India and the Soviet Model. The Linguistic State Reorganization and the Problem of Hindi in the 1950s

This essay examines how India dealt with the “national” question, and the influence of the Soviet Union on this problem. “Nation” is intended in the Soviet meaning of the term, derived from the continental European one: a nation is a people defined by historically produced characteristics, among which language is paramount, and capable of thinking of itself as such thanks to the efforts of an intellectual and political “vanguard.” The nation is thus neither purely objective, nor a pure act of will or “imagination,” but a combination of the two; hence a historical phenomenon upon which politics can operate. As Paul Brass wrote, “Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, especially in the Hapsburg Empire, and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century have provided the closest parallels to India with regard to the multiplicity of cultural groups living side by side, often in conflict with each other and with the authorities in centralizing states.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were 179 languages and 544 dialects in India, while the Soviet 1926 census counted 196 nationalities within its boundaries. In both countries, however, there were no more than 15–20 major and territorially concentrated linguistic groups, a situation similar to that of Europe up to the tsarist borders in the nineteenth century, where such groups numbered fewer than 30.