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Abstract
After over a century of language nationalism and almost as long a period of intense competition and mutual contempt, in post-liberalisation and post-low caste assertion India the boundaries between English and Hindi have recently become more porous, and the hold of both ‘pure Hindi’ and ‘British/pure English’ has become much more limited. English is of course still the language of greater opportunities in local and global terms, and increasingly so, but as low-caste politicisation and literacy widen the sphere of Hindi, and the ‘new middle class’ remains resolutely bilingual in its everyday and entertainment practices, the relation between English and Hindi has become more a relationship of parallel expansion, though still perceived in public discourse as a zero-sum game.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Aida-Mihaela Arosoaie for her web-research work, and the British Academy International Partnership for funding to conduct research in India in partnership with Ravikant at SARAI/CSDS, Delhi, Rajend Mesthrie and the anonymous reviewer for constructive criticism.
Funding
This was supported by a British Academy International Partnership with SARAI/CSDS, New Delhi [grant number PM120032].
Note on Contributor
Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Hindi public sphere of the 1920s and 1930s, published as The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (2002). She joined SOAS in 2006, where she teaches courses on Hindi language, literature, the literary history of South Asia, and contemporary politics of culture.
Notes
1 In India the phenomenon is of course not limited to Hindi but is common in other Indian languages, alongside combinations of Hindi with other languages (Mokashi-Punekar Citation2011; Prasad Citation2011). For Taglish as the moniker for English-Tagalog-Spanish mixing in the Philippines, see Rafael Citation1995.
2 I broadly follow Peter Auer's (Citation1998) use of the terms code-mixing and mixed language.
3 ‘Is Hinglish a single force? Just one idea?’ muses advertising guru and commentator Santosh Desai. ‘Or is it a combination of several ideas – a word that captures multitudes of different strands or strategies … ? Are there different intentions at work there?’ (Desai, in Kothari & Snell Citation2011:203).
4 As CEO of FM Radio Mirchi Prashant Panday puts it in rather stark terms, ‘Since 1991, when liberalization happened, economic policy and progress started to dismantle the caste system – the age-old system where your occupation was pre-decided by the caste and place you were born in. Today, development has become much more egalitarian – which strata you come doesn't matter. As long as you have the right skill set and the right attitude, you can join any sector’ (Panday, in Kothari & Snell Citation2011:193).
5 Documented examples range from Rudyard Kipling (Sharma Citation2011), Urdu poet Akbar Ilahabadi (Nijhavan Citation2010:269–71), Phanishwar Renu's 1954 Hindi novel Maila Anchal (Hansen Citation1981), and of course Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (savagely dismissed in Trivedi Citation2003 and more judiciously analysed in Srivastava Citation2005).
6 Reactions in Hindi media were mixed: some positive (Saini Citation2011), but most were critical, for example ‘Hindi par phahraya, Hinglish ka parcham’ (Hinglish's flag flown over Hindi) Ranchi Express 14 April 2012 <http://ranchiexpress.com/158227> (accessed 31 January 2015).
7 The bibliography is vast, from Kachru (Citation1975 & Citation1978), Malhotra (Citation1980), to Dey & Fung (Citation2014).
8 For example Viswamohan (Citation2004), Mesthrie (Citation2005), Bhatt (Citation2008), Si (Citation2011); for useful methodologies Androutsopoulos (Citation2012) and Sebba (Citation2012).
9 This is the approach fruitfully taken by the Kothari & Snell (Citation2011) volume, still the only one available.
10 Thus Anuja Chauhan's Pepsi ad ‘Yeh Dil Maange More!’ (1998) was used as a title for a 2004 Hindi romantic comedy film (Mahadevan) – and sued for breach of copyright; it had earlier been adopted as a personal motto by Indian Army captain Vikram Batra, who was killed in 1999 during the Kargil war and posthumously awarded India's highest military honour; in the 2014 election campaign, Sonia Gandhi and Narendra Modi sparred over the latter's use of the phrase in an election speech in Batra's home town; see Ghosh (Citation2014).
11 As the example of ‘Mera number kab aayega?’ (When will my turn come?) below shows: ‘number’ is a long-attested loanword in Hindi, but in the 2007 Pepsi ad, it was re-accented as part of aspirational Hinglish; it was re-accented again as the name of a call-in show on Star TV in 2011, where number meant phone number while referencing the popular ad.
12 Witness the debate over the entrance test to Civil Service (UPSC) exams: in the television debate We The People, NDVT host Barkha Dutt consistently slotted positions that differed from a plain espousal of English as Hindi and anti-English, despite the fact that the speakers (Ashok Vajpeyi, Alok Rai and Abhay Kumar Dube) repeatedly pointed out that they were not anti-English but wanted English-educated to also be tested for proficiency in Indian languages; see <http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/we-the-people/watch-the-language-debate-hindi-hain-hum/330772> (accessed 30 January 2015).
13 As Times of India director Rahul Kansal put it, ‘Hindi had mass appeal but no brand’ (in Kothari & Snell Citation2011:206).
14 See Chad Nilep ‘“Code-switching” in Socio-cultural Linguistics' <https://www.google.co.za/#q=nilep+2006+code-switching>.
15 Ashok Chakravarty, creative head of leading ad agency Publicis India. His colleague and executive creative director, Sanjay Sipahimalani, points out that the stock of Hindi is now high in the copyrighting business: ‘Ten years ago if somebody used Hindi in an otherwise perfect English sentence, I don't think we would have hired him. It would be a sign of lack of education. Now, it's a huge asset’; both quoted in Beeson (Citation2012).
16 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pushing me to articulate these features.
17 Oye is a Punjabi exclamation and Bubbly puns the English term for sparkling with the common Punjabi diminutive Babli.
18 Personal communication, New Delhi (28 August 2014).
19 See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aog_A-lqla4&feature=related> (accessed 24 July 2014).
20 See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMzZfzzG80s&feature=related> (accessed 24 July 2014). All the children wear Sachin Tendulkar masks, and at the end behind one of them is the real Sachin Tendulkar.
21 As journalist P Sainath remarks, ‘For the media leaders, the lives of ordinary people make no sense in their economic calculations, they cannot buy the products that these guys are selling’. Nero's Guests <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q6m5NgrCJs> (accessed 17 March 2012).
22 Former Bihar chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav famously did not care about criticism from English-language journalists but wanted his photo taken: as he put it, his readers could not read English newspapers but could see his photograph printed.
23 See also Rohit Prakash's presentation ‘Remix ke daur men Hindi’ (Hindi in the time of remix) at the SOAS/SARAI Hinglish workshop in New Delhi <http://sarai.net/hinglish-workshop-18-19-august-2014-recordings/> (accessed 30 January 2015).
24 ‘The politicians arguing about the Reservation for Women Bill in parliament swing back and forth between English and whatever language channel they may be giving a sound bite to. “Let me tell you,” they declare, “iska koi easy solution nahin hai!” (Let me tell you, there is no easy solution to this issue)’ (Mohan Citation2010).
25 See his speech on YouTube <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3UC8fJ5nl0> (accessed 23 July 2014).
26 See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIiRIoyjf5Y&feature=relmfu> (accessed 23 July 2014).
27 See interview on Walk the Talk <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iNUEB7B5do> (accessed 23 July 2014).
28 Apoorvanand, ‘Language strategies in political speech’, SARAI Hinglish workshop <http://sarai.net/hinglish-workshop-18-19-august-2014-recordings/> (accessed on 20 January 2015).
29 See references cited in note 8 above.
30 As documented in many newspaper articles such as Kumar (Citation2014). He notes that these are ‘coaching classes, most of which offer two to three-month crash courses in spoken English’. Interestingly, not only those from vernacular-medium schools, but also some from English-medium ones are enrolling themselves in such classes. Explaining the trend, Kishore Kumar Banerjee, director of British India, says, ‘With premier management institutes like IIM-Ranchi, BIT-Mesra, etc, bringing students from metros with a fluency in English, local students are realizing the need to hone their communicative skills to survive competition’. Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase (Citation2009) record urban middle-class anxieties in Kolkata that the older pride in the Bengali language has jeopardised professional opportunities for the young generation.
31 See Prashant Panday the workplace today ‘has become much more egalitarian – which strata you come doesn't matter. As long as you have the right skill set and the right attitude, you can join any sector’ (see note 4 above).
32 ‘Hinglish, for them helps to break the “formal” environment at office, and makes the boring dull office conversations more peppy and spiced-up. “An usual day at my office is all about work, work and more work, and added to that the late hours … it all can make life really miserable. So, we all colleagues try to keep the office environment as stress-free as possible, and conversing in a language that's fun, youthful and absolutely hatke, like Hinglish, does help a great deal,’ proclaims engineer, Amit Sharma; Sujata Chowdhury (Citation2008).
33 ‘Hinglish, a strict no no in BPOs!’, Nofil, Indian Express 13 May 2010 <http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/hinglish-a-strict-no-no-in-bpos/article1-542998.aspx> (accessed 31 January 2015).
34 As Nandini Gooptu (Citation2013:11) puts it: ‘Urban areas have witnessed a hitherto unprecedented proliferation of private hospitals, educational institutions, leisure and entertainment venues, hotels and hospitality units, large scale organized retail outlets and shopping malls. Maintenance, cleaning, catering and house-keeping in such mass private property, as well as the protection, safety and security of such spaces and their owners and users, have led to both an immense surge in demand for suitably trained labour and a radical transformation in the nature of work at the bottom of the urban formal sector.’
35 Nandini Gooptu, personal communication (25 July 2012).
36 As Krishna Kumar puts it, ‘The Hindi-medium schoolchild very quickly understands that the sources of his/her knowledge are a translation whose original text is in English; e.g. arithmetics and science, where the terminology is so artificial that one needs to know the English word in order to understand the Hindi one. S/he is socialised in a world of knowledge that is full of disparities/unbalances and which produces a lack of self-confidence.’ Whereas ‘the English-medium schoolchild perceives a harmonious world of knowledge and acquires self-confidence through praise and social respect. After the first pain of translations his/her world becomes a wide, international world (even in her actual means are limited), whereas the world of the Hindi-medium child will shrink and s/he will cover up that limited world with the “cover” (jhalar) of nationalism’ (2001, my translation). For a recent study, see LaDousa (Citation2014), also Ramanathan (Citation2005).
37 For example, ‘Teachers of almost all the subjects, save languages, deliver their lectures in a mixture of Hindi and English, so that students coming from different backgrounds might easily comprehend them’ (Mishra Citation2011).
38 See, for example, Kothari & Snell (Citation2011:194); but see also Tripathi's alarmist newspaper article (Citation2003): ‘Excessive use of “Hinglish” from an early age is now being linked with speech disorders like stammering and “faulty production of sound” among children. Unable to articulate well, because of “faulty” bilingual usages, the children end up in a situation where they are neither versed in English, nor in their own mother tongue.’
39 ‘Says trade analyst Amod Mehra, Entertainment Network, “Today, middle-class and poor people have virtually stopped going to the theatres, thanks to the spiralling prices of the tickets. Hence, the main audience for the film is the educated and the upwardly mobile urbanite. These people relate to Hinglish films better because this is exactly what they speak – a bit of Hindi and a bit of English. Besides, they relate to the characters in Hinglish films strongly; they find the larger-than-life image of characters in the candy-floss and action films too unrealistic”’ (Lalwani Citation2003).
40 See Anna Vetticad (Citation2011), ‘There's something about the way language is being used in Bollywood these days. Characters in many major films now speak Hindi the way Indians do in real life – formally in formal situations, casually among friends, melding it with our mother tongues if our roots don't lie in the Hindi belt, and injecting English into our speech whether we are public-school-educated-city-bred folk or street urchins in small towns whose accents are a product of repeated interactions with foreign tourists. A number of Bollywood writers these days are working hard to ensure that the Hindi their characters speak is not textbook-ish or unreal; equally important, that their Hindi dialogues are not direct translations of English sentences; and that their English dialogues don't reek of Western serials and films.’
41 She argues that such self-translation is now ‘incongrous': ‘it's so incongruous when Amitabh Bachchan in Jha's 2011 release “Aarakshan” more than once treats viewers to a direct English translation of a dialogue he's just delivered in Hindi – “Kya aap mujh par jaativaad ka aarop laga rahe hain?” followed by “Are you accusing me of being casteist?”’ (Vetticad Citation2011).
42 Actor-turned-director Deepak Tijori makes the interesting observation that censors are less strict for Hinglish films – clearly reflecting their differential role vis-à-vis the urban middle class and the urban and rural poor (quoted in Lalwani Citation2003).
43 Writes Trisha Gupta (Citation2011): ‘As a young woman who writes screenplays and dialogue for Bollywood recently informed me, people “in real life” no longer say things like “Kya waqt hua hai?” or “Tum yahan kaise?” The idea of speaking full sentences in Hindi is now so anachronistic as to be automatically funny.’ This is obviously a metropolitan view that does not reflect practices outside Mumbai and Delhi and a limited social group.
44 ‘[Amitabh] Bhattacharya takes Hinglish seriously as a language, and treats it with respect. For him, it's less a medium to elicit laughs by some clever juxtapositioning of Hindi words and English ones, but more a hybrid language that nails contemporary reality … The new wave of lyric writers like Jaideep Sahni and Bhattacharya are at the forefront of these successful experiments with Hinglish, which has liberated the Hindi film lyric, allowing the film song to widen its ambit a wee bit; it can now talk about things other than eternal love and cloying romance. Even when the subject is as hackneyed as love, it is now approached in a more direct manner, like in the lyrics of “Jaa Chudail”, also from Delhi Belly, where a disgruntled lover spits out the following, “Ungli pe nachake tune/ Chuna jo lagaya mujhe/ Arey jaa jaa jaa/ Go to hell … /Arey jaa ja ja/ I want silence/ Jaa chudail, Jaa chudail”’ (Mehrotra n.d.).
45 See videos on the official Youtube channels <https://www.youtube.com/show/emotionalatyachaar> (accessed 23 July 2014).
46 He then switches to mixing and switching ‘Kya kar paaenge, ek dusre ko impress, uh? So let's find out! Aj kaun jaaega date pe?’ (Will they be able to impress each other, uh? So let's find out? Who will go on a date today?) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hbOysIorv0> (accessed 23 July 2013).