Guest post by RITA KOTHARI

We live with multiple Hindis – one for instance, in railway and flight announcements, the other in cinema, a mixture of Hindi and Urdu, or Hindustani,  the kind Gandhi wanted India to adopt as its national language. The former kind – sarkari Hindi – survives only in its ceremonial avatar. This  was acknowledged in a rare moment of honesty when   the Rajbhasha unit of Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order in December 2011 to provide relief to beleaguered translators who came up with words like ‘Misil’ (for file) and sanganak (for computer). It suggested using English words or words from Indian languages instead of  coining new ones but to be written in the Devangari script. It is interesting that this remained unnoticed, for it was business as usual when it happened. How is language both incidental and central at the same time? I wondered.

Government Order dated May 27, 2014 on use of Hindi

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