Let’s be clear upfront: I have no beef with Hindi. In fact, like many Indians, I find myself effortlessly switching to it when the situation demands. Think about it: when I’m haggling with a vendor in a Delhi market, catching a Bollywood movie, chatting with a taxi driver or even trying to decipher the occasional railway announcement, Hindi slides in quite naturally. And frankly, why wouldn’t it? It’s a beautiful language, rich in vocabulary and allusion, and spoken by millions.
So, when certain quarters lament what they perceive as a “resistance” to Hindi, I can’t help but feel they’re missing the point, perhaps even deliberately. The pushback isn’t against the language itself. It’s against its imposition.
Here’s the thing: Indians are comfortably pragmatic. We embrace tools that work. English, despite its colonial baggage, became our de facto link language for a simple reason—it opened doors to global commerce, science, and an ocean of knowledge. No one needed to hold a gun to our heads to learn “the Queen’s English”. We learned it because it was useful. And since that’s true for all of us in every corner of the country, it helps us communicate with fellow Indians we meet, until we discover that we have another Indian language in common, and then we slip naturally into that, too.
The same goes for Hindi, to a large extent. The reach of Bollywood, the sheer number of Hindi speakers in trade and travel—these factors have naturally diffused Hindi across the country, not because of some grand government decree, but because people saw its value.
Go to any major city in India, even in the south, and you will find people navigating conversations in Hindi when necessary. They pick it up from films, from migrant workers, from travel. It’s an organic process, driven by utility and exposure. Chennai and Kochi are full of urban residents who have to master adequate Hindi to communicate with their handymen, domestic workers or security guards. It’s rare to find a Kerala restaurant without a Hindi-speaking waiter or busboy (because many of those are not from Kerala!) And that’s precisely how languages should thrive—through natural adoption, not forced feeding.
The moment you declare Hindi as the national language, or worse, make it a compulsory subject in schools far from its native speakers, that’s when the hackles rise. Suddenly, it stops being a useful tool and starts feeling like an instrument of majoritarianism. It smacks of an unspoken agenda: that to be truly “Indian”, one must speak Hindi. Why? Merely because Hindiwallahs failed to control their population and now outnumber the rest of us?
This is where the real problem lies. India’s strength is its dizzying diversity. We celebrate our myriad languages, each a repository of centuries of unique culture, literature, and thought. To suggest that one language should somehow supersede the others, to become the sole embodiment of our national identity, is not just misguided; it’s deeply insulting to the vibrant linguistic heritage of countless communities.
When a child in Chennai or Thiruvananthapuram is compelled to learn Hindi, not out of choice or practical need, but because it’s deemed a “national imperative”, it feels less like unity and more like enforced assimilation. It feels like an attempt to dilute their own linguistic and cultural identity. It feels like the assertion of dominance by one set of people, those of Hindi mother-tongue, over the rest of us. And quite frankly, it breeds resentment, not harmony. Why should Singh, Shukla and Sharma get to impose the language they learned in their mother’s laps over Subramaniam, Sravanareddy or Sasidharan, who didn’t?
Let’s drop the charade. The opposition isn’t to Hindi, the language. It’s to the political project behind its aggressive promotion. It’s about the underlying message that one part of India dictates what it means to be Indian to the rest.
So, next time you hear someone “resisting” Hindi, understand that they’re not rejecting the language. They’re rejecting its arrogance. They’re asserting their right to their own linguistic heritage and saying, loud and clear: “We will speak Hindi when it makes sense, but don’t tell us we have to.” That is the pragmatic, wonderfully diverse Indian spirit. It will prevail.
editor@theweek.in