Opinion | Stalin, Hindi And The Battle For Bharat’s Civilisational Identity
The DMK’s war against Hindi is just an excuse. The real battle has been about the Sanatana Dharma and, of course, the civilisational identity of this land called Bharat
Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has launched a fresh war against Hindi. What’s unfortunate is that it is based on a wilful distortion of facts, largely aimed at scoring political brownie points, obviously at the risk of threatening national unity and integrity.
It is a wilful distortion, as the Centre, through its three-language formula, does not propose imposing Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states. In fact, DMK chief and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin’s recent diatribe is wrong on two counts: first, the three-language formula, against which Stalin has taken up the cudgels, as suggested by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, is not a new phenomenon; and second, the current Union government’s stance on Hindi is far more flexible compared to that of its predecessors.
related stories
As for the three-language formula, the University Education Commission made the first recommendation for such a policy in 1948-49; interestingly, at that time, the commission, while conceding that Hindi was in no way superior over regional languages such as Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, or even Marathi, Bengali, and Punjabi, foresaw the former eventually replacing English as the link language in the country.
The NEPs of 1968 and 1986 retained the three-language formula and supported the promotion of Hindi as the third and link language. However, while the three-language formula was implemented nationally in 1968 under the NEP, it couldn’t be imposed in Tamil Nadu due to the anti-Hindi agitation spearheaded by the DMK. In 1968, Tamil Nadu was the only state across the country to adopt a two-language policy, Tamil and English. In 1986, again, Tamil Nadu was given the leeway.
As for the NEP 2020, it retained the three-language formula but, for the first time, has offered greater flexibility for non-Hindi-speaking states. Forget about non-Hindi-speaking states, it does not even propose Hindi to be made compulsory in Hindi-speaking states too. Instead, for the first time, it has left the choice to the states, regions and students, as long as at least two of the three chosen languages are native to the country.
So, why is the DMK raising the issue of Hindi when it is not even the issue? A part of the reason can be the rise of Thalapathy Vijay in Tamil politics. One of the biggest stars in Tamil cinema today, Vijay has announced his entry into politics. Though it would be too early to predict the course of his political journey, the DMK is not taking any chance and making sure that it retains its hardcore Dravidian identity by giving a fresh impetus to the North-South divide.
The DMK’s Dravidian politics, however, is full of loopholes—and contradictions. Historically, it is based on a theory of an invasion that never actually took place. With each passing day, the colonial-communist mischief of first inventing and then promoting the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory is getting exposed. A theory that has the backing of not a single literary evidence (if anything, the Vedic texts talk about out-of-Bharat migrations), and whose archaeological records are so dubious and unreliable that even its most ardent supporters such as Romila Thapar have quietly moved to the Aryan Migration Theory (which, ironically, finds itself on an even more slippery ground).
The innate civilisational unity of Bharat, despite its apparent diversity from the outside, has been the case for millennia. The Vishnu Purana makes a pointed reference towards that when it says: “Uttaram yat samudrasya, Himadreshchaiv dakshinam, varsham tad bharatam nama, Bharatee yatra santatihi" (The country that lies north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains is called Bharatam, there dwells the descendants of Bharat).
It is this civilisational thread that keeps Bharat united—not cricket, cinema or, worse, English, as the DMK and its ideological supporters would like us to believe. It is this innate unity that encouraged Adi Shankaracharya, born in Kerala, to establish tirthas (pilgrimage centres) across the subcontinent—from Joshimath in the north to Sringeri in the south, and from Dwarka in the west to Puri in the east.
It is this intrinsic idea of oneness that has ensured that only Namboodiripads from Kerala would be priests at Badrinath; those hailing from Karnataka would look after the Pashupati temple in Kathmandu; and those looking after Rameshwaram would come from Maharashtra.
The North-South binary and the Aryan-Dravidian divide, thus, are a figment of the DMK’s dangerous imagination, perfected and weaponised by the Dravidian party to gain and retain political power in Tamil Nadu.
The DMK’s anti-Sanatana stance, in general, and especially its known animosities vis-à-vis Brahmins, expose its dubious double standards. Even if one takes the Dravidian argument at face value and considers Brahmins to be the oppressors of the indigenous Dravidian people in Tamil Nadu, the current generation of Brahmins cannot be held accountable for those crimes. In fact, while Brahmin atrocities are among the most widely studied phenomena, atrocities against Brahmins remain one of the best-kept secrets in post-Independence Bharat.
Not much is recorded on how Brahmins faced institutional/societal persecution in Tamil Nadu after 1967 when the DMK came to power. VS Naipaul, in his seminal book, India: A Million Mutinies, records how a young Tamil Brahmin confessed to him that it was “not easy for Brahmin boys nowadays". They were mocked in schools and colleges, faced discrimination in job opportunities, and were incessantly ridiculed by ‘rationalists’ in every walk of life. Overnight, with the government appropriating temple property and resources, a Brahmin was reduced to being “simply the conductors of rituals, the purohits, and certainly there was impoverishment".
Despite the institutional targeting of Brahmins for at least the past 50 years—with not a single instance of reprisal from the other side (most Brahmins in Tamil Nadu have instead chosen to migrate elsewhere, including abroad)—the DMK’s appetite for Brahmin blood doesn’t seem to get over. Ironically, the people who are baying for Brahmin blood in Tamil Nadu never get tired of exhorting Hindus to forget Muslim vandalism in the medieval era. They believe any attempt to record and even report such cases of vandalism, violence and killings would strain the current Hindu-Muslim relationship in the country.
No such censorship is applied in the case of Brahmins, though. This is because a Brahmin is seen as a symbol of civilisational Bharat that works as a bulwark against North versus South and Aryan versus Dravidian divides. Here, the DMK finds itself in the company of the missionaries, who too have traditionally targeted a Brahmin because the latter has been regarded as the biggest hurdle in winning “India for the Christ" — a fact attested by Abbe JA Dubois in Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies.
The British Raj, too, saw him as a rallying point for the country’s nationalism rising against colonial rule. Worse, post-Independence, the Left-Dravidian forces have carried this forward — to villanise a Brahmin, for he seems to epitomise everything that they detest. Is it, therefore, any surprise that Tamil Nadu, as per a study conducted a few years ago by the Centre for Policy Studies, a Chennai-based think tank, has been regarded as the most favourable state for the growth of Christianity in Bharat?
In this backdrop, it is obvious that the DMK’s war against Hindi is just an excuse. The battle has never been about Hindi per se. It has never been about a Brahmin too. The real battle has been about the Sanatana Dharma and, of course, the civilisational identity of this land called Bharat.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
- Location :
- First Published: