Rajasthan's language lack of recognition Issue – An Anaylsis :

The old city of Jaipur was recently accorded the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and this recognition of Rajasthan’s built heritage is certainly a reason for celebration. Formal recognition will only aid in conservation efforts and sensitisation. This is then a good time to introspect on the intangible heritage of the state, which is now inches away from extinction.

The vehicle of intangible heritage is language, and since Independence, there has been no official recognition of Rajasthan's language. This means that it is neither a recognised medium of instruction in schools and colleges, nor does it have recognition in the state’s courts or in its Vidhan Sabha. 

The local film industry is dead, the Rajasthani print media barely has any circulation. Even the business of gram panchayats, where the medium of communication is almost solely the local language, must be carried on in Hindi.

Language has been the rallying point for various sub-national movements across the country. The recent push for the One Nation-One Language model has been met with sharp resistance and criticism from many parts of the country, including Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Rajasthan, on the other hand, is as quiet as quiet can be. It has been so for seven decades now.

The census data on mother tongues  records that out of a population of nearly seven crore people in the state, 4.75 crore people are speakers of Rajasthani in one of its many forms. How then did a language which traces its origins back to the classical Dingal and Pingal literary traditions end up in this situation? Its close cousin Gujarati is alive and kicking, both in the spoken and written forms. Migrant Gujarati families continue to speak the language, even those settled abroad.

Those involved in the campaign for the official recognition of Rajasthani cite various historical reasons for this, ranging from pointing out that at Independence, Rajasthan’s bureaucracy was dominated by Hindi-speaking migrants, to the fact that Marwari business stalwarts who funded and were closely involved with the Independence movement gave priority to Hindi as the language which would unify the newly formed nation. Contemporary interventions by urban Hindi- and English-speaking elites have avoided the issue of language altogether.

There are those who point out that Rajasthani is not one language, but more an umbrella term for a collection of dialects such as Dhundhari, Hadauti, Mewari and Marwari, among others. They add that there is no standardised written form, which is why it should continue to remain a dialect. One response to this argument is that the standardisation of a language usually comes about by institutionalisation within the academy. Many regional languages underwent this process in the 19th and 20th centuries. Barna Parichay, the treatise by Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, which laid out, in large measure, the foundation for the modern written form of Bengali, was published as late as 1854. Hindi as it is known today is itself a mixture of so many dialects, and its present spoken and written form attained widespread currency only in the years after Independence, when it was positioned as the language which could unify the country, through the effort of writers and scholars .

Recognition will, however, give the language of the people of Rajasthan legitimacy. Formal recognition will not solve all the aforementioned problems. The inferiority complex associated with a regional language, aspirations to an identity that is ‘global’ — these are deep-seated prejudices in our minds and societies. he government at the Centre prides itself on its cultural revivalism. There is an ever increasing recognition and understanding of the state's tangible heritage.To preserve our oral traditions is to preserve living and mutating strands of the human experience.

It will bring the language into public spaces, or at least, the right to be in public spaces. And most importantly, one hopes, it will inspire confidence in its speakers to speak it without shame and embarrassment.