Nehru’s Linguistic Cosmopolitanism | Arup Kumar Sen

Scholars in India and abroad have explored different dimensions of statecraft of Jawaharlal Nehru, the eminent nationalist leader and first prime minister of independent India. However, his reflections on language and journey through the “post-Independence linguistic battlegrounds” are relatively unexplored areas of research. Robert D. King’s book, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997), is a rare exception in this regard. King’s central argument in the book is put forward in the final chapter: “Nehru has not been given high marks for his handling of the language problems India faced during his stewardship of its affairs, which lasted from the achievement of independence in 1947 to his death in 1964. I myself am not in the least disposed to criticize him in this…He saw deeply into the nature of language and drew upon what he saw in both his private and public personae. The ultimate beneficiary of his linguistic wisdom was India and its people with whom he was mystically attached.”

The following are some insightful arguments as well as facts put forward by Robert D. King in support of his claims.

King has incorporated in his book the “most remarkable” speech delivered by Nehru on the subject of language in the context of the Official Language Bill placed before the Lok Sabha and debated in the early months of 1963. Nehru stated: “Urdu is a dynamic language…Hindi will get vitality from Urdu while retaining its own genius and nature. Urdu is vital…Urdu itself is an amalgam, a synthesis of various languages; it is about 75-80 per cent Hindi and about 25 per cent of the words come from other languages (such as) Persian, Arabic and Turkish. It is quite clear that when two languages come together, they strengthen each other. The idea of pulling down a language and thinking that your language will profit by it is utterly wrong.”

King clarified the context of Nehru’s position in this speech: “This is a thinly disguised criticism of the narrowness of Hindi zealots and hearkens back, as so much in this speech does, to Nehru’s experiences of the mid-1930s when he was criticized by Hindi writers and journalists for his cosmopolitan outlook on language and, in particular, for his defence of Urdu.”

King drew our attention to the cultural-political roots of Nehru’s position on the Hindi-Urdu controversy: “Nehru was always proud of his own family’s legacy of Persian and Urdu from their Kashmiri past…Nehru was always more critical of Hindi writers than those writing in Urdu, but this was both a linguistic and literary appraisal and a political tactic. We recall that Nehru usually referred to the form of the language he spoke as Urdu rather than Hindi, and his Allahabad-based Hindustani would have had more Persianisms in it than the Hindi of, say, Varanasi. In truth, ‘Urdu’ was for Nehru both a language and an icon: a symbol of Hindu-Muslim harmony and a secular India in which religion was no longer an issue men would die for.”

Robert D. King’s book has explored other dimensions of Nehru’s tough journey through the “linguistic battlegrounds” in independent India.

In the third decade of the 21st century, Nehruvian paradigm of nation building has been virulently attacked by the right-wing forces under the BJP regime. Those of us who do not subscribe to the Nehruvian paradigm of development should not lose sight of his acumen and cosmopolitan outlook reflected in his interventions in the contentious language politics of independent India.