The essentials
India is a land of many languages, and the question of a national language was one of the most bitterly debated issues in the Assembly. By the 1930s the Congress had accepted that Hindustani should be the national language. Mahatma Gandhi felt that everyone should speak a language the common people could easily understand. Hindustani, a blend of Hindi and Urdu, was a popular language of a large section of the people, and it had been enriched by interaction between different cultures. Gandhi saw it as a language that could bind Hindus and Muslims, and people of the north and south.
From the end of the nineteenth century, however, Hindustani was gradually changing. As communal conflicts deepened, Hindi and Urdu grew apart: Hindi was sanskritised and Urdu became more persianised.
Key points
- R.V. Dhulekar, a Congressman from the United Provinces, made an aggressive plea that Hindi be used as the language of constitution-making, causing an uproar.
- The Language Committee of the Assembly proposed a compromise: Hindi in the Devanagari script would be the official language, but the transition to Hindi would be gradual. For the first fifteen years, English would continue to be used for official purposes. Each province could choose one regional language for official work within the province.
- Shrimati G. Durgabai from Madras described how people in the south feared that the propaganda for Hindi would undermine provincial languages.
- Members from the south saw the aggressive push for Hindi as a threat; the compromise sought to balance national unity with linguistic diversity.
- The Language Committee used the term "official language", not "national language".
Common mistakes
- Gandhi supported Hindustani, not a highly sanskritised Hindi.