Parts of the Bible began to be published in Hindustani in 1811. The complete Hindi Bible was printed in 1843.
It was only after the Bible had been published the Hindi, that the first Hindu who ever wrote in Hindi, Bharatendu Harishchandra, was born – in 1850. He began his literary activities by founding the first Hindi literary magazine, Kavi-vachana-sudha, in 1867. His very first book, a translation from Bengali, was published in 1868.
No part of the Vedas had been translated and published in Hindi, before Dayananda Saraswati’s translations of excerpts began to appear from 1875. After his death in 1883, additional work by his followers resulted in the first-ever unorthodox translation of the Rig Veda being published – only in 1899.
However, that was rejected by traditional Hindus because it made clear to anyone who read it that the Vedas do not teach idol worship and other traditional Hindu practices. The first translation of one of the Vedas which was accepted by many traditional Hindus is by Ramgovind Trivedi. It was published only in 1954.
The first society to publish religious literature in Hindi that supported traditional or orthodox Hindu thought and practice was Gobind Bhawan Karyalaya in Gorakhpur, operating through its unit, the Gita Press. That was established only in 1923. During the century and more of its existence, it has published some 418 million (41.8 crore) books in fourteen Indian languages. However, it has refused to publish the Vedas — the most sacred of Hindu scriptures.
Many Hindus ask: If the Vedas are a source of wisdom and goodness, why not make them available to the whole world, at least to all Hindus?
Well, that is best explaind by asking the related question: : why do orthodox Hindus prevent lower caste Hindus from worshiping in their sacred temples? The answer is that the Hindu gods are different from the Bible’s God. He invites sinners to repent and become His children, beloved and holy. Orthodox Hinduism teaches that a soul is born into a lower caste or as a female because of bad karma in previous lives. Polluted souls cannot find salvation without first re-incarnating as a Brahmin male. Gods and goddesses cannot make a sinful soul “holy”. That is why Hindu scriptures prohibit the lower castes from hearing, let alone reading or teaching the sacred Vedas.
Caste-based and gender-based discrimination is justified on the basis of the theories of karma and reincarnation. These theories have had serious civilizational consequences:
- It prevented Brahmin women from learning Sanskrit. That meant they could not make Sanskrit the mother-tongue even of Brahmin children. That is why only about 25,000 people speak Sanskrit today. By contrast, Hindi, a language created and promoted by Bible translators and missionaries, is spoken by about 615 million people.
- Sanskrit could not become India’s national language of mental development because Brahmins turned it into a wall, a barrier, that prevented the spread of knowledge.
- Mass ignorance weakened India, making 85% Hindus (SCs, STs, OBCs) educationally and economically “backward”. The Brahminical attitude to language prevented India from developing our enormous but untapped potential.
– The Brahmin refusal to share Sanskrit with fellow Hindus and non-Hindus made it necessary for the Mughals to make another language the normal court language -Persian.
– In order to educate the oppressed, Christian missionaries had to develop peoples’ dialects so that they could be used for education and literacy.
Muslims ruled Delhi for close to seven centuries, from 1192 to 1857. But no ruler, whether Muslim, Sikh, Maratha or Hindu, saw any need to develop a vernacular such as Hindi. For it is easier to keep people enslaved if they are ignorant and divided by local dialects as well as castes.
Inspired by the Bible thousands of people devoted their lives, money and energy to develop and teach the heart languages of the people. We Indians did not pay them, nor did the British Raj. Missionaries served India because they were inspired by God’s love – because God, the Bible says, wants to liberate the downtrodden — dalits and shoshits.
Missionaries developed Urdu before they developed Hindi because, before them, Muslims had been ruling most of north India for centuries. Missionaries published the first Urdu New Testament in 1805.
It is worth remembering that, back then, the average Muslim did not read or write Urdu. Missionaries had to set up schools to teach Urdu. It was the education system set up by missionaries which made Urdu the main literary language of northern provinces, including Punjab and Pakistan.
That is why Hindus such as Bhartendu Harishchand (1850-85) and Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) began their literary careers in Urdu.
Most educated Indians do not know that missionaries such as Alexander Duff, Indian reformers such as Raja Rammohan Roy, and colonial rulers such as Lord Macaulay promoted English education primarily to enrich Indian vernaculars. They wanted Indian intelligentsia to access the intellectual wealth created in the West so that it can be transmitted to the common man in vernaculars. Bible translators standardized Urdu and Hindi by using the works of the following pre-British poets:
— Surdas (1478–1583) who grew up around Mathura and expressed his poetic devotion to Sri Krishna in a dialect called Braj Bhasha.
— Mirabai (1498–1547) who composed her devotional poems in Merta, Rajasthani and Braj Bhasha.
— Rahim (1556–1627) who grew up in Delhi/Agra region as a Mughal courtier and composed his couplets (dohas) in Braj Bhasha and Awadhi.
— Tulsidas (1532–1623) who composed his epic Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi (notably, he did that in spite of strong opposition by the Brahmin community in Benaras).
None of these poets had used “Hindi” because it did not exist in their day. Hindi was born only when Bible translators and missionary educators fused Awadhi with a dozen other north Indian dialects in order to create a language rich enough to communicate complex and wide-ranging ideas which could not be expressed in any of the pre-existing dialects
Following the work of the Bible translators who created Hindi, here are examples of the people who became pioneers of Hindi literature. It is important to note that none of them was a Brahmin:
- Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–1885), the author of “Satya Harishchandra” (1875) and “Andher Nagari” (1878) was an Agrawal (Vaishya).
- Munshi Premchand (1880–1936) the author of “Godan” (1936) and “Nirmala” (1927) was a Kayastha (at that time considered Shudras).
- Jaishankar Prasad (1889–1937), famous for “Skanda Gupta” (1928) and “Kamayani” (1936) was a Kesarwani (perhaps originally considered Brahmins in Kashmir – but, by the 20th century, due to their earning their living by the cultivation and sale of saffron, considered Vaishya)
- Mahadevi Varma (1907–1987), a key Chhayavad poet of “Yama” (1936) and “Neehar” (1930), used the surname Varma in order to conceal her caste identity (which may have been Kayastha).
Brahmin intellectuals decided to support Hindi only in the 1890s. They were alarmed that Urdu, written in Arabic script, was becoming north India’s literary language. This fear motivated them to team up with missionaries such as Rev. Edwin Greaves of Varanasi to establish the Devanagari Pracharini Sabha (1893). Fear of Urdu motivated them to toil and develop Hindi vocabulary in “Hindi Shabd Sagar.” This massive work was published between 1922-29. However, the standardized Hindi dictionary was developed by a Jesuit priest, Camille Bulcke (1909-1982) in Allahabad, and published only in 1968. It was my privilege as a teenager to meet him.
The Hindi language is one of the Bible’s most important gifts to India. It has allowed the common man to develop intellectually. Thanks to public education, to All India Radio, to Bollywood and to the media, Hindi has forged a shared identity and emotional unity across caste divides.
Modern Hindi began as ‘Hindustani’ because of a Scottish surgeon and linguist, John Borthwick Gilchrist (1759 – 1841). He helped establish Calcutta’s Fort William College in 1800. It hired Bible translators and Pundits who began turning dialects into literary vernaculars. William Carey (1761-1834), the father of India’s linguistic revolution, spent three days a week at Fort William.
Gilchrist’s ‘Hindustani’ blossomed as Henry Martyn’s (1781-1812) Urdu in Kanpur. It climaxed into the modern Hindi grammar textbook published in 1876 by a Presbyterian missionary, Rev. Samuel Kellogg (1839-1899), which came to be widely used for teaching Hindi in schools and colleges. Kellogg was a teacher in Missionary Language Schools in Allahabad and Landour (Mussoorie). He was eleven years senior to Harishchandra Bharatendu.
Ignorance of the history of Hindi makes Hindus mourn that it has marginalized Sanskrit. They condemn Christian missions for moving the “backward” castes forward through India’s linguistic and education revolutions. The sad truth is that a vast majority of Indians became “Backward” (SC, ST, OBC) because of the Hindu attitude towards language, and towards the education of the lower castes.
After determined initial resistance to English, small groups of “high” castes became wealthy because they decided to take full advantage of missionary education and therefore learning English.
High caste families sent their children to mission schools on the condition that their children would not have to sit with “untouchable” children. Christian educators compromised, because “lower” caste families had no money (they served upper castes even to merely survive), and the educators needed some students who paid fees. The missionaries thought that studying the Bible would deliver India from the caste-system. Though that liberation has begun, its fulfilment remains a distant goal because the biblical idea of equality was overrun by the evolutionary idea that some are more evolved than the rest. Nevertheless, the Bible’s teaching that God created all human beings equal in His image, has disturbed Hinduism’s philosophical foundation. The Gospel that every soul is polluted by human autonomy and disobedience, but can be Born-Again to become God’s child, is birthing post-colonial communities of Yeshu Bhakts (followers of Jesus the Lord) that are taking the responsibility to educate and empower the marginalized. That is what will make India a great nation.
Vishal Mangalwadi
Vishal Mangalwadi is the author of many books including, “Moving Backward Castes Forward,” * “The Bible and the Making of Modern India,” * “The Quest for Freedom and Dignity.” He is also the visionary of the movement called “The Third Education Revolution” (and the Editor of the movement’s manifesto, which is known by the same name).