Hindi is not alien to Tamil Nadu (2025)

The public response evoked by the DMK government’s protests against the National Education Policy, 2020 (NEP) is nothing compared to the mass anti-Hindi protests earlier. Even in 1986, the anti-Navodaya school agitations led to 21 self-immolations and 20,000 arrests. The DMK has picked the wrong policy in a desperate bid to revive that sentiment. After all, the NEP does not even mention Hindi in its language policy. It only talks of the benefits of multilingualism. But the centrepiece of the major anti-Hindi agitation in the late 1960s was also multilingualism. It is reported that Tamil Nadu had the highest enrolment of students with the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha among southern states in recent times. While peoples’ attitudes may be changing, the Dravidian resistance is very much alive.

Gandhi’s dream

In 1903, Gandhi brought out Indian Opinion in South Africa to uphold the rights of Indians. Notably, it used to be published in four languages — Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and English. Some of his closest followers and associates in the Natal Satyagraha were Tamils. His fondness and respect for the language and people of Tamil Nadu need no mention. After returning to India, he gave a call for making Hindi the national language. In later years, he may have conceded that status to Hindustani. The demand for a national language did not only emanate as a “Hindutva” ploy for uniformity. In fact, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Jana Sangh, was highly cautious while endorsing Hindi as the official language in the Constituent Assembly. While decentralised polity meant everything to him, he also wanted a national language. It is easy to be misled to see this as a contradiction in Gandhi. Both the pragmatic and philosophical sides of Gandhi were at play. A village-centred and diverse society can rise up to the challenges of modern times only if its members shed parochial tendencies and develop a sense of brotherhood across local communities. During Gandhi’s time, the challenge was carrying forward the freedom struggle. He saw the learning of another language as a sacrifice that the Tamils had to make for the nation and was equally clear that this sacrifice should not come at any cost to the growth of Tamil itself. One can also see in Gandhi’s stand the same absence of linguistic antagonism as when Swati Thirunal wrote songs in Hindi and Raja Serfoji composed operas in Tamil.

It is also important to note that Gandhi did not call for a state-imposed language policy. In 1918, he issued an appeal for six Tamil and Telugu youths to come forward and learn Hindi and propagate the language in the Madras Presidency. This led to the formation of the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, an organisation of volunteers, which has endured violent attacks and hostile politics over the decades.

Ideas for reform

If one looks at the debates surrounding language policy in the past decades, one finds interesting suggestions that do not seem to attract attention nowadays. It was not only the Congress leaders of Tamil Nadu who backed the cause of a national language. Nationalist leader Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar also wanted Hindustani as the national language but with Roman script. The rationale for this combination is explained by scholar and former Union education minister V K R V Rao in an article: “English as a language will continue to be learnt even if it is not the official language; the Roman script will therefore have to be learnt by a growing number of the people. If Hindi could also be learnt in the Roman script and official documents and other material made available in this script, one major obstacle to the learning of Hindi by the non-Hindi regions would have been removed.” He added, “Moreover the country has had considerable experience in teaching Hindi through the Roman script in its defence forces and by all accounts no difficulty has been experienced in the process.”

Another suggestion is found in the Constitution itself, in one of those many articles that have remained in obscurity. Article 351 directs the Union to develop Hindi “…by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule.” Rao explains that for this, “what we need is a corps of Hindi writers whose mother tongue is not Hindi and who are equally proficient in both their own languages and in Hindi”. Through their efforts, the idioms and styles of other languages, including Tamil, can be introduced into Hindi. Initiatives like this cannot happen without substantial effort by the government.

The government should concentrate on studying and implementing such suggestions, where feasible, through autonomous bodies like the Kendriya Hindi Sansthan, and encourage more voluntary activities for the spread of Hindi. The change has to happen through consent for divisive politics to take a back seat. One only has to remember Mookerjee’s chiding of the pro-Hindi lobby in the Constituent Assembly: “If the protagonists of Hindi will pardon me for saying so, had they not been perhaps so aggressive in their demands and enforcement of Hindi, they would have got whatever they wanted, perhaps more than what they expected, by spontaneous and willing cooperation of the entire population of India.”

The writer is a lawyer in the Madras High Court