Delhi University Hindi teachers unite! You’ve nothing to lose but your jobs

You wouldn’t know it. And those still bemoaning the ‘ hegemonic language’ being pushed down everyone’s throat by ‘North Indians’ won’t believe it. But if one is to believe some Delhi University teachers, we are to witness the death of the Hindi language any day now. A petition demanding that Hindi be returned as a compulsory language in humanities and commerce programmes in DU colleges has been signed by more than 100 teachers and sent to the President. (Yes, the same President whose Hindi diction needs work.) So why the sudden outcry to save Hindi from perceived extinction? Answer: the prospect of job loss. Or, as the teachers put it, because their “workload has been greatly reduced”.

Not only is the situation worse since “choice [of what the students study] is now in their hands”, but the government is also after Hindi — the same “nationalist” government that “screams about promoting indigenous languages”. Such concern for India’s de facto lingua franca is sweet. But if Hindi courses in DU were somehow made more popular than they are now, they could have attracted youngsters as much as Hindi movies and songs do outside these empty classrooms. One wonders whether these teachers with very little workload would be anguished if they were paid a salary to teach nothing at all.