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.
Estimated to be spoken by over 500 million people, Hindi is the world's fourth most widely-spoken language, and is by far the most used language within India. Despite having been made the national language of India by a constitutional provision in 1950, however, Hindi has never managed to gain legitimacy as either the language of the government or of the people. Instead, it has been repeatedly rejected by the speakers of other regional languages and sidelined by English, the language of status in post-colonial India. In fact, in contrast to its aspirations of national prestige, Hindi is largely perceived as a subaltern language, the dialect of the rural, uneducated Hindiwalla.
In terms of literature, books in Hindi seem. completely absent from the mainstream marketplace, which is dominated by English paperbacks and glossy hardcovers. Even in Delhi, considered to be the capital of the Hindi literary world, it is hard to find bookstores selling works of Hindi fiction. The leaders of the Hindi literary establishment themselves are well aware of Hindi's marginalised position, having, with obvious irony, named the annual festival of Hindi as the Hindi Pakhwada (Hindi's Funeral)