The return to NATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

In Priya, one of New Delhi's bustling shopping malls and a symbol of the new consumerist culture in India, billboards written in Hindi (but printed in English script) call out to shoppers Piyo thanda, jiyo thanda (drink cool, live cool) and Yeh dil mange more (this heart asks for more). For North India's middle and upper classes, Hindi has become 'cool' again, establishing itself as the lingua franca of both the marketplace and the mass media. The majority of news and entertainment television channels are now broadcast in Hindi, and the number of FM radio stations in Hindi has doubled in the past five years. But has this return of Hindi to the metro media translated into an increasing interest in Hindi literature?

A survey of those both inside and outside the Hindi literary world reveals that the Hindi of the marketplace and the Hindi of the book have little, if any, connection. "I don't think I've ever read a Hindi book," says Aditya, a college student in Delhi. "Middle-class people like me speak Hindi, but we would never read a book in Hindi." Dharmendra Sushant, an editor at the Hindi publishing house Vani Prakashan, explains: "There is a gap between the marketplace and Hindi literature. The Hindi that is used in the marketplace is actually for English speakers — it is for their consumption." This 'bazaar Hindi' tends to be a parody of vernacular Hindi, a satire of the native Hindi speaker and his literature. This irony reflects the paradoxical status of Hindi as a national language that has never actually been accepted as such by either India's rulers or its common people.