Hindi, India’s official language holds the reputation of being one of the world’s most-spoken languages. At an event, Mahatma Gandhi said Hindi is the language of common people and even put forward the demand of making it the state language, however, to no avail.
It was September, 14th 1949 when the members of the constituent assembly were writing down the fate of Indians in the form of our Constitution, adopted ‘Hindi’ as the country’s official language. But, it was 3 years later only in 1953 when Hindi Divas were being observed pan India.
September 14th, 1950 is the official date recorded in History when Hindi got the status of the official language. The constituent assembly agreed to English as well in the form of our official language alongside Hindi.
As mentioned in Article 343 of the Indian constitution, "The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script," provides Hindi a position of national importance.
Political Stance on the official language:
The position of Hindi in Indian politics has a very debatable place, the history of which dates back to the discussion from the constituent assembly when the members like T.T Krishnamachari conveyed a warning on behalf of the people of the South, some of whom threatened to separate from India if Hindi was imposed upon them.
It is appalling to see that the divide on linguistic grounds still has its place deeply rooted inside Indian society and is reflected in the politics and the people widening the North-South divide.
On the one side, it is the BJP at the center which sees Hindi as their identity and tries to impose on Indians the move which we saw a couple of months back when the center passed the order to make Hindi compulsory for students up until 10th standard.
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The rebuttal comes with an equal force from Deccan India against the call and by no means wish to have Hindi in their culture even in the common parlance.
Recently former Karnataka CM HD Kumaraswamy urged the BJP government of the state not to celebrate ‘Hindi Divas’, which is no surprise owing to the history that we have been part of so far.
Some facts associated with Hindi:
Undivided Bihar became the state to adopt Hindi as its official state language replacing Urdu in 1881, later it was UP, Haryana, and Rajasthan that took Bihar’s course in declaring Hindi as their state’s official language.
Hindi stands in the fourth position in the world after Mandarin, Spanish, and English in the most spoken language category. Countries like Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, and Nepal.