A seeming new thirst for Hindi
Audiences are increasingly choosing their native tongue
By Randeep Ramesh

For two decades, evening commuters have come to sip coppery brown tea at Laxman Rao’s roadside stall on a busy South Delhi main road, to the sound of the blaring horns of passing traffic. But in recent years, customers come not for sugary chai but for a taste of Mr. Rao’s. bittersweet words.

He is the author of 18 novels, plays and political essays in Hindi, India’s national language, which is thought to vie with Spanish to be the world’s third most-spoken mother tongue. Like most Hindi novelists he considers writing stories a calling, one he supports with the Rs. 4,000 a month he makes from selling tea. “For 20 years I have made no money from my books.”

But Mr. Rao’s luck, appears to be changing. His novel Ramdas, about a wayward village boy who mends his ways only to drown suddenly, earned him 10 times as much money as he made from selling tea.

He has handed over the running of his stall to his eldest son while he cycles around Delhi’s libraries hawking his work. “I am the writer, the publisher, the salesman now,” says Mr. Rao, 51. “There is a change coming even if I am too old to enjoy it.”

Challenge to English

In the last few years English, which bound together a nation of 800 tongues and dialects and connected India to the outside world, has faced a challenge from native languages. As literacy levels rise in India, there is a palpable shift to a more subcontinental lingua franca and Hindi’s reach is lengthening.

Although it is spoken by half of India’s billion people, its writing is absent in the literary canon. of India, which is dominated by exiles such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. “I do not read these books. They do not talk about the India I know,” says Mr. Rao. “The stories do not mean anything to me or people like me. India lives in villages, small towns, on streets. The authors do not.”

Factual information, as well as fiction is increasingly sold in Hindi. The biggest-selling newspapers in the country are no longer English-language broadsheets but those in Hindi. Nearly 70 per cent of all news broadcasts are in Hindi, less than a decade after Rupert Murdoch presciently chose the language for his Indian TV network.

In publishing

Publishing houses now hope to mirror that success. Penguin India, one of the largest English-language publishers, this year began printing novels in Hindi. In six months it has put out 15 such books, of which four are original titles. Ravi Singh, publisher of Penguin India, says margins are lower but the market is much bigger. “It’s in hundreds of millions of potential readers and we have watched advertising trends slope upwards, so we know people out there are getting richer.”

“Hindi classics”

Mr. Singh says there have always been big-selling “Hindi classics.” He says: “Take Sara Akash, a novel written in the early 20th century about small- town India. It has sold 120,000 copies. But there has been a more recent change, which is a confidence about using Hindi, about not being embarrassed about using it rather than English. People are hungry for Hindi.”

The language debate

The deference to English has long been part of India’s cultural make-up. The language is perceived to bestow intelligence and sophistication on a speaker, but remains the preserve of an elite whose opinions often seem far removed from the concerns of ordinary Indians.

The language debate is ignited periodically in the literary world. In 1997, Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai, declared that Indian writing in English was “proving to be a stronger and more important body of work” than writing in home-grown languages.

“It was typical from someone who does not read and write Hindi,” said Harish Trivedi, Professor of English at Delhi University. What is important about Hindi’s rise, says Prof. Trivedi, is producing stories that Indians can identify with. “Are you interested in Indian indentured labour in Africa? Then read Pahla Girmitiya by Giriraj Kishore. If you want stories of Indian Sikhs in Slough in Enoch Powell’s Britain then read Mahendra Blialla... Novelists who are located in places they write about.”

Pavan Verma, Director-General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, says he is “condemned by privilege.” He added: “People like me are really cultural orphans. Linguistically I was brought up in the British system, albeit one based here. So I was completely educated in English and spoke it while growing up. Although I can read and write Hindi it comes as a learnt language.” Mr. Verma yearns for the day “when Hindi literature has the same popularity as Russian works or Latin American authors.”

(Courtesy: The Hindu)