The Hindi Imposition

In the southern Indian town of Tiruchi last week, a 20-year-old hotel waiter scribbled hasty notes to family and friends, then committed suicide by gulping a bottle of insecticide. He was the third suicide in the area in a week.

Earlier two young men, like him mem bers of the radical Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Advancement Party), killed themselves in Vietnamese fashion by soaking their bodies with gasoline and igniting themselves with a match. All three protested "the imposition of Hindi." On schedule, the ruling Congress Party had celebrated the 15th anniversary of Indian independence by establishing Hindi as India's official national language (TIME, Jan. 29).

Frustrated Opposition. Hindi, a derivative of ancient Sanskrit, is the language of 190 million Indians in the north, who represent 40% of the nation's population; it is also the tongue of leaders of the Congress Party, headed by Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri. Under the new law, official business now must be carried out in Hindi, and civil servants, India's largest urban labor force, are granted higher seniority status for learning it. But in southern India, where 111 million people speak four different, Dravidian languages -- Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam -- there is frustrated opposition to the law. Along with suicides, there were riots, bus burnings, and demonstrations. Before they ended, 1,500 people had been arrested.

The dissenting southerners have a point. Indians speak 14 major tongues and 831 dialects; the only truly common language among educated Indians is English. Hindi script is an almost insurmountable obstacle for southern Indians; it is made up of a series of curves, lines, and floating vowels, arranged above a horizontal line, as against the intricate, graceful loops and curves of Tamil. For instance, the words "India and America" are written thus in Hindi:

and as follows in Tamil:

Hindi is also different from Tamil in its syntax. The start of St. Luke's parable of the prodigal son ("A certain man had two sons") becomes in Hindi "One man did two sons have," and in Tamil "For one man two sons were." South Indian languages have a neuter gender as well as masculine and feminine; in the north, there are only masculine and feminine. "Water," for example, is neuter in Tamil, feminine in Hindi.

Associate Language. Hewing to the letter of the new law, Indian officials last week wrestled with the problem of communicating in Hindi. In some areas they wrote most of their correspondence in English -- retained as an "associate language" -- but inserted verbs in Hindi. In Uttar Pradesh, a Hindi state, government offices faced a correspondence backlog for lack of enough typewriters equipped with the cumbersome 36-character Hindi alphabet.

Meanwhile the south, where university classes were suspended for a week to calm rioting students, was hastily visited by a government envoy. Gist of his message: for the time being, the southerners can still correspond with the capital, if they wish, in the associate language.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.