As someone with some knowledge around this subject, this is a simplistic and inflammatory bad-faith reading of a very complex topic – how do you create a common country out of hundreds of splintered cultures, languages, and religions spoken by millions of people? The nearest parallel to how many languages India is the European Union, and I would wager that given the differing scripts and such, India's diversity of languages exceeds that of the EU's.
And people have been trying to unite this complex mixture as a country since the 1700s! (thinking of the British attempts here; much earlier if you include pre-British empires).
The imposition of Hindi has been the one of the (failed) ways to have such a common language. It is quite a vast topic, but one example is that Mahatma Gandhi himself started the South India Hindi Outreach Institute to promote Hindi as a means of integration between (broadly speaking) North and South India.
Also, the issue of caste in India is a pretty complex one as well, but having spent some time in south India, I can confidently say that casteism is way more prevalent there than Hindi, which casts some doubts on the effectiveness of the politics you allude to (even presuming it exists).
----------------------------------------------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakshina_Bharat_Hindi_Prachar_...
However, unlike the holocaust "Caste" and the "Caste system" originates in Europe. It is time that the textbooks are updated to reflect reality and not carry on a colonial-evalangical propaganda.
https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/wquRqpqgRGfDP58kN9BNOM/cast...
Just like every Hollywood movie involving Germany, has to have a hitler reference.
Rest of your comment is factual, except not sure if Tamil is the oldest language or Sanskrit or some other is.
But the above quoted part of your comment is utter BS.
The reason to promote Hindi is nationalistic rather than religious. Why should the lingua franca of any country be a foreign language, it should be a local language. Hindi fits the bill amongst all other Indian languages is because it has the largest footprint and hence best odds of success, as opposed to say Tamil which is primarily spoken in 1 state.
My understanding is that this is (or was) contested in the south. While Hindi is (as you say) large and local, it's also specifically northern. (The southern languages are very different, non-indo-european.) The counter-argument for English is that, while foreign, at least it's equally foreign all round.
Also, only Tamil has a non-Sanskrit origin and is completely different. Other South Indian languages do have Sanskrit origin/influence.
Which is possibly why Tamil Nadu is the most anti-Hindi state.
Recent scholarship around this paints a very different and complicated picture of interactions between Dravidian and Indo-Iranian languages. Specifically, there is evidence that Indo-Iranian speakers and Dravidian speakers exchanged vocabulary even before Sanskrit and Tamil branched off from their parent languages.
From Rice in Dravidian by Franklin Southworth [0]:
> The reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Dravidian depicts a society whose main source of food is animals and their products. Though the speakers of Proto-Dravidian had some knowledge of agriculture, the absence of reconstructible names for cereals strongly suggests that they were not sedentary farmers at this stage—rather, they were probably herders of sheep and cattle, supplementing their diet with grains and other agricultural products through gathering, trade, and occasional periods of sedentism. The first association of Dravidian speakers with a specific cereal is signaled by the occurrence of the word gōdhūma “wheat” in Vedic Sanskrit, a word derived from a Proto-Zagrosian word meaning “stand of grain”. This word, along with other Dravidian-derived words relevant to agriculture (words for “fruit” and “field, threshing ground”, “joint of plant”) and animals (words for “sheep”, “ass”, “hoof”) suggests a significant role for Dravidian speakers in Indus Valley agriculture. As the distribution of these words in modern Indo-Aryan languages—with cognate forms in Dardic and/or Nuristani languages—is similar to that of inherited words like Old Indo-Aryan “brother” (4 Nuristani, 16 Dardic cognates) or “mother” (four Dardic cognates), it is reasonable to assume that the initial contact between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speakers took place outside of the Indus Valley, in parts of Iran, Afghanistan, or Turkmenistan, probably at a time when Dravidian speakers were involved in wheat cultivation. Chronologically, this might have been anywhere “from about 3500 BC onwards”, in Bellwood’s words (2005:334, see also Bellwood 2009). The presence of cognates of some of these loans in Iranian languages suggests that both Indo-Aryan and Iranian-speaking groups may have been involved in early interactions with Dravidian speakers.
> By the mid-third millennium BCE, Dravidian had become the dominant language of the Southern Neolithic; the Dravidian languages had split into North Dravidian and Peninsular Dravidian, and the latter was further divided into four subgroups. The Southern Neolithic was “…a system that combined animal husbandry—including the well-known cattle pens (Allchin 1963)—with a new package of crops, of which the staples were legumes and millets, a description applicable to the diet of most South Indians today” (Southworth and McAlpin 2012, unpublished). Its main cereal crops were two millets, bristley foxtail (Setaria verticillata) and browntop (Brachiaria ramosa), whose names were either taken from some unknown language(s) or derived from existing Dravidian words such as ko rr - “food” DEDR 2171. Since South India is not a suitable climate for wheat cultivation, the old word for “wheat” was no longer even a memory, surviving only as Tamil kūlam, a generic term for “grain”, and a few related words in Gondi-Kui (DEDR 1906). When Dravidian speakers today refer to wheat, they use a form borrowed from Sanskrit godhūma, such as Tamil gōdume.
> Contrary to Southworth’s claim (2009) that the language of the Southern Neolithic was a form of “late Proto-Dravidian” (equivalent to what is now being called “Peninsular Dravidian”), it now appears that the Southern Neolithic involved a coming together of various subgroups of Proto-Peninsular Dravidian which had already separated some time previously, had been in intermittent contact over a long period in the interim as each branch developed its own unique crop package, and ultimately pooled their resources to create the collection of crops identified in the Southern Neolithic.
> Regarding rice: the Proto-Peninsular Dravidian word vari-(n)ci, which probably originally had the meaning “seed, grain”, appears first as a word for “barley” in two Nuristani languages. The contact that produced the Nuristani words is perhaps dateable to the same period as that of the word for “wheat”: any time from about 3500 BCE onwards. Lacking evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to assume that Dravidian-speaking farmers became part of the population of the Indus Valley from about that time. That they retained that role for a long period of time is shown by the appearance of the OIA words vrīhi “paddy” and “threshed (husked/unhusked) rice” in about 1200 BCE, and by the later replacement of these words by another Dravidian loanword, cāmala/cāvala, a millennium or so later. Additional evidence may come from other names of cereals: for example, Dravidian *co nn al “millet” is the probable source of the late Sanskrit yavanāla (reshaped under the influence of OIA yava “barley”), the source of modern Indo-Aryan words for “sorghum” such as Marathi
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12284-011-9076-9
Even though the link seems to imply that it's more Elamitic than Dravidian, the case of Brahui [1] is very interesting as an instance of a Dravidian-linked language that's very different in origin from its geographical neighbors.
----------------------------------------------------
Some context: Brahui is a language spoken in Pakistan that’s been a bit of a mystery till David McAlpin solved it with the proto-zagrosian hypothesis.
Brahui clearly looks like related to Dravidian, but didn’t fit into proto-dravidian or any reconstructed daughter languages of proto-dravidian. Simultaneously, the ancient language of Elamite looks a lot like Dravidian. (sidenote: there are cuneiform tablets written in elamite! Elam shows up prominently in the fall of Nineveh, the capital city of the super power of that era!)
The problem was chronology- Brahui is clearly older than the later descendants of Proto-Dravidian. Elamite is far older than the descendants of Proto-Dravidian. The question was how these two languages fit into the Dravidian family tree.
McAlpin’s 2015 hypothesis answers this question with a surprising and elegant idea: What if Brahui is related to Elamite instead of Dravidian?
He found that the pieces fit really well when you treat Elamite and Brahui as sibling languages descended from a parent language: Proto-Elamite. Next, he finds that Proto-Elamite and Proto-Dravidian cleanly fit as siblings descended from a mother language that he calls Proto-Zagrosian.
I’m not a linguist and I don’t know how well accepted this idea is among academic circles - but looking at this from outside, it seems to be a fairly well respected idea that’s being seriously considered by some academics.
PS: I did a google search for Proto-Zagrosian and the second result was my own comment on HN from a long time ago. I really wish there was more people writing/blogging about this.
[0]. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=prot...
A proven connection between Dravidian and Elamite would kind of upend most perceived ideas in India about Dravidian versus Indo-European languages (namely, that Dravidian ones are more indigenous than Indo-European).
Also, this is very likely just a coincidence, but I realized that the Tamil word for homeland is...Eelam [1].
-------------------------------------
Not true. Even if it were think about the following analogy given by a national leader. I dont remember his name. There are more crows in India than Peacock. Yet Peacock is the national bird not the crow.
If there must be a national language then it should be English. Simply because it is the one that has prospered the coutry. Hindi does not help the states where hindi is the primary language. Bihar people migrate to south india for jobs and learn tamil and telegu, while the south indians leave india to abroad.
Preach Hindi to the people who are still low class but you learn english conveniently, thats evil IMO.
Hear, hear. But good luck convincing Americans to learn the local indigenous languages or go back where they came from...
I thought that English actually served that purpose even in India (unofficially).
Not sure how Hindi is related to the caste system. Caste system plagues all of India irrespective of the mother tongue.
> forces in to the education of all non-hindi speaking states too
Education is a state subject in India, the union government cannot force a language on a state
This is not true anymore. Education used to be a state subject but it is now in concurrent list; which means the union govt. has a say in education. That's how the union govt. was able to mandate three language formula in New Education Policy 2020.
The same misconception is present with national sport (believed to be Hockey, actually is no sport)
I would surely have guessed Cricket.
A fun question people ask here in India is 'What is the national sport of India?'. Most people reply cricket, few 'intellectuals' say hockey, but there is no national sport.
Lots of people in the places that were part of the British Empire other than in continental North America (where for some reason it had less staying power) which includes all of those places except South America (if you count the West Indies as part of North America.) It's popular some other places, too.
You lost me there. Usual white man's burden speaking. BJP is not a "religious" party in any sense of the word. Hindi is just ridiculously popular language mostly because of Bollywood. Since most politicians tend to be 'hindi' speaking they try to make Hindi even more popular as it benefits them where as regional parties see that as threat.
Stop drinking Equality Lab's kool aid.