मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

CHAPTER IX The spread of Hindi in the Andamans I had begun my work to obtain for Hindi the status of the national language of India, and to popularise it by every means at my disposal from the year 1906 when I was in England. The members of the Abhinav Bharata in England repeated the pledge every night before they retired for sleep, to 'make India independent, to weld her into one nation, to turn her into a republic, and last and the fourth, to make Hindi the national language of India and Devanagari the script in which it should be written.' Accordingly, when I found in the Andamans a suitable opportunity for consolidation and propaganda work, I drew up a plan in 1911 in which I gave a prominent place to the spread of Hindi in these islands. The very idea of making Hindi India's national language seemed so preposterous at that time that the so-called great leaders of India simply pooh-poohed it. The man in the street had no notion about it. Lokamanya Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi openly espoused it only after an agitation in its favour had gathered momentum and weighed behind it. And that was long after 1906. Only the Nagar Pracharini Sabha of Benares and some members of the Arya Samaj were the first agitators in its favour. The first credit of propaganda in favour of Hindi as India's national language, as also of writing patriotically in that language goes to Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the great founder of the Arya Samaj of India. It was in this stage of the public mind that I undertook in 1911 the task of persuading all the prisoners at Port Blair to study Hindi. I had to begin at the beginning, that is, with a discussion whether Hindi was at all a language after all. To the inhabitants of Maharashtra and of the South of India the word Hindi itself was a strange word. They would designate Hindi as 'the language of the Mussulmans.' For in the South the Mussulmans often used it as a mother-tongue, or, at least, as a language peculiar to their own community. Prisoners hailing from the North knew it not only as the common language of the Hindus but had come to realise that eight crores of Hindus and Mussul- mans together had begun to adopt and use it as their common mother-tongue. Even these, however, used to say that it was not a language fit enough to be the national language of India. Some said it had no grammar, others alleged that it had no literature. It was natural for people from Madras to fight shy of it. But the prisoners from Bengal were as averse from it as those from Madras. For the Bengalis cherished the ambition of making their own mother-tongue the language of India. In fact, next to Hindi, it is the Bengali language that deserves the honour of becoming the national language of India. In point of number, four crores of the inhabitants of India speak in Bengali, and it is as advanced in