Vernacular

As I have to take the rickshaw every morning to go to work, I have slowly, mostly by immersion, begun to become conversant in a daily variety of Hindi, which, in fact is no single language, but a bundle of Hindi, English, Urdu, Punjabi and the language of whatever state you are from all combined into a sort of common linguistic masala. Every time I encounter a word I need to use but don't know I immediately look up the Hindi equivalent, usually with the result of being told by my Indian companion that nobody would understand me if I actually used that word on the street.

The other day I wanted to calm down a short-tempered rickshaw driver but did not know the word for "impatient", the dictionary offered the word adhīra, which I figured sounded simple enough. My attempt at using the word only resulted in a blank stare by my driver. Before using Hindi words, I usually test them on Meg just to be sure they are words that people actually use daily, this proved to be another word that nobody uses, unless you're trying to be Premchand or Tagore. It might have been a better idea to just use "impatient" in between a Hindi sentence.

A similar anecdote was told by a journalist who had returned to Delhi after many years and spoke Hindi the way it was taught to him at school. While trying to buy a box of matches with his cigarettes, he casually tried to address the cigarette vendor with an appropriately courteous manner: Mujhe ek diyasalai dijiye. 
After nothing but blank stares, he finally blurted "ek matches do yaar!" with instant desired results.

There is a linguistic polar shift taking place in India where English is forced to make way for Hindi in new domains. One manifestation of it is the language used in media. In the December 2012 issue of Caravan Magazine, Krishn Kaushik in his long reportage paints a picture of the current state of the Indian English-language news media. The general observation of the article is that TV-news in English is in fact a losing game and a marginal segment amongst a largely Hindi- and local language dominated viewing public:


According to TAM (Television Audience Measurement), the healthiest segments of Indian television are Hindi and regional general entertainment, which each capture at least 35 percent of overall television viewership.

...contrary to popular perception, English-language news is a fringe genre of Indian broadcasting. TAM’s data indicate that, for the first six months of this year, English-language news was watched by only 0.21 percent of the television audience in TAM markets. That amounts to one viewer for every 500 television-watching people, watching English-language news for less than five minutes per day.

Television news in Hindi or Hinglish and regional languages reached a public that ranges from the street sweeper and rickshaw driver all the way to company CEO's and the members of parliament. English, on the other hand, only reaches the educated few. It is often said that the vast majority of the Indian public are in fact not big readers and therefore TV will reach a much wider audience than any book. Vast majority of the people who watch TV on a daily basis are most comfortable with Hindi or Hinglish. Meanwhile, English remains a stalwart of the printed word, in books as well as in newspapers.

There is no intimacy attributed to English as a language, it remains a language of instruction in elite schools and the lingo of white collar jobs. It is mostly seen as a tool of a sort - an emblem of professional aspiration. Rural and small-town India craves to learn English to get ahead in life, but seems to only value it due to its material benefits and certain lexical borrowings. For some, it has become a stepping stone away from caste-bound roots: BBC Radio 4 reported on a group of former untouchables, who had started worshiping the English language as their liberator from caste-based socio-economic boundaries. It had even inspired them to create new gods into Indian mythology: Their saviour from caste oppression is personified as a goddess, modelled on the Statue of Liberty, in a sari and mounted on a computer.

Meanwhile, Hindi, in various colloquial forms, remains a language of the common man that everybody speaks and understands, but nobody really studies. Learning Hindi at school stops at 8th grade for most people and anything more complex than that will be patched up with English vocabulary. For many, it remains a "kitchen" language, but also a de facto language used most in everyday communication. Beyond a certain point, Hindi as a language becomes too complex for most Indians and too cut off from today with it's sanskritized artificial vocabulary. The national language of India thus seems to be a sort of a bundle of different languages in a basic Hindi frame, not least with the aid of Bollywood and advertising and made nation-wide after the arrival of satellite television.

There is a young generation in Delhi, as well as other big cities in India, that seems to exist in a sort of a linguistic limbo, where a colloquial variety of Hindi heavily laden with English vocabulary as well as expressions of the speaker's local language has become the mother tongue. Meanwhile 100% "pure" forms of either have remained in very confined domains and generally deemed as pretentious, artificial or just too difficult. Many young people reminisce on their Hindi classes at school with horror.

Hindi as a literary language is commonly deemed to be a 20th century political construct and the mother tongue of none. As coexistance of various languages had been the norm for most Indians and Pakistanis, linguistic purism and zealous efforts to eradicate any foreign influences from language on both sides after the partition resulted in a comical situation where nobody actually understood their own national language. Robert D.King in his book on Nehru's language politics illustrates this situation with an anecdote:

Hindi-speaking Indians frequently say that they cannot understand the Urdu of Radio Pakistan, Urdu-speaking Pakistanis say the same of the Hindi heard on All-India Radio. Nehru himself complained that he could not understand the increasingly Sanskritized Hindi language promulgated by All-India Radio. He frequently commented on this in his letters, and on at least one occasion he rose in the Lok Sabha to complain that he could not understand Hindi broadcasts of his own speeches.

Decades later, the situation remains more or less the same. Rashmi Sadana in her article "Managing Hindi", visits the Deparment of Official Language in Delhi and encounters a government office that time seems to have forgotten. Although Hindi in many states is the de facto language of administration, which since Nehru has been according to national language policy, the national capital region encounters a different reality:

In the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Haryana, the state governments used Hindi “about 100 percent of the time”, and the version they spoke was a “chaste” Hindi, a Hindi laden with Sanskrit vocabulary. But in Delhi this vocabulary became “burdensome”. “When it comes to the capital, Hindi has a very subordinate role to play. The language in the offices and ministries is English.” No one speaks of “difficult” English, but people speak of “difficult” Hindi. “While there is an impetus to learn English, a craze in semi-urban and rural areas, there is a sense that you don’t need Hindi to do well in life.

Another BBC article argues that Hinglish is a pure construct of Indian linguistic innovation, which has become the everyday lingo of a new younger elite as well. The problem, according to the writer, is that for many it has become the mother tongue which lacks variation in different social settings:

The trouble with dysfunctional Hinglish is that it can cause havoc when clear and precise communication is required, whether on a simple taxi ride or in more serious situations like hospitals and law-courts. Young Indians still need better quality, standardised English teaching if they want to access the global knowledge economy and stay ahead of eager new English-speakers in China or Argentina.

For many Indians, especially middle-class, being multilingual is a norm and there is very little differentiation between languages in spoken interaction. As most Indians speak at least two to three languages, jumping between languages is but normal and you might hear a person using for example English, Hindi an Bengali in a single sentence, without it sounding awkward or strange at all. Rather, saying a complete sentence in a single language seems to be actually more rare.

Linguistic purism has its political implications as well. By speaking a Sanskrit-heavy form of "proper" Hindi, one risks of being labelled as a zealot Hindu nationalist and speaking only in English sans Hindi might be seen as snobbery and would only make you able to communicate with a limited stratum of society.

Therefore, the linguistic scene of middle class India seems to be that sticking to one language only is almost as if to make a statement of a kind. As Mrinal Pande in her book "The Other Country: Dispatches from the Mofussil" aptly summarises:

Actually, India's fabled middle class cuts through the rural and urban divides and converses in multiple Indian languages increasingly laced with English words.

A Hinglish McDonald's flyer: The ad roughly reads: "Our treat, arrived at McDonald's for you to enjoy."