AHC: Post-independence India introduces national language

[EternalCynic]

It's somewhat ironic that post-independence India never seriously tried to introduce an indigenous national language, mostly because of its vast diversity. However, unlike former African colonies, India has some degree of pre-colonial collective identity. Therefore, your challenge is to have India adopt a national lingua franca other than English, while its regional language exist as regional languages. Your best bet would probably be a vernacularized version of Sanskrit, a parallel to China's Putonghua, which is a vernacularized version of Classical Chinese.

[Zajir]

Originally Posted by EternalCynic

It's somewhat ironic that post-independence India never seriously tried to introduce an indigenous national language, mostly because of its vast diversity. However, unlike former African colonies, India has some degree of pre-colonial collective identity. Therefore, your challenge is to have India adopt a national lingua franca other than English, while its regional language exist as regional languages. Your best bet would probably be a vernacularized version of Sanskrit, a parallel to China's Putonghua, which is a vernacularized version of Classical Chinese.

Putonghua is based on Beijing dialect of Mandarin, not Classical Chinese as far as I know.
Classical Chinese was essentially only a written language, almost never a spoken one.

Also it was tried to make the offical sanskritised version offical but due to oppositions from southern states (especially Tamil Nadu)

[Ganesha]

Originally Posted by Zajir

Putonghua is based on Beijing dialect of Mandarin, not Classical Chinese as far as I know.
Classical Chinese was essentially only a written language, almost never a spoken one.

Also it was tried to make the offical sanskritised version offical but due to oppositions from southern states (especially Tamil Nadu)

This actually isn't too hard, as Zajir mentions. In OTL, India's 1950 constitution called for the gradual adoption of Hindi as a legislative language, replacing English. This process was supposed to be complete by 1965, but there was significant opposition in the south of India and the plan was abandoned.

If you began the process of using Hindi earlier (say at the first Congress Party meeting in the 1800s), then you could hypothetically get the idea of Hindi as a pan-national language used in opposition to English. However, there's inevitably going to be resistance to the idea of using the lingua franca of North India for the whole country.

Cheers,
Ganesha

[Zajir]

On the other hand If the Congress Party is seen as hindi-chauvinist, the Dravid Nadu movement might become more powerful and perhaps Dravid Nadu or at least Tamil Nadu might become separate from the Indian Union.

[EternalCynic]

Originally Posted by Zajir

Putonghua is based on Beijing dialect of Mandarin, not Classical Chinese as far as I know.
Classical Chinese was essentially only a written language, almost never a spoken one.

Putonghua is based on the Beijing pronunciation of Baihua, which is a vernacularized version of Classical Chinese. Until the 1920s, Classical Chinese was the only official written language.

A better parallel than China would be Indonesia. Bahasa, which is a somewhat artificial version of Malay, totally replaced Dutch as lingua franca in all of Indonesia, including Java which is its core territory.

Also it was tried to make the offical sanskritised version offical but due to oppositions from southern states (especially Tamil Nadu)

That's the problem. Hindi would not work due to opposition in non-Hindi, particularly Dravidian areas. However the entire subcontinent shares Sanskrit as an ancient prestige language. Could an artificially modernized version of Sanskrit be introduced and accepted over the entire subcontinent?

[The Kiat]

I think China's greatest advantage was that written Mandarin wasn't phonetic. A symbol meant the same thing in most languages and dialects. A simplification perhaps, but it made it possible for those who did not share a spoken language to communicate.


Maybe India should just except Dutch as the official language, sort of a way to give London the finger one last time.

[eliphas8]

I honestly doubt India would survive if they pushed Hindi as the national language. Its entirely possible that a Hindi chauvinist government could lead to the secession of the Dravidic and Marathi into their own countries. India already had an incredibly unstable ethno-religious balance, if things are handled poorly then a united India may not survive.

[Dan1988]

Hmm - could it possible to incorporate South Indian (i.e. Tamil, Malayalam) vocabulary into Hindi, so as to make it more pan-Indian?

[Dan1988]

Originally Posted by EternalCynic

Putonghua is based on the Beijing pronunciation of Baihua, which is a vernacularized version of Classical Chinese. Until the 1920s, Classical Chinese was the only official written language.

No - the original form (Guoyu) was based on Beijing Mandarin (or, rather, an élite version of the regionalect), but with semi-classical additions and some cleanup so as to avoid some of the (perceived) less savoury and more "colloquial" bits, of which at least one of them would have been helpful for English speakers (when Pinyin <b, d, g> are unstressed, they are pronounced exactly as the letters indicate and not per standard). Putonghua took that as the starting point, but make it a bit more vernacular by adding in vocabulary from all over the country. All Baihua essentially was at this point was just polished-up written Beijing Mandarin.

[MarshalBraginsky]

Why not ue Sanskrit as the national language? Hindi could be the lingua franca, though Sanskrit could be seen as a recognized language.

[Beedok]

Why not make an artificial language that is a mix of Indo-European and Dravidian styles, maybe with a little bit of Austro-Asiatic thrown in for good measure? Like an Esperanto type thing?

[EternalCynic]

Originally Posted by Dan1988

No - the original form (Guoyu) was based on Beijing Mandarin (or, rather, an élite version of the regionalect), but with semi-classical additions and some cleanup so as to avoid some of the (perceived) less savoury and more "colloquial" bits, of which at least one of them would have been helpful for English speakers (when Pinyin <b, d, g> are unstressed, they are pronounced exactly as the letters indicate and not per standard). Putonghua took that as the starting point, but make it a bit more vernacular by adding in vocabulary from all over the country. All Baihua essentially was at this point was just polished-up written Beijing Mandarin.

This is true, but Baihua was a "spiffied up" version of all the related northern Chinese dialects. A Cantonese or Hokkien speaker who read Baihua out loud would feel awkward. But, at least Baihua could easily be turned into China's modernized Lingua Franca.

India is a whole other story. There isn't even an India-wide trade language similar to Malay in the Indonesian archipelago, which formed the basis for Bahasa which did replace Dutch as lingua franca.

Sanskrit itself would be unwieldy as lingua franca. It would be almost as absurd as the EU imposing Latin as a lingua franca today. The only possible solution would be a vernacularized version of Sanskrit, consciously introduced by the INC and rolled out in schools, government departments, and radio. Hebrew provides an example of an ancient liturgical language becoming the lingua franca of a new state, but India and Israel are not comparable. Especially in their early years.

[Ganesha]

Originally Posted by Dan1988

Hmm - could it possible to incorporate South Indian (i.e. Tamil, Malayalam) vocabulary into Hindi, so as to make it more pan-Indian?

It might be possible, but the fundamental grammar would be different, and South Indians would probably just view it as unsatisfying appeasement rather than actual equality in language.

Originally Posted by MarshalBraginsky

Why not use Sanskrit as the national language? Hindi could be the lingua franca, though Sanskrit could be seen as a recognized language.

Originally Posted by Beedok

Why not make an artificial language that is a mix of Indo-European and Dravidian styles, maybe with a little bit of Austro-Asiatic thrown in for good measure? Like an Esperanto type thing?

Well, using Sanskrit, as EternalCynic pointed out, would be very unwieldy. Sanskrit is an enormously complex language; it has 10 classes of verbs in four groups and over a dozen tenses, three genders, three numbers, eight cases, and two forms for every pronoun.

In addition, only maybe 10,000 people out of 361,000,000 spoke Sanskrit in India in the 1950s. Teaching even the elite how to read and write Sanskrit fluently would be a massive task - not really worth it for a poor state like India with enough problems already.

The same problems are compounded with an artificial language. You would have huge political battles over the construction of the language, it would take time, it would be difficult for everyone to learn, etc. Really, English was the only viable language, ironically.

Cheers,
Ganesha

[EternalCynic]

Originally Posted by Ganesha

Well, using Sanskrit, as EternalCynic pointed out, would be very unwieldy. Sanskrit is an enormously complex language; it has 10 classes of verbs in four groups and over a dozen tenses, three genders, three numbers, eight cases, and two forms for every pronoun.

In addition, only maybe 10,000 people out of 361,000,000 spoke Sanskrit in India in the 1950s. Teaching even the elite how to read and write Sanskrit fluently would be a massive task - not really worth it for a poor state like India with enough problems already.

The same problems are compounded with an artificial language. You would have huge political battles over the construction of the language, it would take time, it would be difficult for everyone to learn, etc. Really, English was the only viable language, ironically.

Cheers,
Ganesha

Is it possible that Gandhi and Nehru, starry-eyed idealists they are, would devote their spare time to constructing this new Sanskrit-derived language and begin using it at INC meetings to make a statement? Then, after independence, there is an elite which is somewhat literate in this new language, which permits it to be adopted in schools, radio, bureaucracy, and so on.

When Israel was founded, very few Jews spoke Hebrew fluently. There was no way to describe anything invented in the past 1900 years. Most Jews already in Palestine, and most Jews who arrived, spoke Yiddish. And Israel itself was under constant existential threat. So from that angle Israel was in a worse situation than India was, to construct a new lingua franca out of an ancient liturgical language.

[Ganesha]

Originally Posted by EternalCynic

Is it possible that Gandhi and Nehru, starry-eyed idealists they are, would devote their spare time to constructing this new Sanskrit-derived language and begin using it at INC meetings to make a statement? Then, after independence, there is an elite which is somewhat literate in this new language, which permits it to be adopted in schools, radio, bureaucracy, and so on.

When Israel was founded, very few Jews spoke Hebrew fluently. There was no way to describe anything invented in the past 1900 years. Most Jews already in Palestine, and most Jews who arrived, spoke Yiddish. And Israel itself was under constant existential threat. So from that angle Israel was in a worse situation than India was, to construct a new lingua franca out of an ancient liturgical language.

Well, neither was exactly a starry-eyed idealist. Gandhi was a dreamer, yes, but he was also an excellent politician who had long experience with the British and knew how to play them to the best advantage of India. Nehru was even less of an idealist - he was willing to accept compromises like the creation of Pakistan which Gandhi hated.

In any case, it's possible that someone in the Congress leadership would try to create a new language, but it almost certainly wouldn't come to anything. Gandhi's vision of India as a pastoral, peaceful, non-industrial nation certainly never amounted to anything other than a pipe dream.

Israel is a wholly different situation. As you pointed out, Israel was under "constant existential threat." That's the sort of thing that helps unify a people who already share a common religion and mostly a common language - neither of which is true in India's case. Not to mention, of course, that Israel was a lot smaller and somewhat richer than India - it's easier to teach a new language to everyone if everyone is only 100,000 elites in the first generation as opposed to 10,000,000.

Cheers,
Ganesha

[Kishan]

The fact is that the Congress leadership did not have a clear idea about a common language for India. Gandhi's idea was to adopt Hindustani, a mixture of Hindi and Urdu as the national language and this idea was shared by many leaders. But the partition and the formation of Pakistan turned many Hindu leaders against Urdu, viewed as a Muslim language. They upheld Hindi as the national language. Hindi and Urdu rift widened as Hindi started to adopt more Sanskrit words and expel Persian words while Urdu adopted more Persian words, dropping Sanskrit origin words. Urdu was adopted as the national language of Pakistan.
Hindi was adopted as the national language and a time limit of 1965 was decided to make it the sole official language. But the efforts by the overzealous champions of Hindi to push its cause raised the apprehensions of non-Hindi speakers, especially in Tamilnadu. Tamil is a an ancient language, with a rich literature even from third century before Christ. This resulted in violent agitations in Tamilnadu lead by D.M.K. The Central Government was forced to postpone the decision to make Hindi the sole official language till the non-Hindi speakers agree to it.That could be eternity!
Many of the regional languages like Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi etc. are older than Hindi with richer literature than it. Though Hindi is the most widely spoken language, it is spoken by barely one third of the population.
In fact it would have been wiser if a simplified version of Sanskrit was adopted as national language. The Northern languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Nepali, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarathi,etc. are based on Sanskrit. The Southern languages like Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam contain more than 50% words borrowed from Sanskrit. Tamil is the only language which has borrowed less from Sanskrit. Trouble with Sanskrit is that it is a very complex language and is spoken by very few people. The second factor could be an advantage as there is no chance of any domination by its speakers! The solution for the first problem is to simplify Sanskrit in the form of esperanto! Then retaining its basic words and roots, grammar should be changed to create a new Sanskrit. It should also adopt more words from regional languages like Tamil.

[Dan1988]

Originally Posted by Ganesha

Well, using Sanskrit, as EternalCynic pointed out, would be very unwieldy. Sanskrit is an enormously complex language; it has 10 classes of verbs in four groups and over a dozen tenses, three genders, three numbers, eight cases, and two forms for every pronoun.

Hmm, so I guess we need a pre-1900 POD so that Sanskrit would be more viable as a language. After all, many of the Slavic languages (and even Latvian and Lithuanian) have grammars similar to (and just as complex as) Sanskrit yet still remain in use and are not viewed as unwieldy. (However, any Neo-Sanskrit would also have to take into account the huge Perso-Arabic vocabulary used in North India, as exemplified by varieties such as Urdu and languages like Punjabi.)

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Just not going to fly, anyway you look at it.

Hindi. Much of india would rather use english. What that tell you about the popularity of hindi?

Hindi based. Falls between two stools. Has almost the same political problems as pure hindi, lacks ANY native speakers.

Sanskrit. Good grief, thats even less likely that ressurrecting latin for theEU. Which is infeasible.

Artificial language. Either doesnt exist or has no indian roots. Look at how well Esperanto has succeeded, and its a trivially simple language to learn. MIGHT work if nationalist philologists had created an ,,indian,, analog to esperanto, and then pushed it in theiir publications. Otoh, it would likey end up like Newspeak in 1984 , namely used in a handful of government official pronouncements, but otherwise ignored.

[EternalCynic]

Originally Posted by Dathi THorfinnsson

Just not going to fly, anyway you look at it.

Hindi. Much of india would rather use english. What that tell you about the popularity of hindi?

Hindi based. Falls between two stools. Has almost the same political problems as pure hindi, lacks ANY native speakers.

Sanskrit. Good grief, thats even less likely that ressurrecting latin for theEU. Which is infeasible.

Artificial language. Either doesnt exist or has no indian roots. Look at how well Esperanto has succeeded, and its a trivially simple language to learn. MIGHT work if nationalist philologists had created an ,,indian,, analog to esperanto, and then pushed it in theiir publications. Otoh, it would likey end up like Newspeak in 1984 , namely used in a handful of government official pronouncements, but otherwise ignored.

Indonesia could serve as the closest model to India. Pre-colonization, a very simple Malay was the trade language of the archipelago. Dutch (and English in Malaysia) became the colonial language. In 1928, Indonesian nationalists made the decision to make Bahasa based on Malay as Indonesia's lingua franca even though Javanese had more speakers and had a longer literary history. When Indonesia gained independence, Bahasa was easily rolled out as the lingua franca. Today most Indonesians are fluent in Bahasa, so much so that there's concern over the survival of Javanese among the youth. It would be as if today's Tamil and Bengali youth were preferring "Indian" over their native languages.

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Originally Posted by EternalCynic

Indonesia could serve as the closest model to India. Pre-colonization, a very simple Malay was the trade language of the archipelago. Dutch (and English in Malaysia) became the colonial language. In 1928, Indonesian nationalists made the decision to make Bahasa based on Malay as Indonesia's lingua franca even though Javanese had more speakers and had a longer literary history. When Indonesia gained independence, Bahasa was easily rolled out as the lingua franca. Today most Indonesians are fluent in Bahasa, so much so that there's concern over the survival of Javanese among the youth. It would be as if today's Tamil and Bengali youth were preferring "Indian" over their native languages.

Well, except that there wasnt a simplified lingua franca in india, iirc, except later english filled that role.

Which is one reason english is so widely used there. One of several, of course.