The slow death of Bhojpuri and Awadhi

Hindi in Devanagari script is the official language of the Indian Union government. According to the 2001 census, 41.03% of the population are Hindi speakers. However, the definition of Hindi, as per the census, is strange. It’s largely a result of the pre-Partition competition between ‘Hindi’ upper-castes and ‘Urdu’ Ashrafs to enlist greater numbers in their favour. People are counted as Hindi speakers even if they don’t call their language “Hindi”. Hindi in the census includes western Hindi (but not Urdu), eastern Hindi, non-Maithili Bihari languages (including Bhojpuri), Pahari languages and Rajasthani languages — even if the speakers did not report their language as ‘Hindi’!

 As as researcher in human vision, I am associated with a project that brings congenitally blind children from the interior villages of Hindustan to Delhi. Many come from UP’s Gonda district. These children are blind from birth and remain almost exclusively at home. They are so poor that they don’t have access to radio/television and are hence exposed mostly to their mother-tongue and not the Hindi in currency in larger towns, schools and government offices. When Delhi natives asked these children questions in Delhi-area Hindi, they hardly understood. The Delhi native’s understanding of the children’s spoken language was worse. Communication became smooth through interpreters — children’s relatives who visited big towns at long distances from their village homes and had some exposure to Bollywood films. The blind children spoke Awadhi. Awadhi speakers are at least 38 million strong, being the world’s 29th largest linguistic community. According to the census, these blind children and the Delhi natives both speak the same language — Hindi. The younger generations of families that used to identify themselves as Awadhi-speakers now claim to be Hindi speakers. Among the top 10 census languages of India, Hindi is the only one whose population proportion has increased every decade for the last four decades.

The biggest casualties are languages now classified as ‘Hindi’ but were not called ‘Hindi’ even 150 years ago. While speakers of non-Hindi languages like Tamil, Bangla, Kannada, etc. have official language status in various states with strong and widespread education infrastructures in those languages, Awadhi, probably the single largest linguistic sub-group within census ‘Hindi’, has no such distinction. This is especially unfortunate for a language that had for centuries produced some of the most widely cherished works of literature that remain alive in the Hindustan region’s grass-roots culture. Ironically, Awadhi comes closest to official recognition in the form of Fiji Hindi, being the language of the indentured labourers from the Awadhi heartland who were shipped to Fiji before Awadhi and Hindi were conflated. Bhojpuri, also classified as ‘Hindi’, has fared slightly better than Awadhi in terms of textbooks and TV channels. Even then these measures are minuscule compared to its size (about 40 million speakers) and does not do justice to its rich long tradition of producing literary works of the highest grade. In Delhi-centric Indian imagination, Bhojpuri speakers are ridiculed as comical, rustic and backward. In the face of continuous official Hindi imposition, the continued survival of Awadhi, Bhojpuri and other people’s languages are a testament to their resilience and the depth of their roots in their speakers’ lives and dreams. But their destruction is happening slowly but surely, following a well-known pattern. It starts with people’s languages being replaced by imposed languages in education, official work and big money commerce. Then it affects all other aspects of life outside one’s home. Finally, it invades homes and communities. The assaulted languages survive in domestic spaces and then become the language of older people and of very intimate emotions. And one day they are gone. A way of living and dreaming disappears. The destruction of a language is a crime against the whole of humanity.

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