Word: hindie
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Earlier two young men, like him mem bers of the radical Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Advancement Party), killed themselves in Vietnamese fashion by soaking their bodies with gasoline and igniting themselves with a match. All three protested "the imposition of Hindi." On schedule, the ruling Congress Party had celebrated the 15th anniversary of Indian independence by establishing Hindi as India's official national language (TIME...
Frustrated Opposition. Hindi, a derivative of ancient Sanskrit, is the language of 190 million Indians in the north, who represent 40% of the nation's population; it is also the tongue of leaders of the Congress Party, headed by Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri. Under the new law, official business now must be carried out in Hindi, and civil servants, India's largest urban labor force, are granted higher seniority status for learning it. But in southern India, where 111 million people speak four different, Dravidian languages - Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam - there is frustrated opposition...
Fortnight ago, an anti-Hindi rally in Madras denounced the "imposition of Hindi" as "discriminatory tyranny." Other southerners even charged "Hindi imperialism," and a Madras political party planned to spend Republic Day in mourning. Last week in Bengali-speaking West Bengal, trucks bearing license plates in Hindi were ordered off roads on the plea that cops were unable to read them-obviously a deliberate and calculated harassment of Hindistate shipping...
Desk Piles. To spread Hindi, the government is spending $2,100,000 this year. Committees have been appointed to translate legal and technical terminology into Hindi, a task complicated by the fact that one English term often comes out as a cumbersome and exotic train of several Hindi words ("telephone exchange," translated literally into Hindi, is "house of the distant voices"). Such bureaucracy by doublespeak is hardly apt to speed India's snail-slow governmental machinery, which at a time of increasing national difficulties needs just the opposite. Desks of West Bengal bureaucrats are already piled high with letters...
...Mahomedali Chagla, who has pleaded: "Let us not destroy the link language. It is our window to the world." Under the 1963 act, Parliament is to review the language question again in 1975. But at his first formal press conference last week, Premier Shastri confirmed his support for Hindi, and as for bureaucratic snafus, he said simply, "There will have to be some waste of time." With that, Shastri flew off to Bombay to participate in the dedication of India's first factory for the manufacture of plutonium-for which there is no Hindi word...