Personal essay: A writer on the dilemmas of loving the Hindi language in a Sikh Punjab

As a Punjabi, my nostalgia and love for Hindi may contrast sharply with the usual fears and resentment found in non-Hindi-speaking regions of India regarding the imposition of the Hindi language. In this essay, I focus on Hindi as a language of creativity and dissent rather than government bureaucracy. I will trace my personal linguistic journey and how it is intertwined with the surrounding politics and culture.

Saul Bellow once remarked that “a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us,” asserting his right to be an autonomous English-language novelist. As we shall see below, such literary freedom isn’t available in India when regional politics, caste exclusion and cultural hegemony dictate which linguistic mansion, or cubbyhole, Indians can inhabit.

The languages of modern Punjab

I was born and raised in Punjab during the 1980s and ’90s, mostly in Jalandhar, with a few years spent in Bhatinda and a brief period in Ambala, Haryana. I got to experience Punjab and Punjabiyat by residing in different urban centres. While 40 per cent of the Sikh-majority Punjab’s population is Hindu, Jalandhar is a predominantly Hindu city and a hub of Hindi-language print media.

Although Punjabi was my mother tongue, like most urban Punjabis I also grew up speaking Hindi as my native language. Bollywood films and songs, Hindi comics, newspapers, magazines and books (published in Delhi) enriched my childhood. Before the advent of cable TV, most programs on the public broadcaster Doordarshan were in Hindi, including adaptations of the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, never mind how insufferably hacky they appear now. We also watched dramas and shows on Pakistan TV from across the border. Urdu sounded the same as Hindi, with Persian and Arabic words instead of Sanskrit.

At school, in Jalandhar, we followed a three-language model, learning Punjabi, Hindi, and English. Interestingly, children in Pakistan's Punjab province, home to most of the world's Punjabi speakers, weren’t taught Punjabi in schools until 2024. It was challenging for me to master three different scripts, but I pulled through. Also, I developed a deep fascination for Hindi literature and the culture of Hindi-speaking regions of India. My flair for Hindi expressions delighted my teachers and my literary-minded father, who was proficient in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, English and some Sanskrit.

During my early years, in the late 1980s, I developed a passion for listening to radio stations from faraway places. I eagerly tuned in each night to All India Radio's broadcasts from distant cities in the Hindi belt, such as Shimla, Delhi, Jaipur, and Bhopal. Later, I began to enjoy Hindi shortwave radio broadcasts from the BBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Moscow, eventually switching to English services.

Hindi became for me what English later would: the language of my intellect, a gateway to the wider world. Hindi allowed me to communicate with working-class immigrants and their children from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Nepal who flocked to Punjab during its now-lost economic boom. As a teenager, I fondly remember writing a letter in Hindi to a pen pal in Bihar and receiving his reply on a yellow postcard.

Hindi-Punjabi conflict at school

The gorgeous couplets of Kabir, which often challenged social evils, and snatches of modern Hindi prose inhabited my memory as verses from Shakespeare would do later. Here’s a random textbook commentary on Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s poem that I can recall and recite like a mantra some thirty years later:

बच्चन जी की पहली पत्नी की मृत्यु ने उनकी कविता को निराशा का नीड़, करुणा की रागिनी और अभाव का आकाश बना दिया था। इस लिए यह कविता उन अवसाद भरे क्षणों की देन है।

A literal English translation loses the music and emotion of the original.

“The death of Bachchan ji’s first wife turned his poetry into a nest of despair, a melody of compassion, and a sky of emptiness. Therefore, this poem is the legacy of those sorrowful moments.”

In the early 20th century, prominent Punjabis were touched by the aesthetic beauty and larger scope of Hindi. The pioneering Punjabi novelist Nanak Singh (1897–1971) writes in his autobiography Meri Duniya (My World) how, as a young man, he read Premchand’s novels with deep admiration and discovered his purpose in life: to become a social realist novelist. Punjab’s young anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) wrote of the relationship between Punjabi and Hindi without promoting a narrow religious agenda. These early days of modern Punjab do not reflect a Hindi-Punjabi divide—rather, they suggest that the two languages were part of the same cultural continuum.

By my mid-teens, I had begun to nurture a fantasy of becoming a Hindi fiction writer. I didn’t know then that it would be a literary way to starve and be mocked by India’s English-speaking cosmopolitan elite. Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize win in 1997 compelled all wannabe Indian writers to write in English, which accelerated the demise of Hindi as India’s major language of books, literature, good journalism and intellectual discourse. How ironic that the recent interest in Hindi literature was revived when Geetanjali Shree’s novel was translated into English as Tomb of Sand and won the International Booker Prize in 2022.

Now most Indians writing in regional languages remain acutely aware of the English translatability of their works and the possibility of access to Western literary and academic markets. When seen from the perspective of the dominance of English in India, both Hindi and Punjabi are native derelicts.

I don’t wish to paint English as a coloniser’s culturally destructive language. Authors like James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and many others have shown me the revolutionary power of literature in dismantling hegemonic narratives of class, race, caste, and religion. For now, as I have noted elsewhere, Indian-English novels rarely offer radical or subversive possibilities within their upper-caste echo chamber.

Beyond these issues of cultural and social engineering, every aspirational Indian should have the intellectual and creative autonomy to express themselves in any regional or global language.

From the 1960s, for Punjab’s Hindus, the Punjabi language written in the Gurmukhi script (used for Sikh holy scriptures) came to be associated with religious orthodoxy and provincialism. With demands from the Shiromani Akali Dal for a Punjabi-speaking (effectively dominant-caste Sikh) state, Punjab was divided in 1966, chopping off the Hindi-speaking regions that now make up Haryana and parts of Himachal Pradesh. Amandeep Sandhu writes in his thought-provoking, albeit strongly pro-Punjabi, book Panjab that in the 1961 census, many Punjabi-speaking Hindus had claimed Hindi as their mother tongue to stay out of the smaller neo-Punjab.

As Pravin J Patel notes, the Akali-led Punjab movement of 1981 intensified the focus on ethno-Sikh identity, leading to demands for a Sikh theocracy (Khalistan) that spiralled into tragic violence and loss of life. As an alarming example of language policing of the time, the wildly popular Dalit Punjabi singer Chamkila received death threats for some of his racy lyrics that supposedly polluted the Punjabi language and culture. In 1988, Chamkila was shot dead at the age of 28 by unknown assailants. While certain people wanted to maintain Punjabi as a dominant and pious language, others began to see it as an imposition.

In 1991, when I was eleven and blissfully ignorant of the dangerous political currents, students at my private school in Jalandhar could be slapped or caned if teachers overheard us speaking Punjabi. Only Hindi and English were encouraged. Many Sikh parents backed this rule, believing that a greater emphasis on Hindi would make their children sophisticated. However, the restriction frustrated me because talking and swearing in Punjabi was so much fun and came naturally when communicating with others who shared the same mother tongue. We (the boys) reserved Hindi for polite conversations with teachers and girls we liked.

My best friend in school, Palwinder Singh (a Sikh with a top knot), fumed at the Hindu and Hindi imperialism. He told me Punjab would soon become a Sikh state called Khalistan. I didn’t quite understand what that meant. I assured him that I, too, resented language policing. Although Palwinder made it clear that there would be no place in Khalistan for Hindus like me, he was happy to get my support on the language issue.

Driven by our youthful rebellion, Palwinder and I swore at our teachers behind their backs, using Punjabi words that are not fit for print.

As I grew older, loving or choosing a language became extremely political and intellectually stunting.

Language and intellectual autonomy

Wendy Doniger has observed that ancient Sanskrit texts have a long tradition of dissent against socio-religious dogma. Modern Hindi has inherited many of these subversive qualities. Given the wide geographical spread of the Hindi language and the diverse belief systems covered under the umbrella term of Hinduism, it is impossible to police them.

The picture isn’t all rosy. Despite the massive popularity of Hindi through Bollywood, TV channels, YouTube and social media, the current state of Hindi literature and intellectual life is gloomy. There are hardly any good literary magazines left; the golden age of Hans, which also introduced many Dalit writers, is over. Even so, the highly politicised, ethno-Sikh Punjabi language fares much worse and offers less freedom.

In the mid-1990s, I was suddenly cut off from my beloved Hindi after completing my class ten exams. Thanks to the Punjab state’s educational policy, Hindi was absent from the curriculum throughout my five years of college, where only Punjabi and English were mandatory language subjects. Taking Hindi literature as an elective wasn’t feasible with my course load.

At the college level, choosing a language should be a matter of individual intellectual aspiration and aesthetic pleasure, not ethno-religious dominance. In 2023, Panjab University in Chandigarh faced political pressure to retain Punjabi as a compulsory subject, which effectively excludes Hindi and the diversity that comes with it.

After migrating to the West, I noticed that Hindi – spoken with various accents – rather than English often serves as the common language among Indians from the Hindi belt, as well as those from Gujarat, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and even Fiji.

In Australia and New Zealand, I fully embraced the intellectual, creative and subversive possibilities of English. But I also had the freedom and pleasure of reading Hindi works by Premchand, Nirmal Verma and eye-opening Dalit writers like Omprakash Valmiki, Dr Tulsiram and Ajay Navaria. In my experience, instead of dividing India, Hindi has the potential to animate and unite it, bringing us into a larger communion and revelation.

Rajiv Thind is a literary scholar and a fiction writer based in New Zealand.