You can taste it or leave and it won’t affect you in the examinations.” According to his grandson CR Kesavan, a senior Congress functionary in TN, “Rajaji said that it was like having chutney on your plate. Interestingly, Rajaji, who introduced Hindi at a section of schools in 1938, changed his views in the 1960s. The intention to impose Hindi as a link language itself is wrong,” he said.
For Tamils, apart from Tamil, being mother tongue, English, which has been there for over two centuries, alone can be the link language. There is no such demand from the people because the link language differs according to the people’s needs in terms of their routine life, place of living and business etc. “They argue that there is a need for having a link language for all States of India. CN Annadurai, DMK founder and former Chief Minister, articulated the argument against Hindi imposition when addressing the students of Alagappa university decades ago. Tamil politicians have preferred English for being a language that puts no Indian region at a disadvantage while connecting the speaker to the world. Those favouring Hindi as a link language argue English was a colonial imposition that should be shunned. Picking Hindi as a national language would provide an unfair advantage to those for whom it was a mother tongue. The argument of those opposing Hindi has been that all Indian languages should have an equal status. “Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar, Lal Bahadur Sastri, Morarji Desai and a host of other leaders from north India had similar views on Hindi,” he said, adding that Ambedkar said Hindi should be made the official languages of all States for better administration.ĪLSO READ | BJP's ideology of promoting 'Hindi, Hinduism and Hindustan' is dangerous: Shashi Tharoor Senthilnathan is of the view that although Gandhi gave importance to the mother tongue of different sections of society, he played a negative role as far as imposing Hindi was concerned, at one point terming the opposition to Hindi from non-Hindi speaking people as the “tyranny of (linguistic) minorities’. The opposition gained momentum and first erupted as an agitation in 1938 when C Rajagopalachari was premier of the Madras Presidency. The first Pracharak of the Sabha was Gandhi’s son Devadoss Gandhi.Īccording to Senthilnathan the first opposition to Gandhi’s move came from Dalit scholar Ayothee Dasa Pandithar and his associate, the Tamil scholar, Pamban Swamigal (not to be confused with the Saivaite saint of the same name). Gandhi remained the Sabha’s president till he breathed his last. It was through the effort that the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha was established in 1918 in Chennai by Gandhi. In the 1910s, the Congress decided to promote Hindi across the country. Azhi Senthilnathan, coordinator, Tamil Language Rights Federation, said the issue of Hindi imposition began with Mahatma Gandhi and later became a policy of the Congress party.