"Events of significance between 1965 and 1995" Peter Hook 3 Mar 1998 1965: In wake of language riots thirty thousand teachers of Hindi lose their jobs in Tamilnadu schools. Plans to make Hindi THE official language of the Republic of India are shelved indefinitely. 1975-date: English medium private schools assert themselves socially, politically, financially... Hindi "as a subject" loses priority in hearts and minds of Indian elite. More than half the graduates of such schools are unable to pass second-year Hindi final exams in American universities. Date? Government of India decides to automatically convert mother-tongue returns for Braj, Kannauji, Awadhi, Chattisgarhi, Malvi, Kauravi, Kumaoni, and many other local languages into "Hindi". See next item for consequences. 1990: According to World Almanac and Book of Facts Hindi-Urdu has passed English (and Spanish) to become the second most widely spoken language in the world. (Mandarin still is first.) 1995: Tamil made usable for sending messages via e-mail. Can e-mail be sent in Hindi? 1997: Fifty years have passed. Scientific publication in Hindi languishes. Is there a medical journal in Hindi? 1998: CIIL completes 3-meg text databases for most languages in 8th schedule. Is text base for Hindi complete? ------ Mehta, Shailendra" 3 Mar 1998 Several remarks on this: 1. A legacy of the Raj and the ICS was the fact that English medium schools always had the best facilities (sporting, academic, cultural), and consequently attracted the best students. It became a mutually reinforcing cycle, that I hardly need elaborate upon. This phenomenon pre-dates 1975, going back to Macaulay's famous mintue even. 2. The spread of Hindi typewriters was hindered by a multiplicity of keyboards. This made Hindi cumbersome to use for commercial purposes. 3. The revolution in computers and in Java, provides the best hope for Hindi, and indeed for all Indian languages. 4. E-mail has been possible for more than a decade in Devanagari for more than a decade with the introduction of Frans Velthuis's Devanagari Tex. Indeed Knuth's original non-Roman metafont example was from Devanagari. Chopde's I-Trans is also has been a viable alternative for many years. 5. Modern democracy has meant, that political power now has increasingly devolved to people who have no knowledge of, and a great deal of antipathy to English. Around independence, there was hardly a leader who fit this profile. Mulayam Singh Yadav is a prime example. 6. Lots of misinformation has been spread about how Hindi had been adopted in the first place as the National Language. How many of you have heard the story that the Constituent Assembly was evenly divided for and against Hindi and that Rajendra Prasad as chairman cast the deciding vote? This piece of fiction was indirectly voiced by such notables as Ambedkar and Suniti Kumar Chatterjee. You will find eminent professors of history in leading universities mouthing this as the gospel truth. Yet, the prosaic and fascinating reality is that the LANGUAGE was adopted almost unanimously but the form of NUMERALS was a bone of contention. In the end they chose the indigenous form of the numerals with one vote. I have put together a lot of primary materials relating to this controversy and one day hope to write well researched piece on this. 7. About medical journals, about the only entities likely are journals dedicated to Ayurveda. ------- Daisy Rockwell 3 Mar 1998 I would also be interested in using Hindi on the list, if possible. Regarding the timeline: 1805 Lalloo Lal's Premsagar published in Hindi (a mixture of Khari Boli and Braj Bhasha) for Fort William College in Calcutta. 1893 Founding of the Nagari Pracharni Sabha (the Society for the Promotion of Nagari) in Benares. 1936 First meeting of the All India Progressive Writers' Association, chaired by Premchand.