International Journal of Social Science Research (IJSSR)

Power Languages in India: The Making of Hindi as a Power Language

Politics of language in India is evident not only in the standardisation and hierarchical ordering of languages, it is also expressed in attempts at getting into power languages through demands for linguistic recognitions as pedagogic tool, or entry into job-market and more instrumentally, in autonomy movements and demands for separate states. In this paper we attempt to see the issue of national languages and politics of language in India in general and Hindi in particular by situating them in our historical experiences. One of the important modern developments which brought the imagined community of nation into a homogenous connected reality was the development of print capitalism. The homogenous nation and its culture had to be sustained through centralised socialization or national education, through the common medium of language and this universal unified culture constitutes the natural repositories of political legitimacy and (re)production of the nation. Rooted in colonial history in India and in tandem with absorption of modular forms of western nationalism, the case of emergence of new Hindi with Devnagari script and marginalisation of script neutral Hindustani in India as well communal separation of Hindi and Urdu testify to how the subliminal category of language get politicised within the framework of nation. The paper concludes that coexistence of two official languages and a list of scheduled languages are all parts of standardisation of national languages and are all power languages relevant to emotional integration and business communication. Keywords: nation-state, system, language, Hindi, education