can find an article listing 41 "distortions" in the NCERT books. As luck would have it, the NCERT director at the time, JS Rajput was a contributor to the book as well. And, of course, the education ministry was headed by dyed-in-the-wool swayamsevak, Murli Manohar Joshi. As a result, so impressed was the BJP government with this book and its “distortions” that it took notice of them and proceeded to act. On the orders of the Central Board of Secondary Education a number of “offensive” passages were deleted from NCERT textbooks.

Flush with victory, our man, Mr Batra explained these deletions with some impeccable logic: ‘Jesus Christ was a najayaz (illegitimate) child of Mary but in Europe they don’t teach that. Instead, they call her Mother Mary and say she is a virgin’.

Right, then.

After tackling this issue and getting the BJP government to bend to his demand, Mr Batra shifted his attention to a universally acknowledged problem: the presence of sex education. In a country where overpopulation and STDs are major problems, Mr Batra has threatened a massive agitation against sex education and warned of an “an attempt to impart sex-education through pornography, radio and television”.

It is little wonder that in the petition submitted against The Hindus by Mr Batra, one of his charges is that the book’s approach to “Hindu scriptures has been sexual“ something the petition tries to explain by claiming that Doniger’s “approach is that of a woman hungry of sex”.

Now someone being a raving crank is hardly front page news. God knows there are enough of them everywhere. What is disconcerting is the level of power a person of his views enjoys within an organisation such as the RSS. Although, again, that in itself is nothing particularly surprising. Given that the RSS considers gentlemen like Golwalkar to be thoughtleaders, the real surprise would be if the organisation could ever produce a person who can think straight.  Antediluvian ideologues such as the ones Batra holds, I dare say, are the RSS norm rather than the exception.

The scary, dystopic bit though is that these crank and fundamentalists have been given access to the highest levels of political power. Batra, a person who thinks Doniger is wrong because her approach is a symptom of her “hunger for sex”, was a person who drove thinking for the education ministry on what they should or should not include in textbooks that would shape the minds of millions of children across the country.

And of course, Batra is small fry really. Our main opposition party and one that would, in all probability, hold the reigns of the next federal government is controlled structurally to a large extent by the RSS and is staffed almost completely by people who have gone through and have had their worldview shaped by the RSS.

Somehow, one gets the feeling that this book “withdrawal” is just a trailer. Picture to abhi baqi hai, mere dost.

A Short History of the Blasphemy Law Used Against Wendy Doniger And Why it Must Go

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The main stick used by Dinanth Batra to silence Wendy Doniger was a law called Section 295 (A) of the IPC.

I have a piece up on Scroll.in which goes back to 1920s Lahore and explores the history of how this blasphemy law came about [link].

P.S: Have you checked out Tarikh Par Tarikh?

New History Blog Up

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One of the most enduring trends in business is that when an industry matures, it reverses the process of vertical integration. So, when the PC industry was young, a company like IBM did everything: made the processors, RAM, wrote the software and applications and marketed its PCs to consumers.

Then deverticalisation happened: Intel took over processor manufacture, Windows made your OS, a whole host of people made your applications and it was marketed by Dell.

I believe the blogging industry is at a deverticalisation cusp as well.

So, to take advantage of this market opportunity, I'm starting a pure-play history blog called Tarikh Par Tarikh. My first post A Trip to Bijapur with Shivaji and Afzal Khan is up.

Go check it out history geeks [link]

Dedh Ishqiya and Urdu in India Today

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First published in NewsYaps

In a riotously funny scene from recently released comic thriller Dedh Ishqiya, Jaan Mohammad (played by Vijay Raaz) aggressively threatens a very drunk Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) to leave town so that he can win the hand of the beautiful Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit). In a twist typical of the film, fist fights and gun brandishing suddenly give way to poetry, as Khalujaan picks up the word “wādā” (promise) used by Jaan and starts taunting him using a sher. A gangster by profession and somewhat removed from the world of poetry, Jaan retorts as best he can by racking his brains and coming up with the only sher he knows on “wādā. This change of playing field from violence to poetry, though, can only end badly for Jaan. His verse induces derisive laughter from Khalujaan who then points out that Jaan’s original sher spoke of “bādā” (wine) and not “wādā” at all. Jaan just confused the two rhyming words.

It is credit to the competence of director Abhishek Chaubey that the Bombay theatre I was in found the wordplay funny and laughed along with Khalu, in spite of the fact that very few would have been able to point out Jaan’s mistake themselves. Anupama Chopra, movie critic for the Hindustan Times, though, might have empathised more with Jaan and his struggles with High Urdu. While generally praising the film, she did end her review with one small regret: “I also struggled with the Urdu,” she said. “It was melodious but I wish I understood more of it.”

This frank admission, and the fact that Dedh Ishqiya is the only Bollywood film I’ve ever seen with English subtitles, contains within it some stark irony for an industry which, it could be said, was born into Urdu. As Mukul Kesavan has pointed out, Bollywood with its fantasy, musicals and location (Bombay) was an almost direct successor to Parsi theatre. And like the theatre, the new film industry adopted Urdu, given that it was the only language at the time which had any sort of pan-national appeal. To churn out words for this new industry, were recruited large numbers of Urdu writers and poets from North India. Bollywood’s Golden Age from the 40s to the 60s was studded with Urdudāns such as Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayuni and, most relevant to this movie, Ismat Chughtai. Lihāf (Quilt), Chughtai’s story of lesbian love between a begum and her maid, forms one of the principal subplots within Dedh Ishqiya. The movie itself has a subtle hat tip to this sourcein the scene where Khalujaan and Babban have been tied up by Para and Muniya (Huma Qureshi). As the shadows of the two woman making love flit across the screen—in itself a symbol from Lihāf—Khalujaan remarks impishly to Babban, “thand lag rahī hai? Lihāf māng le!” (Feeling cold? Ask for a quilt).

To grant Chopra her limited point, the language of Dedh Ishqiya is particularly “high” for the average film of today. But go back just 50 years, and you would find a very similar linguistic standard prevalent in the industry, especially in the music. Wonder how a film reviewer reconciles her job as a critic when a film of just 50 years back would be inaccessible to her. But then in an industry where Katrina Kaif, a person who plays all her roles with a thick British accent, is the dominant star maybe Chopra is doing all right. And of course, there is the point that Chopra would hardly be alone. Whatever be the origins of Bollywood, the fact is that a very large majority of Indians would be unable to understand the sort of High Urdu that the movie uses—it’s not for nothing that the film carried English subtitles.

In a mark of the intelligence of the film though, one of the themes of Dedh Ishqiya is this very hollowness of Urdu in India today. Urdu started life as a standardised register of the local language of Delhi. As SR Faruqi points out in his book Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, “Urdu” itself is a metonym for the city of Delhi. The name “Urdu”, though, is very recent and the language has variously been called Hindvi/Gujri/Rekhta/Dakhani and even Hindi; as late as the early 20th century, the words “Hindi” and “Urdu” were being used interchangeably.

The development of Urdu as an elite language though was a rather late development in the history of North India. Throughout the medieval period, Persian had been the region’s lingua franca and official language. In fact it was so ingrained in India that when the British proposed to do away with Persian in 1839, 500 citizens from Dhaka, split almost equally amongst Hindu and Muslim, vigorously petitioned the government to desist from such a foolish move. In spite of this, the British did replace Persian and, in North India, introduced Urdu in its place as an official language. Unfortunately, the legacy of Farsi was less easy to shake off. The Urdu that took root in the offices of the Raj was corpulently Persianised. This was maybe a deliberate tactic by the clerks—mostly upper class Muslims, Kayasths, Kashmiri Brahmins and Khatris—who controlled the language and profited from the fact that the general populace was totally dependent on them for something as simple as comprehension. In many ways, this attitude was not dissimilar to that of the current Anglophone class which break out into paroxysms every time anyone so much as talks of replacing English with the local languages of each state.

As a reaction, the rural classes—who were mostly Hindu—championed the cause of Nagari using organisation such as the Nagari Pracharini Sabha (of Banaras) and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (of Allahabad), both founded at the turn of the century. In this way, the origins of modern Hindi were utilitarian and commonsensical—it aimed to simplify Urdu. Unfortunately, this straightforward matter of language, as we all know, got violently communalised and to top it all, the end result was a register which was de-Persianised, as promised, but also corpulently Sanskritised, leading us all back to square one as far as ease of comprehension goes. Alok Rai calls this new register “school Hindi” and wryly remarks that this leads to children across the length and breadth of North India to valiantly struggle to learn a language which is supposed to be their mother tongue. It is no wonder that all popular culture in India, such as Bollywood, steers clear of either extreme and sticks to the spoken speech of Hindustan.

In 1947 though, the sharp politicisation of the Hindi-Urdu issue meant that this “School Hindi” was adopted as India’s official language. Suddenly, in places like Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, the birthplace of Urdu, Urdu stopped being taught and used in government. This lack of patronage had little effect on the everyday Urdu (or Hindustani) of spoken speech, a large portion of the language which was shared in common with Shudh Hindi. It did however have the effect of severelycurtailing the sphere of influence of High Urdu. A high or literary register without patronage is, by definition, not going to get very far and that is what happened. Post-1947, Urdu atrophied dramatically.

Normally, if this was any other country, High Urdu would have a dignified death much as Ottoman Turkish did when Ataturk changed the official language of Turkey to Modern Turkish. Indeed, since Urdu offers almost no economic benefits, the only people who study it today as a primary language are people who get this education free at madrasas and are too poor to pay for anything else. In India, though, the communal history of Hindi-Urdu, made Urdu one of various meaningless markers of Muslim identity that can be taken out and flogged whenever necessary. As an example, when AAP want to reach out to Muslims in Delhi, it releases an Urdu pamphlet. This is unneeded because firstly, a large number of Delhi Muslims would be unable to read the Urdu script in the first place and secondly, even those that do, will almost certainly read the Devanagri script better or, at least, just as well. If all AAP wanted to do was to communicate with Muslims, a Hindi pamphlet would have done a much better job. And of course, this was just a minor example. Governments have, for decades, used the “Muslim” symbolism of Urdu—a sort of internal Orientalism if you will—to great effect employing it as a diversionary tactic to get away with non-performance on rather more pressing issues such as health or sanitation.

Given that a majority of its characters are Muslims, Dedh Ishqiya might be classified as a modern “Muslim social”. True to its genre, the film does explore the stereotypical elements of elite Indo-Islamic culture. Dedh Ishqiya has havelīs, nawābs and begums, flowing sherwanīs and, of course, stars High Urdu. Unlike a traditional Muslim Social such as Umrao Jaan or Pakeezah (which would have High Urdu through and through), the movie functions on multiple planes of language. At the almost surrealistic mushairā-cum-swayamwar that Begum Para holds to choose a suitor for herself, the most mellifluous Urdu is spoken and, indeed, Chaubey and Bhardwaj take advantage of the register to produce some crackling repartee and wit. Things though start unravelling in the character of Jaan Mohammed, a local gangster looking to gentrify himself by marrying a begum. Respectability though needs to be earned and before he gets to become a nawāb he’ll have to get the language right.

Jaan’s battles with Urdu lead to some curious results. Throughout the movie he uses some high vocabulary (“shamshīr” for “talwār” and “gauhar” for ”hīre-motī”/) but slips up on the simplest of Urdu words, mispronouncing “Ishq” as “Issak” or “shart” as “sart”. And not only Jaan, for all the other characters, this High Urdu is just a mask put on to impress. Khalujaan, who is otherwise a talented poet, talks to his closest friend Babban in their common earthy register of Bhopali Urdu. The one time he does put on airs as a fake nawāb, Babban tells him rather plainly that “tumhārī sārī nawābīyat hai nā, picchwāde main ghusaid doongā” (I’ll stuff your airs up your ass). And when right towards the end of the movie, Jaan Mohammad despotically orders Para and Khalujaan to dance for him, one of his flunkies pipes up to complain, “Yeh itne dinon se ghazlein-wazlein sun ke nā badhazmī sī hoga’ī hai, sāli. Inse item number karwāte hain.” (I’m tired of all this high-falutin’ poetry. Let’s get them to do some item numbers).

This sort of linguistic meta-commentary is rare in Bollywood (Chupke Chupke is one exception which comes to mind), which is odd given how integral language is to the art of cinema. But Dedh Ishqiya does take a shot at it and skilfully uses the nuances of language to explore different shades of the story as well as make a larger point about the state of Urdu in India today. And that is just one the many reasons which make the movie a treat to watch.

A related post on the language Bollywood uses can be found here.
If this is the sort of thing that interests you, all posts filed under language can be found here.

Which Calendar are You?

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First published on NewsYaps

This New Year and the celebration around it reminds me of some rather contrarian graffiti outside my engineering college in Ranchi from many moons ago. It read, in bold, angry crimson Devanagri letters, “Angrezi saal hataao” (or something to that effect, at any rate).

That was all there was: a three-word angry rant. There was no real solution. The protester did not bother telling us what he wanted in place of this Gregorian calendar he so disliked. Did he want to go back to Bengali Calendar that was in place in Jharkhand before the “Angrezi Saal” became popular? The calendar was introduced by Akbar as a tax collection tool and did a wonderful job of helping him siphon of revenue from the rich lands of Greater Bengal to the imperial capital of Agra. To Akbar’s credit the calendar still does a wonderful job of telling Calcuttans exactly when Durga Pujo is to be held, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad. But maybe the megalomania inherent in the calendar—its year 1 is dated from Akbar’s coronation—might have put off our local graffiti artist. He seems a bit of nonconformist, really.

So then do we go back even further into Mughal history to the Hijri or Islamic calendar? It is probably the only purely lunar calendar still in use which gives the whole exercise a wonderful air of surprise since months no longer confirm to seasons. Some years, Ramzan might fall in the winter, making the dawn-to-dusk fast easier and shorter. Some years, during the summer, making thirst a major problem and the wait for sunset never ending. Unfortunately, what is ‘surprise’ to the optimist is ‘inaccuracy’ to the glass-half-empty sort. Due to its nonconformity to the solar calendar and consequently, stuff like harvests and seasons, most places on the globe, even Islamic countries, have traditionally not used it as a civil calendar.

But our search for calendars in a land as diverse as India would be a short one. India has no less than 30 traditional calendars (the most popular one being the Vikram Samvat which is still used widely as a Hindu liturgical calendar in North India). Once upon a time they were used for purposes both religious and secular but in today’s godless times, most of them have been relegated to setting festival dates. This multiplicity of calendars was sought to be remedied after Independence by Nehru using a by now predictable “scientific approach”. But fighting the forces of time and history is not easy and for that the Government of India had to unsheathe its most powerful weapon: the committee. The Calendar Reform Committee appointed by the Government of India in 1952 and was headed by a person no less than Meghnad Saha. All of this resulted in something called the Indian National Calendar which you’ve probably never heard of. Not to worry—neither has anyone else.Science is all very fine but India, after trying out Hindu and Islamic calendars, wanted a Christian calendar not some anodyne “science” calendar. Try as Nehru might, India was going to go for the Gregorian calendar.

The popular perception of the Gregorian calendar as a “Christian” calendar, though, is a bit of a misnomer—the origins of the calendar are more imperial than religious since it is itself a modification of the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Ceasar. Inaccuracies in the Julian calendar though meant that Christian festivals like Easter were veering dangerously off course, a fact that much alarmed the Catholic Church. The Julian calendar was reformed in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII leading to, you guessed it, the Gregorian calendar. While an obvious improvement over the earlier Julian calendar,Protestants were suspicious of this new innovation as a plot to convert them to Catholicism(a variant of this conversion technique has been adopted by companies such as Pirelli and Kingfisher whose calendars have some very staunch devotees). Due to this apprehension it took almost two centuries for the Protestant British to adopt it by which time things had really gotten out of hand with the inaccurate Julian calendar. As a correction it was decided to knock out 11 whole days from the Julian calendar as Britain update itself to the Gregorian one. As a result, in the year 1752, the 2nd September was not followed by the 3rd of the month but by the 14thof September—one of my personal favourites, when it comes to odd facts.

In spite of this minor hiccup, the Gregorian calendar was remarkably accurate, producing an error of only a day in about 3,000 years, with respect to the solar year. Pretty good for the average Joe. And of course, once this had been adopted by the British Empire,it was just a matter of time, some brutal colonisation and Empire before almost the entire world (Ranchi included) had adopted it.

All that didn’t impress our graffiti artist though, for whom this calendar business was strong enough motivation to whip out his can of paint and begin painting. But for the rest of you who don’t mind Pope Gregory’s invention, have a great 2014.

The Future Language of India

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First published on NewsYaps

In 1916, the Mahatma spoke in Banaras Hindu University on the question of English. He said:

“I am hoping that this University will see to it that the youths who come to it will receive their instruction through the medium of their vernaculars. Our languages are the reflection of ourselves, and if you tell me that our languages are too poor to express the best thoughts, then say that the sooner we are wiped out of existence the better for us. Is there a man who dreams that English can ever become the national language of India? Why this handicap on the nation? Just consider for one moment what an unequal race our lads have to run with every English lad.”

I am unaware of the reaction to Gandhi’s confident claim expressing incredulousness at any Indian ever wanting English to be the national language. But the reaction to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s much more modest proposal that MPs in Parliament speak in Indian languages was met with a rather solid wave of disapproval. One headline from a piece published in the Mint called Mulayam “notoriously regressive” and attacked him for keeping “his people impoverished and vote-banked” (when nouns are being verbed you know things have gotten serious). The Times of India called the proposal “absurd” and opined that it leaked of “political hypocrisy”. The Indian Express, in an editorial, characterised this proposal as a “march to the past” and connected this with the overall failure of the SP government in UP.

That Mulayam’s proposal is impractical and will hardly change a thing is something which is obvious. In fact, this is a minor demand as far as he is concerned; in earlier times, Netaji had even demanded the banning of English from the country overall, the success of which can be gauged by having a look at the language this very write-up uses.

That being said, the reaction to this is almost as silly as the proposal in the first place. What our Anglophone class doesn’t realise is that there are large segments of the country which do have grievances with the heaven-born status that the language enjoys and it is this sentiment that Mulayam seeks to channel.

English as a glass ceiling

In a TV debate about this matter, Madhukar Jaitley of the SP rubbished claims to this being a regressive move and claimed that what was wrong was that you needed to know English—a language spoke by less than 10% of the country—to get a white-collar job. This is a point that is tough to argue with. India, burdened with the worst of colonialism and a particularly elitist culture, genuflects to English as few countries do. English, in India, is effectively a glass ceiling. You might be the smartest person out there for the job, but if you’re “Hindi-medium” then, well, you might as well forget it.

This extreme position that English occupies is something that a lot of the people who are befuddled by Mulayam’s stance don’t get. Yes, “we should love all languages” as Derek O’Brien condescendingly reminds us, but that’s easier said than done when this particular language is one of the major things that stands between you and social advancement. This is a point that many people who extol the English-is-global-language point don’t get. To quote from Sandipan Deb’s piece in Mint:

“Whether we like it or not—and Mulayam can have long discussions with Germans or Russians or Arabs about it through English interpreters—English is our planet’s principle medium of both communication and commerce... The Chinese, for instance, recognize that and have been pouring in enormous resources to teach their children the language.”

This is true. English is the principal medium of communication globally and if you wanted to have an international conversation, you would have to use English. But what about if each of these countries wanted to have an intra-national conversation? Would an Egyptian speak to an Egyptian in English? And Germany already follows Mulayam’s advice of using its native language in its legislatures. If Sandipan really did want to copy what the Germans, Arabs and Chinese were doing, he’d pretty much be agreeing with Mulayam. The point is simple: let us not confuse a global lingua franca—a link language—with our internal languages of business and governance. As far as the latter is concerned, Mulayam, the Germans, the Arabs, the Russians, the Chinese and almost every nation on earth agrees that a native language should be used. As for English being used as a global lingua franca, no one really disagrees with that, or should not at the very least. But as anyone who has observed India would know, English has gone far beyond being just a utilitarian global lingua franca and occupies a position of power today in India. If English was actually just a lingua franca, it would be absent in linguistically uniform places such as Delhi or not find a place in Bombay where, since it is understood by so few people, it would do a horrible job of acting as a lingua franca.

So why is English still India’s lingua franca?

Talk of lingua franca though brings us to another issue: India’s diversity. Not only was Sandipan’s comparison to Germany wrong because it ended up supporting Mulayam’s point, but it was also wrong because India is wildly multilingual unlike Germany. Not only does India need a lingua franca to communicate with other countries, its regions also need one to talk to other regions of India.

Here the contention of the Hindiwallahs is that since Hindi is already spoken by such a vast number of Indians (~33% speak it as their native tongue as per the 2001 census) it is the natural choice as a national language. Unfortunately, learning a new language is not a simple first-past-the-post exercise. For the huge number of non-Hindi speakers, learning a new language has to confer commiserate economic and social benefits for them to take the time and effort to learn it. Hindi clearly did not offer that in 1947. Yet Hindi was sought to be imposed, by fiat almost, on non-Hindi speakers. Almost as a back lash, non-Hindi speakers stuck all the more to English. As Anna Durai, put it across rather eloquently: “Why should Hindi be our national language? Is it because the majority speak Hindi? Then why is the Peacock our national bird and not the crow despite the latter being the most numerous?”

What is odd is that even after 66 years of Hindi promotion by the Centre, it has been unable to create enough critical mass for Hindi. This can be explained maybe by the fact that the Hindi promoted by the Centre is hardly even spoken by the 33% who label themselves as “Hindi speakers”. Our census, when it comes to Hindi is a bit of a joke. In 1881, for example, the census recorded 98% of UPites to be ‘Hindustani’ speakers. By 1951 that number had dropped to 10% and by 1961 to 0.1%! The truth of the matter is that Hindi, even in the Hindi heartland is an urban language and the rural areas speak a variety of languages such as Avadhi, Braj or what have you. To further weaken the cause, the Hindi that the Centre promotes is itself far removed from the urban Hindi of, say, Delhi, Lucknow or Kanpur, being highly Sanskritised and far removed from common speech. It’s a bit like the British Government promoting Shakespearean English today. Thus you have the extremely odd sight of signs in government offices in Patna or Lucknow which advertise and promote Hindi. I know off no other major language in the world which needs to be advertised to its own native speakers.

Given these deficiencies, Hindi is far from established in its own heartland, thus it’s not surprise that it hasn’t been able to take over the country. The elites prefer to stick to English and it remains the language of aspiration.

The Future

So is this the way it’s going to be? Is the rise and rise of English a fait accompli? It’s hard to imagine the decline of a language seemingly as entrenched as English. But the same could maybe have been said about Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in India: both languages once were widespread and powerful but lie dead today.

Personally, I don’t think that English has too bright a future in India as a popular language. English is spoken by too thin a patina of the Indian population to ever be a true lingua franca except amongst the elite. In spite of the bungling and chauvinism by the Hindiwallahs, this lingua franca is still to be Hindi. Indeed, if we consider the spread of Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani over the past 400 years, it’s been nothing short of remarkable. What started out as the language of Delhi and a tiny sliver of Western Uttar Pradesh is now understood, at least at some basic level, from Peshawar in West to Calcutta in the East and from Srinagar in the North to Bangalore in South.  In the 19^th century, this was initially driven by the adoption of Urdu by the North Indian elite and the British Raj. The real fillip, though, came when the Bombay film industry, located far away from the Hindi heartland in Maratha country, adopted the simple spoken form of Hindi-Urdu as their language. If today the arcane register propagated by the Indian government drives people away, the shine and glamour of Bollywood has made Hindi appealing to large sections of the Indian population. This engine has driven the penetration of Hindi into far off regions like Kerala and rural Bengal. In fact, on a visit to Bangladesh, I found that while most couldn’t speak Hindi all that well, years of Bollywood had ensured that they understood the language just fine.

Of course, official languages require more than the entertainment industry. But as a popular language, the way things stand, Mulayam can take heart from the fact that Hindi has a far greater chance of becoming India’s lingua franca than English does.

Campa Cola Shows the Inordinate Power of the Middle Class in India Today

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First published on NewsYaps on 20 November 2013

So I’m sitting there, all of 8 years old, listening to the conversation of a gaggle of aunts and uncles at a cousin’s birthday party. The topic revolves around the perfidy of maid servants, always a popular topic at our family gatherings.

“And that’s it. She just left. Without any notice, no nothing. And after all that I’d done for her,” an aunt complained bitterly about a recent maid in much the same vein as one would about a bad break-up.

“These people are like that only, baba. No matter how much you do for them, it’s not enough. They know they can just skip to a different job whenever they want. They know that and take advantage of this fact,” chimed in an uncle sympathetically

“So true. Arre, it’s only us, the middle class, which has these problems. The rich, of course, have their own lives. And the poor, they don’t care. It’s us who get our backs broken,” said another aunt, following this up with an appropriate sigh.

This middle class lament, that they’re the only class with goodness, filled to the brim with virtues such as honesty, hard-work and diligence is rather common. Apart from this, another recurring theme is a narrative of victimisation: society, as well as the government, is out to get us and it’s only us and our hard-work that keeps us afloat.

Of course, like most self-portraits, there are large inaccuracies in how the middle class sees itself.  The exaggeration starts with the name itself. The middle class (defined liberally as those with an income in excess of 3.4 lakh per annum) actually occupies the top 15% of the country in terms of income. Looking at it mathematically, “upper class” would be a far more accurate name for this class of white-collar workers.

The other untruth of course, is this narrative of victimisation. This might seem like an obvious point—after all which state can victimise its richest, most powerful citizens?  Yet this narrative exists.  This was most recently seen in the Campa Cola Compound episode. Milind Deora’s letter to Sonia Gandhi captures much of this victimisation complex. The letter starts off with describing the residents as “law abiding middle class families” and then goes on to the blame the “builder/Corporation nexus” for this whole issue.

Of course, rather than abiding by the law, the residents were well aware of the fact that they were purchasing illegal flats. In February 2013, the Supreme Court itself stated that, “Although the members of the housing societies knew that the construction had been raised in violation of the sanctioned plan and permission for occupation of the buildings had not been issued by the competent authority, a large number of them occupied the illegally constructed buildings. ”

Most crucially though, rather than victimising the residents, the state went out of its way to help. In spite of the obvious illegality of the compound, so strong was the political class’ support that it bordered on the surreal. The Shiv Sena threatened to hit the streets against the demolition squad of the Shiv Sena controlled BMC, the Congress MP from South Mumbai, Milind Deora threatened Congress CM Prithviraj Chavan if action was not taken to stop the demolition and, of course, the cherry on the cake, the Supreme Court, taking suo moto cognisance of media reports, stayed its own demolition order.

Victimisation? Hardly.

To further make the case, the state has been far harsher with slums in Bombay, demolishing them at will.  The names of Golibar, Sion Koliwada, Ramnagar, Ambedkar Nagar and Ambujwadi come to mind where the residents were just as guilty/innocent as those in Campa Cola. But, of course, they had no media backing and had to go.

Following Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of bias in news, the English media pushes the interests of the middle class in order to keep up its funding which comes mainly via advertisements. Since its readers and the people who consume the advertisements are middle class folks, speaking up for their interests becomes mandatory for the English media. This media, thus, acts as a massive middle class pressure group.

Campa Cola is just one example amongst many of this phenomenon. This is the same mechanism at work which raises such a huge din when LPG prices are raised. Approximately 20% of India uses LPG and they are usually the richest 20% of India. Yet, the government subsidises this upper class and every small increase in prices is met with a strong push back led again by the media.

An even more egregious instance of this is the case of the BRT in Delhi. Multiple surveys have shown that the BRT in Delhi is actually hugely popular with bus riders, an overwhelming majority of the city’s population. Yet, the ruckus created by the English media has made it appear as if the BRT is a failure when the only people who think so are the tiny number of people who own private cars (for whom the roads have become more congested). So strong is this pressure that at one time the Supreme Court even cancelled the BRT system and the Sheila Dixit government has been forced to go slow on expanding the project.

In recent years, there has been a popular narrative of the middle class disengaging from democracy because, or so they moan and complain, there is no space for them here. The system is castigated loudly for being populist and politicians berated for pandering to "vote banks" (as if politicians hankering after votes in a democracy is just the worst abomination ever). Of course, as Campa Cola has most recently shown, vote banks are not the only things which push the levers of power. Far from being the frail little things the middle class like to cast themselves as, using their megaphone, the English media, they wield enormous power and influence in India; far more than the little power vote banks wield, in fact, as the sharp contrast between the treatment meted out to Campa Cola and slums of Bombay show. And as this middle class grows in size, its political influence can only get larger—something Milind Deora and the Shiv Sena seem to have grasped in this episode. This increased clout should certainly lead to interesting changes in the way politics is conducted in our country.