In 1956, India’s political map underwent a major redrawing. The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 carved out states based on language identities. The hope, reportedly, was for these languages to develop, pave the way for increased local participation in administration, and efficient governance.
We’ve had new states thereafter, most created by citing even more specific socio-cultural concerns (Nagaland, for instance, in 1963), or and economic growth (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand in 2000; Telangana in 2014). Despite this and the growing demand for professional mobility, the concept of linguistic identity through the country has more-or-less held on.
The language of growing up
Delhi though, is a strange space. It is home to a cross-section of Indians, especially bureaucrats, politicians, academics, and uniformed officers.
For decades, it has also been the place for migrants of conflicts in the subcontinent’s northern areas. One look at the street signs on the tree-lined avenues of south and central Delhi are especially a testament to the latter, with names repeated in Urdu and Punjabi alongside the standard-use Hindi and English.
“Delhi’s identity is mixed, with 1857 and 1947 being specific markers of change,” says cultural historian Rana Safvi. The first date is a reference to the British Army’s capture of Delhi from the Mughals; the second is of the consequences of partition. Hindustani, the language that arose when Hindi and Urdu met, started making space for Punjabi — now so prevalent in Delhi’s depictions in pop-culture.
Safvi is in her early 60s now. Her schooling in a convent meant education would’ve primarily been in English. “My mother used to say, ‘Your generation is illiterate in two languages!’”, she recalls, referring to a contemporary reality of India’s basic bilingualism – English words casually make their way into many of our ‘main’ languages. For Safvi, Angrezi would creep into everyday Hindustani or Urdu.
The language of the mind
The 2011 Census of India finds that of every 10,000 people in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, there are 8,492 who identify as Hindi speakers, 520 as Punjabi, and 517 as Urdu. The next biggest group, at 129, is Bengali. A sharp drop later, 73 identify as Maithili, 53 with Malayalam, and 49 Tamil. Gujarati, Nepali, Odia, Sindhi, Marathi, and Telugu follow suit, hovering between 15 and 24 in the distribution. These are all languages protected in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India.
“I came to Delhi when I was a year old,” says former Deputy Secretary of Sahitya Akademi Dr. Gitanjali Chatterjee, 61, whose home is a Bengali-speaking one. “We’ve made it a point to teach our children the language — we consume Bengali magazines and programmes, and have kept the basic Bengali identity,” Chatterjee says. But here’s the catch: She finds that she herself ends up thinking in English. And another: She notes that her children, when speaking with their friends, naturally fall into Hindi.
The language of our inner world is supposed to be a ‘mother tongue’. But could that also mean it’s the language we most condition ourselves into? Seemingly so. Emily Sen, the 18-year-old daughter of a Punjabi mother and Bengali father, says her household speaks in Hindi. “My parents have never enforced that I learn their languages,” she says, adding that in school though, teachers prefer that students speak English. “But in their absence, with people of so many backgrounds, we end up speaking Hindi also equally,” she says, adding that she mostly thinks in English.
Vishnu Vardhan, a 26-year-old teacher of English, born into a Telugu family in Andhra Pradesh, does the same. Living in Delhi since he was three meant that at home, they speak Hindi too in addition to Telugu and English. Despite this multilingualism he says his language is English, not because of a “chronological acquisition of language, but maybe because I know it better than the other two.”
Vardhan also makes a point about how cultural consumption informs the language he identifies with the most, but 33-year-old academic Rajeesh Ravindran doesn’t agree with the idea. A Malayali brought up in Delhi, Ravindran admits to a steady diet of Malayalam films and participating in festivals. “But when my parents speak to me in Malayalam, I naturally respond in Hindi,” he says.
This demographic, albeit in varying degrees, never responds with “Delhi,” to the common ‘where-are-you-from’ question. In short conversations, it deflects into an ‘I-live-in’ answer. In longer ones, it is prefaced with an explanation that distinguishes linguistic ethnicity from domicile.
The language of the heart
This comfort of choice, or confusion stemming from multilingualism is common to middle- and upper-middle class families. “But what happens among the poor and un-lettered in Delhi, like domestic workers who migrate here, is that their native language disappears within a generation,” says Dr. Sambudha Sen, head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University technically in Uttar Pradesh, but part of the National Capital Region.
Sen refers to anthropologist Partha Chatterjee’s idea of the language of intimacy versus the language of official dealings. He applies the concept to his own life: a Bengali who grew up in Chandigarh, and has lived in Delhi most his life, Sen thinks mostly in English, because his thoughts are often about work.
The Delhiite’s falling back onto Hindi or English therefore stems from convenience, an ease that trumps efficiency. Despite traditionally being a salad bowl of unmixing pockets — Chitarranjan Park, a Bengali stronghold; Old Delhi, the ‘real’ Dilli; Karol Bagh a little Punjab; R.K Puram, very Tamil — Delhi is fast changing.
The capital’s cosmopolitanism is very different from that of India’s other metros. There’s no real claim to regionalism here, linguistic or political. And if there is, it’s only an angsty need not to conform, masquerading as ‘typical Delhi aggression.’
