3 August

The Supreme Court has recently made a very significant observation: while there are at least 22 official languages in India, Hindi is the “national” language of the country. The observation was made by a single-judge bench of the country’s apex court while disposing of a petition related to a claim pending before a Motor Accident Claims Tribunal (MACT) in Uttar Pradesh. While the observation is sure to trigger off a fresh controversy over what India’s “national” language is, the fact remains that the Constitution of India does not specifically define or identify any language as a “national” language. Though there have been claims and counter-claims over Hindi being India’s “national” language for several decades now, the fact remains that Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is the country’s official language under the Union of India. Different states, on the other hand, have different state languages and official languages depending on the linguistic demography of each state. In Assam, for instance, Assamese is an official language alongside Bodo, while Bengali is the principal official language in the three districts comprising the Barak Valley. The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution, on the other hand, consists of 22 languages, these being (in alphabetic order) Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. It, however, appears that the Eighth Schedule was intended to promote the progressive use of Hindi and the enrichment and promotion of that language. This emanates from the fact that Article 351 of the Constitution provides that it shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language and to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating, without interfering with its genius, the forms, styles, and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages. Right now, there are also demands for the inclusion of at least 38 other languages of the country in the Eighth Schedule, and this list includes several languages from the Northeast like Karbi, Khasi, Kokborok, Kamatapuri, and Tenyidi. It has been widely accepted that as the evolution of dialects and languages is dynamic and influenced by socio-eco-political developments, it is thus difficult to fix any criterion for languages in such a diverse, multi-ethnic, and multilingual country like India.