Judging by what is happening in schools, this trend is likely to worsen. We can speculate on why this is so: complete unimaginativeness with which Hindi is taught; the obtuseness of the Hindi establishment itself, which prevented the growth of the language by defending a very narrow literary conception of the language; the fact that unlike in the case of Tamil Nadu, Bengal or Kerala, the self-definition of elites in north India was premised on a distance from the vernacular rather than an identification with it. But this loss of bilingualism is not an unimportant cultural fact of our times and will impact our relation to our own past.

The second disjuncture is within the world of Hindi itself. If market trends are any guide, there is a growing demand for Hindi works and newspapers. The success of the wonderfully readable Hindi translation of Harry Potter speaks of new opportunities. But Hindi had deep discontinuities between its small literary world and the larger reading public. To a certain extent, this is true of all literary traditions, but the discontinuity seems greater in Hindi. The kind of mass readership high literature enjoys in any language is an open question, but at least literary awards seem to be considered a reflection of the possibilities of that language. The Pulitzers and the Bookers have become the object of mass news; but even within the Hindi world, the literary world seems more distant. Just the ways in which prizes in the two languages are covered suggest as much.

... contd.