Discovering the devilish uses of curry

As I write this on the day after Thanksgiving, across thousands of American kitchens an aroma will be rising which should be familiar to Indians, though in truth most of us will have no idea what it is. It is the aroma of thousands of bottles of curry powder, some lamentably ancient and containing what will be by now the equivalent of mildly flavoured sawdust, because it is only on this annual occasion that they are opened. It is the time for that great American ritual – the making of the turkey leftovers curry.

By chance this year’s turkey curry cooking was preceded by another high profile American presentation of Indian flavours, at President Obama’s State Dinner for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. These dinners traditionally feature American food, not that of the guest country, but the Obamas shook things up by featuring curried prawns and a few other Indian touches. Perhaps they should have chosen turkey curry, as a dish that is nominally Indian inspired, but in reality American. Turkey occasionally features in Indian food, like with turkey varuval from Chettinad, but mostly we, quite correctly, leave the large and tasteless bird alone.

But tradition demands that Americans eat them, and despite the many ways devised to try and make them tasty (the current favourite technique is brining, which as someone pointed out, simply replaces any natural flavour with salt; it tastes good, since humans like salt, but you’d get the same satisfaction from a bowl of chips). Since it’s probably not possible to make regular turkey tasty there must be many who would rather skip the main meal and go straight to leftover curry the next day. This year his New York Times column Mark Bittman, who has become the current generation’s favourite food guru with his book How To Cook Everything, advised making a turkey and spinach curry.

Using turkey in this way though is not American in origin, but more likely British, and for Christmas. As
Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol demonstrates, the habit of cooking turkey for Christmas really took off in the Victorian era – just the time when using curry powder also became common, thanks to the many returnees from the British Raj.

Isabella Beeton’s famous Book of Household Management, written 17 years after The Christmas Carol, takes a Christmas turkey dinner for granted, but notes that “the breast is the only part which is looked on as fine in a turkey, the legs being very seldom cut off...” Instead she recommends they are later reused in the kitchen as “a special attraction at a bachelor’s supper-table – we mean devilled; served in this way, they are especially liked and relished.”

Devilled is a culinary term that means highly spiced and it seems to have cropped up sometime in the 18th century, significantly at the time the East India Company started taking over India. This was the era of the ‘nabob’, Company traders who had made themselves hugely wealthy in India and came back to Britain with an Indian taste for spicy food – or perhaps even more. Just as the super spicy vindaloo and phal curries of British Indian restaurants has little to do with India, devilled foods also seem to have become a sort of macho British spice trip if this recipe from William Kitchiner’s Cook’s Oracle in 1845 is to be believed (this is courtesy the excellent Old Foodie blog):

“The diables au feu d’enfer, or dry devils, are usually composed of the broiled legs and gizzards of poultry,
fish-bones, or biscuits; and if pungency alone can justify their appellation, never was the title better deserved, for they are usually prepared without any other attention than to make them “hot as their native element” and any one that can swallow them without tears in his eyes, need be under no apprehension of the pains of futurity.” The recipe that follows calls for salt, chilli powder and curry powder in equal parts, with double the amount of powdered truffles, which must have made for some explosive, if rather muddled, aromas.

Devil was then a macho term for curry, and still survives in dishes like devilled eggs, where boiled eggs are split and the yolks mashed with curry powder, Worcestershire sauce (another nabob invention) and butter, and piped back into the halved whites. But curry also started to be used for a more literally devilish purpose. Over time quite a few people have found that the plentiful use of spice can be used for far less pleasant cover-ups than just leftover meat. For example, in 2003 Dena Thompson, dubbed the “Black Widow” was jailed for life in the UK after being convicted for killing her husband with mixing an overdose of antidepressants in his favourite spicy curry.

In October this year, Gary Stewart from Manchester was arrested for attempting to kill his neighbours after a long feud by mixing slug pellets, a pesticide, in a takeaway Indian curry he’d brought for them as a ‘peace offering’. But the prize for curry poisoning must go to Masumi Hayashi in Japan who tried to kill over 100 people by putting arsenic in a pot of curry that was being cooked for a communal feast. I can’t think of anything quite on this scale in India. The sort of poisonings one tends to find here are more on the lines of
drugged biscuits to knock people out on trains, and then rob them.

As it happens, perhaps the most famous use of spiked curry was in a similar case – but fictional. This is in ‘Silver Blaze’, a Sherlock Holmes story about a stolen race-horse, which is best known for Holmes noting of “the curious incident of the dog at night time”. When it’s pointed out to Holmes that the stable dog did nothing, he replies: “"That was the curious incident.” Holmes’ point is that dog would have barked at a thief, but didn’t because it was his master, the stable-owner, who was stealing the horse.

But this case could equally be said to have turned on the curried mutton, which was served to the stable-hand who was supposed to be guarding the horse. The mutton has been spiked with opium for the boy goes to sleep, and it is alleged that an outsider had spiked it. But Holmes notes that “Powdered opium is by no means tasteless... A curry was exactly the medium which would disguise this taste.”

And since the only people who could have chosen to make curry for dinner were the stable-owner or his wife, the case was proven. As far as I remember, this is the only example of Indian food in a Sherlock Holmes story, and a good example of the interesting uses that curry can be put to. But don’t let this put you off your meal, just in case you’re eating post-Thanksgiving turkey curry today!

Nightmare on Wall Street

“He’s not going to do it,” Paulson told Geithner in amazement, “He said he didn’t want to ‘import our cancer.’” That’s the US treasury secretary telling the head of the New York Fed that Alistair Darling, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, had just turned down his request to clear some hurdles for British bank Barclays to buy – and save – Lehman Brothers last September.

It reveals the greatest strength of this book: a near-minute by minute recounting of the events from Bear Sterns’ failure to the collapse of Lehman and the rest of the drama as Wall Street and Washington fought to save the US financial system.

To give a fly on the wall account of almost every conversation, memo, email and phone call between each of the major – and some not so major – players in the drama needs two things: very hard work and tremendous access. Sorkin, a financial columnist for the New York Times, conducted more than 300 hours of interviews with his sources and he makes full use of the seemingly unlimited access that he enjoys with the protagonists.

Most of the people who told their stories refused to be identified, but that adds a tantalizing challenge for the interested reader: now, who could have revealed that? Sometimes the solutions are no-brainers.

Warren Buffet is getting ready to leave for a dinner when he’s called by Barclays and requested to guarantee Lehman’s trades for two months. With no intention of doing so, but ever polite, Buffet asks for a fax that he’d “be glad to read.” Moments later after hanging up, Buffet remembers an incident from 10 years ago and thinks: “Maybe he had to stop being so polite to these Wall Street boys.” Now who could have told Sorkin that?

It’s a tribute to his writing that despite his ball-by-ball narrative Sorkin manages to hold your attention for nearly 550 pages. His character sketches are lean and unjudgemental. Yet, though he doesn’t pass judgement, by the end most of the characters – with the possible exception of Buffet and some of the regulators – come across as distinctly unsavoury.

And yes, there’s the story of then-Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who quit Goldman Sachs to join government, visiting Russia at the exact time that Goldman was holding its board meeting there. He asks to meet the board, purely as a ‘social event.’ Advised by his staff against it, he decides to meet them anyway without noting it on his official calendar. Sorkin describes some Goldman folks feeling as if they were in a ‘spy thriller’ as they rode down in a special bus to meet Paulson in his hotel suite in the evening. It was June, 2008 and Paulson still felt the US economy would ride out a rough patch by year-end.

If you’re looking for analysis and interpretation you’ll be disappointed. Sorking faithfully sticks to his task as chronicler. Near the end, he observes that the financial system, created to support real businesses and the economy, had crossed the road. Instead of helping trade and commerce, it was busy feeding itself, money making money. As the crisis receded, “it left the survivors with a real sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.” That should raise some red flags about the current state of global markets.

Why climate meets are carbon copies

Climate change is one of those issues I try to avoid. Not because I don’t think it’s important but simply because it’s almost impossible to comment or write on something where my I/O error, as they say in techie, is so garbled.

Let me give you a small example. If I go for the climate change stuff here, I OD on carbon footprints, neutrality, evils of air travel, green taxes, emissions, emissions, emissions. Of course, at the more erudite gatherings, I get an overdose of China, how snotty India is being in blocking a global deal, and why we’re being cantankerous.

After the recession, thankfully, the tone of those discussions have changed from hectoring and lecturing to a more muted acceptance of the post-modern global reality.

Now, what would be the point of telling my readers in India that they should cut down on air travel or switch off the lights when not in use?

It would make as much sense if I tried to convince the Guardian’s readers that, yes, we really do recycle everything in India, including newspapers, old clothes and mobile phones, for sound economic reasons, and have always done so. (I’ve tried. They just don’t believe it. They think I’m talking about rubbish-scavengers. They also don’t believe that we have converted to CNG only already in places, banned plastic bags etc, when they’re still trying to get their act together on taxing SUVs.)

One could well be writing from Mars. This is the one subject in which misinformation rules — despite the net, despite the free flow of information and exponentially increasing numbers of people travelling around the world to see for themselves.

It’s the one subject on which everyone has a view, and nobody has even a glimmer of an original idea — no, not even the activists who keep draping ribbons all over the Big Ben from time to time.

Even the experts, whether in India or Copenhagen, keep parroting the same old tired concepts. Here’s where the huge gap lies. Amidst the plethora of myths and scare-mongering — mostly indulged in by the environmental lobbies that are probably doing more harm than good to their own cause by creating bogeymen the real issues get obfuscated. The real experts are science blokes, not very good at getting their message across in screaming headlines.

We need to get back to basics. For instance, India doesn’t think it’s important to constantly shout about how energy-efficient we already are — simply because we don’t have any energy. Or how naturally sustainable (we call it cost) conscious Asian and Indian consumers already are. Or that recycling doesn’t have to be a burden, it can generate an entire sub-economy, and could be scaled to a global trade level.

The American public, who in a recent poll voted overwhelmingly against giving any financial aid for battling climate change to developing nations, think that China is this ticking environmental bomb — but they’re judging China from their own consumption patterns, not the reality. Apparently, Americans still use petroleum for domestic heating. Wow.

Now that Mr Obama has publicly accepted what everyone already knew, that the Copenhagen summit will not yield any tangible results, we have another year to sit back and review everything.

The fact is, no binding agreement is ever going to come out of any climate change negotiations, as the agenda is today. The current agendas are about as rusted as that old toaster I’ve bin storing ’cos I can’t figure out how to get rid of it. Kyoto was a long, long time ago. The world has changed, but the discussions haven’t.

To recap quickly, what we want is for rich countries, whose fragile economies are absolutely dependent on high rates of consumption, to cut down consumption. For developing countries, whether it’s India, China or sub-Saharan Africa, to stop raising their people’s standard of living.

Also, for rich country taxpayers to subsidise the cost of clean energy for potential economic competitors. And developing countries, to pay for the past misdeeds of the rich. Oh, yes, the carbon credit market is supposed to do the trick — why, exactly why a system that allows you to buy as many emissions as you can afford help to reduce the overall damage to the eco-sphere is beyond me. It ain’t common sense.

Do you really see a world reverting to pastoral life like the Amish? God, these guys are worse than fantasy writers. It’s like those Wall Street derivatives. We’re going to have to wake up to the fact that the basic assumptions were all wrong, and the model a stupid one.

Natural disasters are not new in history: people and societies have always moved to avoid everything from the Ice Age on. But borders and immigration is a 20th century phenomenon. If you have a potato famine in Ireland today, millions can’t move to America.

I’ve recently been hearing a few, lone scientific voices saying that instead of emissions, the global focus should shift to research. It’s a science problem, only a scientific breakthrough can provide a final solution. That’s the only sensible thing I’ve heard in a long, long while.

Biting Through The Essential Marathi Cookbook

I haven’t had the chance to cook from Kaumudi Marathe’s Essential Marathi Cookbook , so in that sense this is an incomplete review. But this book is a late addition to a Penguin India series on regional foods which has always been about more than just cooking . The series aimed to present readers not just with cuisines, but with food cultures that weren’t that well known. And for that the background material on the region and communities, their history, the ingredients they used and anecdotes both general and personal , were all as important as the recipes themselves.

I don’t know if Penguin specifically set out to detail lesser known Indian cuisines, or it just happened that way because the better known cuisines already had well known books. But that’s how it happened, with volumes on Sindhi, Kodava (Coorgi), Andhra, Anglo-Indian , Kashmiri and North-Eastern foods that go some way to redress the process noted by sociologist Arjun Appadurai where he noted Telugu food being sidelined by Tamil, Kashmiri by Punjabi and so on (though rather oddly Appadurai felt Marathi food was sidelining Kannada food, whereas in reality I think both have been sidelined by Gujarati in the North and Tamil and Kerala food in the South).

It is not a surprise, I think, that the two least satisfying books in the series, on Goa and Kerala, have come from relatively well documented cuisines. Parsi cuisine is also well-documented , but Bhicoo Manekshaw’s effortless authority gives her book in the series real value.

I think, on the whole, the books with a community focus fare better than those with a geographic one. Indian regions are so crowded with communities, with overlapping histories, that it gets confusing. Geography does affect cuisines, perhaps more than we think, but for this sort of cookbook a community focus is easier , allowing explanations of religious practices and historical customs and how these affect their food.

Marathe starts with a real handicap here: Maharashtra , as she notes, is just a little smaller than France. It also has a bit geographic divide between lush coast with easy access to seafood, and parched interiors which enforce more austere cooking. It has also been a region which has seen many communities passing through, and often settling down, and creating their own regional traditions. Laudably, given the politics of community in this state, Marathe explicitly aims to document these, seeking out Muslim Marathi and East Indian Christian recipes. She only fails, she says, to find recipes of the Bene Israeli Jews who settled on the coast, and also of some of the tribal communities like Agaris, Warlis and Bhils.

Maybe I’m being greedy, since this is generally a well researched book, but I do think more digging here would have yielded results. Tribal, and in a larger sense, Dalit, recipes are always hard to find, but Maharashtra is one region where a long tradition of activism and education has resulted in narratives or documentation that could have yielded results. Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan (translated in English as The Weave of My Life) is one autobiography that has much to say about food in the lives of Maharashtrian Dalit women, and she’s a source that could have been used. Similarly, Esther David has written on the Bene Israeli community and her Book of Rachel had excellent recipes.

I am also really surprised, for an author who claims a particular interest in food history, to find no mention of Rasachandrika, the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin (GSB) that is one of the earliest and most impressive compilations of community cooking from anywhere in India. (Marathe does include GSB recipes). It’s also a pity that no space could be found for the historical offshoots of the period of Maratha conquests – there are Maratha influenced recipes that persist in Thanjavur , and in her memoir Jaipur’s Maharani Gayatri Devi, whose mother was a princess of the Maratha dynasty of Baroda, mentions specifically Marathi dishes that were made in the Baroda palace.

But this underlines my point that geographic regions can get too unwieldy for anything less than a really encyclopaedic cookbook – and that was beyond what Penguin could produce. At 398 pages this is already one of the thickest in the series; only Manekshaw’s book and Patricia Brown’s Anglo-Indian one are longer. When I speak to her, Marathe rues the amount of material that she had to cut. More happily she tells me that she definitely plans a longer book for which she plans to travel extensively through the state.

Based on the evidence of this book, Marathe is going to be the ideal person for this work. From her base in California, where she runs classes that seek to show Americans there’s more to Indian food than curry, she’s picked up good food writing skills, and the recipes are presented with the clarity that makes you think you can do them, and just the right amount of anecdotes and urging that make you want to. She also has the interest in ingredients that’s so important in the food world today – which is particularly important for Maharashtrian food too, given the number of unique ingredients it uses (the only shortcoming perhaps is with varieties of fish, but that’s really a vast subject on its own). At the same time Marathe avoids the easy trap of writing more for a foreign audience, explaining or simplifying too much (some credit perhaps is due here to Sherna Wadia, who’s been the excellent editor for this series).

This is not just the best attempt that could have been made at the impossible task of documenting Maharashtrian food in one volume, it’s also one of the best in this series. I just wonder who will publish the larger volume that Marathe must now aim for, since she’s clearly reached the limits of what Penguin can support. It’s sadly true that some of the best books on regional Indian food, like the magnificent Dadimano Varso of the Palanpuri Jain community, have been self-published .

But I note that recently some of the many loudly self-proclaiming promoters of Maharashtrian pride have started turning their attention to culinary matters . There are the all the vada-pav ventures, of course, and now proposals to insist that culinary academies in the state teach more local food. Rather than such peremptory measures, wouldn’t they better serve their aims by supporting a book that aims to be even more encyclopaedic and inclusive than Marathe’s already excellent book?

Ethics and Finance: Time for introspection

n the wake of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and with the world's financial order in a state of flux, the future of capitalism is being questioned. Is it the best system by which to create wealth that will benefit the largest number of people? Ever since it first emerged, capitalism has been accused by its detractors of encouraging greed and selfishness. Its defenders have responded either that this is not so, or that selfish behaviour is redeemed by its socially beneficial effects of greater economic growth.

It was Susan Strange, Professor of International relations at the London School of Economics who first coined the phrase, 'casino capitalism'. She warned in the 1980s how the speed at which markets work, combined with their near-universal reach, and could result in levels of global volatility that had never been seen before. In a world where the vast bulk of market trading has no direct relation to any real business requirement, what concerned her was how the instability of active markets could lead to the collapse of national and regional economies.

Nearly thirty years on, we have seen exactly how, at their worst, financial markets can be engines of unprecedented destructive excess. The catalogue of errors that we have seen is long. It includes the appetite for higher leverage… the over-reliance on wholesale funding … over-confidence in risk modelling techniques… and the misalignment of incentives. The past two years have challenged in a fundamental way the argument that the market always knows best.

The financial crisis has triggered soul-searching about our economic system. Surprisingly perhaps, the questioning has come from capitalism's most committed practitioners: bankers. Stephen Green, HSBC chairman, has written a book about morality and money. Ken Costa, Lazard International chairman, writes: "We are doomed to repeat our mistakes if we do not restore sound ethics to economic behaviour."

HSBC Group Chairman Stephen Green, in his recent book "Good Value - Reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world" reflects on how the human desires for exploration and exchange have led us into a globalised, urban world, and considers why it is that capitalism is the best system by which to improve material human wealth. As the world's financial order is in a state of flux, how do we align these drives, and capitalism, with our spiritual and psychological needs? And how should the financial sector respond not only to the current crisis but to the wider needs of the people it serves. Do businesses - and banks in particular - have a duty to society that goes beyond the creation of profit? Does open market capitalism remain our best hope for creating wealth that benefits all of society? Encompassing history, politics, religion and economics, "Good Value" offers new perspectives on how we can live in a richer, more dynamic world

Green emphasizes introspection by the leaders in financial sector-"One common underlying theme links the problems which were developing at many financial services companies in the lead up to the crisis. Simply put, it was a greedy focus on the short-term. A culture had begun to pervade many institutions that it was fine to pursue short-term returns without any concern for the longer-term consequences, or the rightness of what was done. The mantra had become one of 'if the market will bear it, if there is a contract, then I don't need to ask any further questions.' "Leaders in the banking sector, perhaps more than most, need to demonstrate that they recognise the moral dimension of what was happening in the years leading up to the financial crisis. This was not just a failure of prudential oversight, or of risk management, or of scenario planning, or indeed of common sense - although it certainly was all of those things. Of course, we cannot address the subject of morality in business with a rule book or a tick-box mentality. There are no easy answers and there is no 'one size fits all' approach. Yet what is striking is just how widespread a consensus there is about what constitutes ethical business. We should not forget that, at its simplest level, it is about integrity: doing business with trust and honesty, and treating people as ends, not just means.

Stephen Green, has some interesting and insightful observations to make-"The challenge we face - as practitioners, policymakers, and regulators - is to find the delicate balance that will encourage markets to deliver prosperity, while keeping in check those activities that fail the tests of usefulness, transparency and sustainability. It is now clear that effective government oversight, regulation and even intervention, in times of stress, are all essential. The markets cannot police themselves. As we search for this balance at a time when much of the world is still traumatised by the crisis, let us keep in mind two things. First, one of the stark lessons of the twentieth century is that there is no acceptable alternative to a market-based approach to development. Second, strong financial markets are at the heart of every successful economy, lubricating the engine of economic growth and prosperity".

Money isn’t everything!

Economists (more’s the tragedy!) have always viewed schooling as a purely financial investment. Their traditional views have been greatly coloured by Gary Becker’s approach to modelling long-term decision-making . Individuals, according to this approach, spend money and time to acquire human capital in the hope of greater lifetime wealth in return. With more wealth comes more opportunity for consumption, and with more consumption comes more well-being . But how does one measure ‘well-being’ ?



Economists, not surprisingly, look at monetary returns. And sure enough, they find the returns to annual adult income from spending one year in high school or college range between 7- 12 % on average. But as a recent NBER paper shows schooling is not only about enabling an individual to make more money. It is about much more. Money, the paper says, is not everything! That’s a finding Oriental cultures like ours might regard as so blindingly obvious as to obviate the need for any economic research; but, apparently, it is not so obvious to Western cultures. Hence the paper!



So what are these non-pecuniary returns? Economists use two general models to describe how better skills generate nonpecuniary returns outside the labour market. The productive efficiency model suggests improved skills act as a technology shock — individuals are able to get more done in the same amount of time for the same amount of money. The allocative efficiency model looks how those who are more skilled choose a different mix of inputs in trying to maximise the household production function. To put it plainly, individuals with better skills make better decisions faced with similar circumstances.



Schooling, say the authors, generates occupational prestige . It reduces the chances of ending up on welfare or being unemployed. It improves success in the labour market and the marriage market. Better decision-making skills learned in school also lead to better health, happier marriages and more successful children.



There is overwhelming empirical evidence that women with more schooling have fewer children and hence are able to devote more attention to them. Teen fertility, criminal activity, and other risky behaviours decrease with more schooling. Schooling encourages patience and long-term thinking, making individuals more goal-oriented and less likely to engage in risky behaviour.



All these gains hold after controlling for income, suggesting that pecuniary returns cannot explain non-pecuniary returns. To get a rough back-of-the-envelope measure of the relative importance between the two, the paper compares the estimated schooling effects on happiness before and after controlling for income. It finds about three quarters of the schooling effect on self-reported life satisfaction is due to non-pecuniary factors.



It’s tough to measure non-pecuniary returns but the authors have tried nonetheless and find that after reporting having roughly the same annual household income, high school graduates still report being happy about four percentage points more often than high school dropouts. College graduates report being happy slightly more than two percentage points more often than high school graduates.



That takes us to the next question. If the returns to schooling are so high, why do students not stay on longer? The authors suggest two alternative explanations worth further research , each carrying quite different implications about education policy. First, low-income families may face financial obstacles in trying to afford school. They may be averse to accepting thousands of dollars in debt for an indefinite amount of time, or they may be unaware about how to obtain financial aid. Second students may simply be shortsighted.



Both explanations ring true in the Indian context as well with one major difference — unlike in the US even the poorest of Indian families do not seem shy of taking on debt to educate their children.

Is Hindi an endangered language?

THE question might be seen laughable given the phenomenal growth in Hindi language newspapers and their readership, and the still-impressive growth of the population in the states classified as Hindi-speaking. But consider two facts to remove all snide laughter from a debate on Hindi’s future: one, the telling absence in Delhi of even a single poster of a Hindi film that is written in Hindi; two, the wholly muted reaction to the assault on Hindi via the assault in the Maharashtra assembly on Abu Azmi for taking his oath as a member of the legislature in Hindi.
Let’s face facts. Hindi is a young, artificial language. Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, right in the heart of the Hindi heartland, wrote to Dalhousie in Persian, not Hindi. Two centuries later, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his justly-famous letters to his daughter in English, which is similar to Persian in that it is, again, not Hindi. The language that everyone from Hindi poets to their housemaids in every town in the Hindi heartland today wants his or her child to learn is English. Englishmedium schools sprout all over the landscape, like weeds after a delayed monsoon.
A Lucknow publisher told this writer that the print order for a book of Hindi poems would be 500. That, one would have to admit, is not large for a language which claims over 422 million speakers.
The problem goes beyond the universal appeal of English. Because English is the language of global commerce and finance, high-end jobs require mastery over the language. And in India, the presumption has been that unless kids start lisping Ba ba black sheep, they would never acquire sufficient command over English. So, attempts in India to embrace the language that gives the new generation entry into the world of globalisation tend to be at the expense of the local Indian language.
For Hindi, the problem also is the gradual assertion of so-called dialects such as Bhojpuri and Mythili as languages in their own right. Bhojpuri and Mythili speakers do not want their tongue to be treated as a dialect of Hindi. The popularity of Bhojpuri films, which have carved out a space for themselves distinct from that of Hindi films, is a marker of this trend. Mythili is already recognised as a separate language in the Constitution, which lists 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule.
Any number of other languages that are today described as Hindi dialects could, in the course of time, assert their independent identity and get out of Hindi’s umbrella. Where would that leave Hindi?
The reality is that the Akashvani (All India Radio) variety of Hindi, which consciously substitutes Sanskrit words for those of Persian origin in the Hindustani widely spoken all over north India, had very little chance of survival, to begin with. Languages cannot be created in the studio, they have to evolve from the street.
The Akashvani variety of Hindi is, in this sense, like Sanskrit, which was a limited language of the elite, and so could not survive as the language of the masses. Sanskrit means refined, and the refined tongue could be spoken only by the elite. In Sanskrit plays, it is not uncommon to find that women and minor characters speak Prakrit, the unrefined lingo of the masses, even as the main characters speak the language of the gods. The Buddha, who wanted people at large to understand what he said, eschewed Sanskrit for the more common tongues of north India for his discourses.
If literary Hindi has few takers and even Hindi film posters are not written in Hindi, what is the fate of Hindi? That depends on inclusive growth and globalisation.
The stunted growth of a language reflects the stunted growth of the society that speaks the language. It is no coincidence that the term Bimaru, which in Hindi means diseased, was coined to describe the most backward states that also are the Hindi-speaking states. When only a tiny elite embraces modernity, they will adopt the language of modernity and secede from their mother tongue — this is what has happened to Hindi. When an entire society embraces a new mode of life, their language will evolve. This is why economic change is important for Hindi.
When these regions undergo structural change and people move into non-traditional occupations, caste relations will change, the distribution of social power will change, and the language will change as people create new terms to describe the new transactions of their life. Quite a few words will be borrowed from English, and that is just fine.
While creating the new material life of new progress and prosperity, people will create a new language that will be the new Hindi. And the Hindi newspapers reflect the trend. But for that to happen on a mass scale, the broad mass of people has to be brought into the growth process. And that cannot happen without basic political empowerment, and governance reform in the Hindi-speaking areas.
The struggle for inclusive growth, the fight against Maoism and the fight for Hindi are all, to a great extent, one and the same.