The spread of Hindi in the Andamans
I had begun my work to obtain for Hindi the status of the national language of India, and to popularise it by every means at my disposal from the year 1906 when I was in England. The members of the Abhinav Bharata in England repeated the pledge every night before they retired for sleep, lo ‘make India independent to weld her into one nation, to turn her into a republic, and last and the fourth, to make Hindi the national language of India and Devanagari the script in which it should be written.’
Accordingly, when I found in the Andamans a suitable opportunity for consolidation and propaganda work, I drew up a plan in 1911 in which I gave a prominent place to the spread of Hindi in these islands.
The very idea of making Hindi India’s national language seemed so preposterous at that time that the so-called great leaders of India simply pooh-poohed it. The man in the street had no notion about it Lokamanya Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi openly espoused it only after an agitation in its favour had gathered momentum and weighed behind it And that was long after 1906. Only the Nagar Pracharni Sabha of Benares and some members of the Arya Samaj were the first agitators in its favour. The first credit of propaganda in favour of Hindi as India’s national language, as also of writing patriotically in that language goes to Swami Dayan and Saraswati, the great founder of the Arya Samaj of India.
It was in this stage of the public mind that I undertook in 1911 the task of persuading all the prisoners at Port Blair to study Hindi. I had to begin at the beginning, that is, with a discussion whether Hindi was at all a language after all. To the inhabitants of Maharashtra and of the South of India the word Hindi itself was a strange word. They would designate Hindi as “the language of the Mussulmans.” For in the South the Mussulmans often used it as a mother-tongue, or, at least as a language peculiar to their own community. Prisoners hailing from the North knew it not only as the common language of the Hindus but had come to realise that eight crore of Hindus and Mussulmans together had begun to adopt and use it as their common mother-tongue. Even these, however, used to say that it was not a language fit enough to be the national language of India. Some said it had no grammar, other alleged that it had no literature. It was natural for people from Madras to fight shy of it. But the prisoners from Bengal were as averse from it as those from Madras. For the Bengalis cherished the ambition of making their own mother-tongue the language of India. In fact next to Hindi, it is the Bengali language that deserve the honour of becoming the national language of India. In point of number, four crores of the inhabitants of India speak in Bengali and it is as advanced in literature as the Marathi language on our side. But a Bengali gentleman by name Mitra had given his approval to Hindi as the coming national language - the lingua franca - of India. He had gone the length of conducting a magazine in Hindi in furtherance of that object.
I had meet all these objections and to prove to them that it had grammar, literature, richness of vocabulary and style, and all other qualities capable of making it common language of India. And it had behind it the overwhelming strength of numbers who used it as their language of common speech. I brought for that purpose some classical works m the Hindi language and pointed out though it was at the time lacking in modem literature, how it was fast making up that deficiency. And, further, that if all of them would put their shoulders to the wheel, in five years’ time, we should be able to give that language its proper status in the world of letters. Again, Hindi had always been the ‘lingua franca’ of India; we had not to create it afresh to enjoy that status. The dervish from Rameshwar, as also the merchant carried on intercourse with each other at Hardwar in that common language from the days of Prithviraj or even earlier. With these and similar arguments I at last brought them round to the study of the Hindi language. I tackled prisoners in the jail by a similar persuasive method.
The courses of study we followed were as follows: Every prisoner should learn the languages of provinces other than his own. The Andamans offered a rare opportunity to them for such a study. I used to teach, accordingly, the Bengali prisoners Hindi and Marathi; to prisoners from Maharashtra, I taught Hindi and Bengali; and to the Punjabi I taught Hindi as well as his own Guru-mukhi. I carried on this pursuit throughout my stay in this jail. The Gujaratis were the last to come there, but I taught them, all the same, the Hindi alphabet and equipped them, within the brief period at my disposal, to read and write. Others I taught Hindi first and any other language after it. For ten long years I stuck to that work and my colleagues gave me their fullest co-operation in that self- imposed task.
In a former chapter I have already informed the reader of the circulating library of Hindi books which we had started under our organisation and also of the manner in which books were passed from hand to hand for that purpose. Our colleagues were teaching Hindi to some well meaning Madrasi officers in a secret and silent manner. One doctor taught Hindi to his wife and son, and made them talk to each other in Hindi that it might become the common language of all Indians. He contributed Rs. 5 to 10, from time to time, to our fund for the propagation of that language. I may give here an instance or two of how we collected funds for the purpose, apart from the generous help that some of those officers gave us.
A convict by name Divan, sometime an Arya Samajist, had been transported for life to the Andamans. He was a peasant by caste and was convicted in a trial for dacoity. He became my devoted disciple soon after his arrival in the Silver Jail. He did a lot of work for our secret organization. He had a power of easily influencing the people. Unfortunately Divan died in the prime of youth succumbing to the insalubrious climate of these islands as also to the exhausting hard labour in the prison itself. Some friends decided to celebrate the anniversary of his death by a big dinner. I advised them to divert the collection of money for that purpose to the purchase of Hindi books for the use of prisoners. They agreed and the money was spent in the purchase of Hindi primers and other books which were distributed freely among needy prisoners in the name of the deceased. A man named Bihari was sentenced to death. He made a vow to God to give some money as donation if the sentence was commuted for life imprisonment. By a turn of fortune he got what he had prayed for, when he asked me how he could donate the money which he had vowed for. The dinner was out of question here since I had discountenanced it. I asked him to spend the sum on the purchase of books. But there was a great hurdle here in the way to jump over. Every section claimed the donation to purchase books in his own language- Thus Urdu and English books claimed it at the time. My championship of Hindi was attributed to my desire to kill the Bengali and the Punjabi languages. I told them that I would not sanction the sum for Urdu or English books and I would not claim it for Marathi either. And nobody would charge me with the motive of killing Marathi. Why do I then ask for the money to purchase Hindi books, when I love Bengali, Know Marathi, have learnt Gurumukhi and can teach in all of these? Precisely because what is national must be preferred to what is local and provincial. We must sacrifice our personal bias in the interest of the country as a whole. At last, I persuaded them to use the hundred rupees, which the man with the vow had set apart, towards the purchase of Hindi books. I bought out of the sum the Hindi writings of Al-Udal down to many a book published by the Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Benares. I must say that Al- Udal was my favourite author in Hindi.
I used to impress upon the minds of my Bengali friends, who maintained that Hindi was not a well-developed language or had no literature worth the name, that it was a growing language by bringing to their notice the best works in it as were published by the Gurukul in the Punjab and by similar other publishing houses. Some-time they were considerably annoyed by my persistence, and attributed my efforts to a bad motive. But at last I won and made the prisoners realise the value of Hindi as the national language of India. Henceforward, the matter was no longer under dispute but had become an accepted proposition. I had to use a different line of argument to convince the Sikhs about it. They did not know that the best writings of Guru Govind were written in pure Hindi, like his drama ‘Vichitra’ and history named ‘Surya Prakash’; they were written in Brija Bhasha - which is the purest Hindi and the language of Tulsidas. I convinced them in this manner that Hindi was the language of their religion, and Gurumukhi was only a script and a dialect. So they realised the worth of it not only as a national language but as the language of their panth.
About Gurumukhi I was of opinion from what I had read on the subject in the prison, that it was not a script invented by Gurus, as tradition maintained, but it was only an older script common in the Punjab among merchants and persons of average literacy, as Modi is to Marathi. Historical investigation went to prove that, out of many similar scripts current in the Punjab, a Guru chose the older one and stamped it with his own authority as the script to be followed. Hence its nomenclature Gurumukhi. The religious scriptures of the Sikhs, instead of being written in Shastric or Nagari script, were written in the common script known as Gurumukhi for use by common people even as Buddha wrote them in Pali script with the same end in view. This is a subject by itself. I have referred to it here in the context of Hindi alone. This origin of Gurumukhi, I know, has not yet been accepted by accredited scholarship. Whether it is historically correct or otherwise, I must say that the credit of that finding, so far as I know it, is entirely mine. I have, however, discussed the matter so often with Sikh scholars of language and history.
I did not allow any one of another province to study Marathi in the first instance. My order of study for all the prisoners was first their mother-tongue, next Hindi, and last, the language of any province other than their own.+++(5)+++ I encourged all of them to study at least one provincial language other than their own. I could make no provision for teaching the Dravidian languages of Tamil province including Malayali, Andhra, Tamil and Canarese, for I did not know these languages myself and there was none among the prisoners competent to teach them, and to collect the necessary literature in them in order that their study could be properly conducted. I was ever conscious of this defect in our common programme of teaching languages, and I have not yet been able to remove it. Otherwise during the last ten years, I have made the prisoners study all other languages like Marathi, Punjabi and Bengali in addition to the common language Hindi and their respective mother-tongue. Most of them could read important works in the Marathi language. I used to collect information about standard works in Dravidian languages, and, through the Superintendent, was able to get permission to purchase elementary text-books in that language. I had made a list of them and had provided money for that purpose. But my sudden departure from the Silver Jail put an end to all these projects. Today, I cannot say, what has been the upshot of these plans of mine.
Urdu given a set-back
The Andamans is a colony of men drawn from different provinces of India; as such its lingua franca is Hindi. The progeny of the prisoners who had settled in that colony also uses Hindi as its language of common speech. Intermarriages among their families had given Hindi its natural prominence among them, Most of the settlers are Hindus by religion and race. As such the medium of instruction in schools for their children should have been Hindi, as, for all practical purposes, Hindi has been their mother-tongue at home. But from its early years, the Muslims appointed as teachers in these schools hailed, most of them, from the Punjab and Delhi and were familiar with Urdu script and language. The result has been that Urdu had become the common medium of instruction in all the schools of the Andamans.
Another source of this tradition was that the writers in the prison office were recruited from Muslim prisoners, and Urdu had become the language of the office-records. Those who came out of these schools had all got their education in Urdu; as such those who learnt Urdu came to be regarded in the Andamans as having the stamp of education upon them. Hindi as a medium of instruction naturally fell into the back ground and, later on, came to be altogether ignored. As schools grew in number, Urdu grew in importance along with them. As a matter of fact, there was very little difference between Hindi and Urdu, except for the script. Hindi written in Persian characters becomes Urdu. So the point of difference between the two lay in the question of script. Most of the boys and girls learning in these schools being drawn from Hindus and having Hindi as their mother-tongue at home, should have been taught Hindi in the schools through the Devnagari script. That was proper and desirable from the common standpoint of nationality and religion.
The schools were built up on the taxes paid by the Hindus; and the wonder of it was that their children were forced to learn Urdu script in schools which were meant for them, and which were maintained from taxes paid by their parents. Hindu boys and girls educated in such schools did not know the a, b, c of the Hindi alphabet; they could not read Tulsidas’ Ramayana or Slokas from the Bhagvadgita while they were familiar with couplets from Persian poets. They knew nothing of Kalidas. Let alone Kalidas, they knew not a line from Surdas or Prema Sagar. The Hindi primer or first book was as strange to them as Latin. The boy however read an Urdu newspaper with facility and ease. All his ideas and images were drawn from rivers in Persia and Arabia. He knew more about heroes from those countries. About the Pandavas, or Bharat, or Ramayana, or Bhagwat, he knew practically nothing, for he could not spell a letter out of them. When I went to the Andamans, I saw this state of thing in these islands. If Hindu culture and Hindu tradition were to be saved from extinction in these parts, I felt that the first step to be taken was to make every child learn Hindi script at home, and to talk and read in Hindi alone. I, therefore, thought that an agitation was necessary to bring about this change first in the mind of the Hindu settlers of the place, and then in the schools where their children were being sent for education.
I maintained that the medium of instruction in these schools should be, as a rule, Hindi written in Devnagari script. And for Muslim pupils in such schools Urdu may be accepted for instruction only as special case.
But a change in the schools implied a change, in the first instance, in the mind of the people themselve. For the Hindu settlers in the Andamans had but little sense of nationality in public life, and their notions of Hindu religion were no better than foolish customs from the past. The survival of Hinduism in them was but rigid adherence to these time worn superstitions. They never realised that Hindi was their national language; much less did they appreciate that it had to be preserved and learnt by them as the language of their sacred books. For, after Sanskrit, these were written for common people in Hindi language. The Devnagari script and the Hindi language were their sacred trust, but they knew nothing about their responsibility in that respect; they were not even remotely conscious of that trust. For two or three generations Urdu had dominated the place and had monopolized their attention. They had embraced that language with pride, and had lost touch with their real mother-tongue, an attitude suicidal to them as Hindus in race and nationality. I, therefore, sent round men of my way of thinking among these settlers. I made them visit their houses from door to door, that they might be awakened to their own responsibility in this vital task. I began this task with great determination and pursued it with a tenacity of will and action.
How the awakening was brought about by our organisation and through its agencies among the prisoners and the permanent settlers of the place through discussions, through the spread of literature, through the popularisation of national songs, through secret meetings and lectures, has already been narrated to the reader in a former chapter of this work. The main plank in our programme throughout was to spread among the people the knowledge of Hindi language and literature, and to make them love it as their, national tongue. Five years of intensive campaign in this direction brought about a tremendous awakening among them. We sent special teachers to several Hindu families to teach boys and girls the Hindi language written in the Nagari script. In 1920 when I was appointed foreman of the oil-depot in our prison, I began to come into intimate contact with many merchants in the settlement, who had to come on business in the jail and in connection with the purchase and sale of coconut oil in my charge. Some came only to pay me a visit, others came to deal in oil and coconut cakes. To all of them my constant talk had been, “Yoy are Hindus, Hindi is not only your national language but the language of your religion. You must teach Hindi to your sons and daughters, and that not in Urdu but in Nagari script. You ought to submit a petition to the authorities and assert your right, that it shall be used as a medium of instruction in all the schools of the Andamans.” This combined and consolidated action would alone bring, about the change. No private and individual effort could cope with such a large problem. All the time, so long as that was not being done, they should not fail to instruct their children at home to read and write Hindi and in Nagari script. That was the least that they owed to their children and to themselves as Hindus. If any-one of these visitors seemed agreeable, our volunteers were ready to undertake the task. They would go to his house and begin teaching his children. Of course they had to do it on the sly, for the prisoners were forbidden from having anything to do with independent settlers, and the latter could not speak openly to the prisoners. It was my constant advice to every one I met, be he a Munshi, be he a clerk, be he a doctor, if he was a Hindu, I always told him,”Go and learn Hindi” That was my exhortation to them, that the burden of my song.
As the knowledge of Hindi began to spread among these independent Hindu settlers, I distributed freely to boys and girls of their families elementary readers, copies of the Hindi version of Mahabharata, life of Shivaji and other historical personages written in Hindi. I sent Hindi newspapers to them and made them read or hear them, as they were read out to them. Those soldiers and merchants whom I met in the prison during my last days in Jail, I taught them Hindi myself. Thus the idea that Hindi was their language, both by nationality and religion, took a firm root in the heart of these settlers and a movement began to frame petition to Government that it should be used as a medium of instruction in all the schools of that settlement.
But so long as Government records were kept in Urdu, it was but natural that boys should be attracted to the study of Urdu. The next and the most urgent step, therefore, was that Hindi should supersede Urdu in these offices and in their records. I, therefore, directed my energy to that work. As a rule, all proceedings and records were in English in these offices; but the clerks being men from the North of India and most of the prisoners being more familiar with Urdu than with English, statements came to be teken down and recorded in Urdu and the trdition had continued to our day. These records were in bulk made up of documents in connection with prisoners that were sent out in every steamer from India to Port Blair. The Munshi took down their statements in Urdu. Hence my first move was to ask the authorities that the prisoners should be permitted to submit their statements and other documents in their own native language, and not in Urdu only. Days passed before permission was obtained thus for Marathi and Gurumukhi. The Munshi knew only English and Urdu. And until the Munshi had passed the letter as ‘unobjectionable’. it would neither enter the prison nor go out of it. After the permission was granted, the prisoner could put the contents in any language he knew. Urdu was the common language of communication in Punjab, lucknow end parts of Northern India. And I had to persuade those who sent their letters from those places, and those who sent their letters from here to them, to write them invariably in Hindi. My Marathi and Bengeli friends also sent and received letters in Hindi. The authorities had, perforce, to appoint Hindi-knowing Munshis to scrutinize their contents before the letters passed in or out of the prison.+++(5)+++ The older Urdu-knowing officers now began to study Hindi. If no clerk was found to write a letter in Hindi, our volunteers did it for him. Formerly ninety per cent of the letters were in Urdu script. But at the end of our campaign, ninety percent were in other languages, the bulk of them being in Hindi, and only the rest in Urdu script.+++(5)+++ As the officers with powers to appoint clerks in offices under them became members of Hindu Sanghatan, they appointed Hindi knowing Hindu clerks in these places. It became a rule in the prison thenceforward that a Hindu must write either in Hindi or in his own native tongue. The Mussulman was free to write in Urdu. No compulsion was to be exercised on him to the contrary. But a Hindu could no longer be compelled to send or receive letters in Urdu. When I was admitted into the office, I saw through all the letters coming in and going out, to note how many of the Hindus still persisted in corresponding in Urdu script. And if I found out any-one still doing so, I lost no time in dissuading him from that habit. In course of time, things had so changed in this prison, that it was full of Hindu Munshis at the top and all correspondence in and out was carried on in Hindi and in Nagari script. Letters addressed to us from outside were also written in Hindi for we had directed our relatives abroad to write to us in Hindi. So correspondence in Hindi and other provincial languages went on multiplying and Urdu began to dwindle proportionately. Consequently, the staff of clerks in the office showed an increasingly larger percentage of Hindus, and the prestige of Urdu began to diminish and it sank in popularity.
Only the political convicts had to write compulsorily in English as their correspondence was personally gone through by European officers. But as their number increased by hundreds, they were also permitted to write and receive letters in their mother-tongue, for many of them could not speak or write in English. It was after tremendous effort that this concession was made to them, though, to the last, I had to write in English alone.+++(5)+++
The same change came over the noting down of names and preparing their list. In fact, all work in the office came to be done in Hindi, miscellaneous official correspondence and every other kind of Writing. All this was being done till then in Urdu script Thus Hindi and Nagari won the place of honour in the work ofthis jail and though it did not entirely oust Urdu, it promised to be, before long, its official language.
In the settlement and among free settlers, all invitation cards used to be printed so long in Urdu; then a few ventured to issue them in Hindi, but very many could not read them, for an educated Hindu meant one who knew Urdu. I insisted upon them all the same to go on issuing the invitations in Hindi and, if necessary, in Urdu on the side of the card or letter. If one could not but write in Urdu, I exhorted every Hindu to begin the letter of invitation or the card with the letter “Om” at the top, and end it also with some lines written in Hindi and in Nagari alphabets. I set that new tradition in the writing of invitation cards as the minimum that, as Hindus, they owed to their national language.
It was not a matter for surprise that there was still opposition to the establishment of Hindi as the common language of Hindus in the Andamans. The wonder of it was that the opposition came more from European than from Mussulman officers of the place. It was partly due to the fact that most of them knew Urdu and were ignorant of Hindi. But the main reason of their opposition lay in the fact that I was the supporter of the campaign in favour of Hindi; and it was on that account that they were suspicious of it. A prisoner once asked for books in Hindi, when one of the officers questioned him why he had changed from Urdu to Hindi, and tried to make him go in for Urdu books as before. And when the movement was started to substitute Hindi for Urdu in the schools, the reporters, the C. I. D. Officers and the Mussulman jamadars openly informed the higher authorities in the jail that I was at the back of it, and, if it succeeded, I would grow in influence and power throughout the entire settlement.
The agitation in favour of the Hindi language and the Nagari script was organised and led by the Arya Samajists, by persons who had sponsored the Shuddhi and the Sanghatan movements, by civil resisters to jail tyranny, and by those who had striven hard for the education of prisoners. They were all set down in the black list of the officers “as dangerous agitators of a highly suspicious character.” This unnecessary suspicion of Government prevented Hindi from being the medium of instruction in the schools ofthe settlement though the demand for the change had come from the independent settlers of the Andamans. The Hindu boys and girls had yet to learn in the schools in Urdu script, and not in Hindi alone as their mother-tongue, during the time I was in that jail. It was my continuous plea to the inhabitants that they should continue agitating for it, and bring it to the notice of the authorities that their suspicious attitude to Hindi was unjustified, and that at length they would succeed in giving Hindi its proper place in the education of their children, and Government could no longer withhold their permission to the introduction of Hindi in their schools at least as regards its Hindu pupils.
If I did not succeed in making Hindi indispensable in schools for boys, I did succeed in that respect in schools just started for girls. Even the girls would have been compelled to read and write Urdu script, and Hindi and Nagari would have been given the goby. But I remonstrated with the parents not to tolerate this sort of tyranny, I put them to shame for acquiescing in such a course, I dissuaded them from sending their daughters as Hindus to learn the Urdu alphabet from a Mohomedan Moulvi, and compelled the authorities to introduce Hindi and Nagari script in schools for Hindu girls from their very start.+++(5)+++
The political convicts from the Punjab, it need not be told, began writing home in Hindi rather than in Urdu or Persian. There were many noted writers and good poets among them who composed fine poems in Urdu. They strongly resented my action. But when I brought home to them as Hindus, how by their prepossession for Urdu, they were letting that foreign script and language thrust out Hindi from its high position as the national language of India, they took a vow that never with their pens would they write anything in Urdu, but devote all their talents towards writing in Hindi alone. I had to teach them such simple words in the beginning as “Akasha” (sky) and “Vyayama” (exercise). So much was their mind steeped in Urdu; but it must be said to their credit that they gladly went through that toil and began to master classic Hindi. My campaign against Urdu was not dictated by malice or hatred. I myself had learnt Urdu and can still lisp some words in that language and spell its rudiments. I understand Urdu even today when it is read out to me. And I had no objection to its survival as a dialect between Mussulmans and Hindus. I shall cherish it with love as the language of our Muslim fellow countrymen. But that Urdu should be a dominant language of Hindusthan, and that by the patronage and encouragement of the Hindus therm-elves was more than I could bear. I shall never tolerate Urdu if it tells me to cast off Hindi and to enthrone itself in its place as the national language of India. If it threatens me that way, then I will overthrow it. To that extern alone I will resist Urdu. I carried on agitation against Urdu in the Andamans because it was imposed upon fchoots run and maintained by the Hindu community of that place. I insisted that in those schools Hindi and Nagari must have their unchallenged place as medium of instruction. To force Hindu children to learn Urdu was to denationalize them. It was an inroad upon the Hindu culture. As mere language and script every one was free to leant it As we learn German so we may learn Urdu. But as mother-tongue and national language it had no place in Hindu culture, and could not displace Hindi which traces its pedigree from Sanskrit and has so many cultural associations with what we love as Hinduism. To let Urdu dominate us in this manner was highly ruinous to us.
I have already written about the stocking and circulation of Hindi books throughout these islands in my chapter on libraries in Part I of this book. I bought for these roving libraries, so to say, choicest books in Hindi on politics, political economy, and the history of our national movement so that those who studied them became really conversant with these important subjects. Most ordinary prisoners passing through this training became, at the end of it, entirely different men. I made them study particularly Satyartha Prakasha of Swami Dayanand Saras- wati. Political convicts especially were made to read, re-read, and read it over again. That work of Dayanand, apart from the heat and dust of controversy that occasionally mar it, is a monumental contribution to the proper under-standing of our Hindu religion and Hindu culture. It is a bold and courageous vindication of its national importance, and is, in itself, a fine propaganda in its favour. I bestowed scholarships on prisoners and free men for the study of Hindi. I had to hold out this bait to them at the beginning, but soon they became so fond of reading Hindi books that the stock of books fell far short of the demand, and whatever books we had were never found lying idle on their shelves. They were constantly moving from hand to hand and were read over and over again. I had to warn them to use the books carefully and not to lose them in any circumstance. I even preferred the books being tattered and torn by use to their remaining covered with dust on the library shelves.
The Andamans which knew no other language than Urdu, and where Hindu girls talking to each other spontaneously uttered the word ‘shadi’ to indicate marriage and knew not its Sanskrit or Hindi equivalent, now saw a transformation that was indeed, a miracle. There every Hindu now began to revere Hindi as his national language or the language of his religion, and the idea seized not only the elders but caught the imagination of boys and girls. And the credit of this transformation goes entirely to the enthusiasm and devotion of my fellow-workers in the prison as well as in the settlement at large.
But the full fruition of that agitation was yet to come. And for it Hindi and Nagari must spread throughout the education centres of those islands. I made but a beginning. What its sequel has been we shall see as we go on.