A Braj-bhasha speaker breaks the myth of Hindi belt
When one fine day a Union minister rises to say: “It is our misfortune that we give too much importance to English medium,” and that we should learn, “the rashtra bhasha Hindi as most people in the country speak this language,” he says that with complete ignorance of the politics of the Hindi belt that he blindly used to win that chair, and also of how this identity of the Hindi-speaking majority was created and is nurtured.
The only reason we speak Hindi in the North is because it was developmentally coerced down our throats. We never loved it or thumped our chests while speaking it. We cribbed about it, the same way some of the people now crib about English, that how it is being forced on you, or how speaking it is erroneously considered a sign of refinement or education, and how it must be stopped.
That is exactly what was done and is still being done in all the villages and towns of the so-called Hindi belt.
I have grown up in Mathura, and have lived in Gajipur, Bareilly, Chandigarh, Ganganagar and nowhere have I spoken what you might call Hindi; until I and others like me were reprimanded and caned regularly in our schools for speaking our mother tongue, our matra-bhasha.
It continued until we started speaking Hindi with such fluency and clarity that anyone meeting us for the first time could immediately recognise that we belong to the Hindi belt. But in reality we never actually did.
My mother tongue is Braj bhasha, the same tongue Meera sang in and the disciples of Kabir and Rahim wrote down their couplets in. It's the same language Krishna grew up speaking or Khusro fell in love with.
It has got its own culture, its own music, art and literature. I grew up in the Braj region, and I spoke Braj and so did my family and my relatives and my friends and everyone I knew around. I didn't speak Hindi.
When I came to school, that was a big problem. Speaking any regional language, be it Braj, Khadi Boli, Nepali or Bhojpuri, is considered a sign of illiteracy and lack of refinement in modern India.
In the small-town schools, we went to study in, we were the uncultured lot who came from uneducated homes; we were desperately waiting to be groomed. The first part of grooming was to erase the touch of our own languages from our baby tongues.
In a similar way, even today many a language is dying in our small towns under the influence of Hindi. Every day the number of people who speak the diaspora of languages which are the inherent tongues of North India are shrinking, because unlike as for Tamil and Odiya, nobody fought for them.
The shaming one experiences in this country for speaking one’s vernacular is not only established (and propagated) by schools and the society, but is also viciously thrown in by peer groups.
When I, a young boy in my first and second standard, would utter words like “bussat” (for shirt), “choon” (for flour), “piyau” (for water stations) – which were quintessentially vernacular, my friends would look down at me as if I came from an obscure tribe that they couldn’t recognise.
That shaming is then imbibed by the kids leading to a lifelong aversion of talking in the vernacular, as if as it will break away the sheen of their class. Hindi in the rural and small towns was the modern Sanskrit, the sign of intelligentsia and elitism. The same space as we moved to larger towns and cities was replaced by English.
Hindi zealots fight that Hindi is a combination of all these regional languages. That it's the mother of all these dialects, that Braj-bhasha is just another form of Hindi, and that's how it binds us all. Sorry but, no!
My language is Braj, and if I start speaking Braj the way it's spoken back home you will not understand a single iota of the whole conversation. Similarly, if a girl from Haryana starts speaking in any of the multiple dialects of her state, the only thing you'll say in reply is "kya (why)?" Then tell me, what is this Hindi Belt or the Hindi Heartland that we repeatedly refer to?
Even if all these vernaculars use the same grammatical rules, it doesn’t turn the area into one homogenous language group. You might call it an ethnic group, but that would only go on to show how hollow this Hindi fanaticism is. And if you dare call all these languages “Hindi”, then what actually is Hindi?
Also, why in censuses I, a Braj-Bhasha speaker, am considered a native speaker of Hindi even though it is a second language to me? While people speaking Tamil or Malayalam are not counted as the native speakers of that language.
Hindi is not our national language or even a state language. It's just a good political language and that's how it has always been used, initially to bind people in a movement, later to morph a large chunk of a votebank. The same way a religious identity of Hinduism is being created around a religion which is actually a loose segregation of sects, and for some a chamber of horrors.
Even the fact that 41 per cent of the population speaks Hindi as per the 2001 Census is a mass illusion created by clubbing all the numerous dialects, all of which are very much distinct from each other.
That’s why there’s no Hindi Belt. There is no one string going through all the hearts of North Indians and tying them in one lovely community of Hindi speakers. We are not Hindi. Digest that. Take your time.