prove so.’^44 (It was not clear from this whether he was not in fact making
a case for three languages: ‘Hindi’, ‘Urdu’ and ‘Hindustani’.) After
independence, Nehru protested against the difficult and over-Sanskritised
Hindi words used in provincial administration and on All-India Radio.
At the same time, he believed that for the time being, English would need
to continue as the language of official communication.
The defence of ‘Hindustani’ as opposed to ‘Hindi’ as a national
language was an attempt not to acknowledge what was potentially a
sectarian position. Literary Urdu was generally considered the language
in which all poetic and literary production had operated in northern India;
Hindi’s over-Sanskritised form owed much to its having been modelled
on modern Bengali, itself a self-consciously ‘classicising’ language that had
Sanskritised itself, attempting to purge itself of its Arabic and Persian
words in its bhadralokand therefore implicitly high-caste Hindu version.
From the latter part of the nineteenth century, sectarian movements had
come to claim ‘Hindi’ in the Devanagari script as a ‘Hindu’ language;
Urdu in the Arabic script had come to be associated with Muslims.
In everyday language, the script was the only difference between the
two languages; this made no difference to the majority of people who were
illiterate anyway. Teaching Hindustani in the Roman script had been
supported by various people at various stages; early on Gandhi had lent
his voice to this – which might have made sense, in the tradition of Kemal
Ataturk’s choice in Turkey of a ‘modern’ script to modernise a language.
By 1946, Gandhi opposed this idea, preferring to keep both scripts. The
Hindi question was a recurrent theme in Nehru’s time. The language
would not, it was always insisted, be imposed on anyone who did not want
it; and the southern Indian states, whose languages were in a completely
different linguistic group, did not want Hindi.
More problematic still were the peripheral areas of India that were only
accidentally a part of the Indian Union – an accident of colonial history
and its arbitrary borders. The ‘tribal areas’ of North-East India were a
case in point. Under colonial administration, they were administered
differently, designated as ‘tribal territories’, and separated from the rest
of India by an ‘inner line’; the ‘outer line’ then divided it from the
outside world. Potential secessionist tendencies had been identified in
the Naga areas of the north-east early on by Nehru, at the time of the
Interim Government. At the time of the separation of Burma from India
in 1935, British administrators had toyed with the idea of attaching these
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 209