A bit of a khichdi: How Hinglish evolved
Is Hinglish older than we think? Take a look at how colonialism, the quest to speak English, and early ’90s television shaped this unusual tongue.
Hinglish goes back centuries, says Karthik Venkatesh, executive editor at Penguin Random House India. “And it’s all around us too. So many of us speak it every day without even realising it.”
In his new book, 10 Indian Languages and How They Came to Be, Venkatesh traces Hinglish verse to the 19th century. There was the English poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, who wrote, in his Ode: From the Persian of Hafiz:
Without thy dreams, dear opium,
Without a single hope I am,
Spicy scent, delusive joy;
Chillum hither lao, my boy!
There was the Hindi Khari Boli writer Ayodhya Prasad Khatri who, in 1887, wrote:
Darkness chhaaya hua hai Hind mein chaaro taraf
Naam ki bhi hai nahin baaqi na light now-a-days.
Hindustani was the lingua franca across large parts of northern India, and was bound to impact the English being spoken, says Mohini Gupta, a researcher with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, focusing on Hindi, Hinglish and language politics.
The phenomenon of such pidgin languages, of course, is not unique to India. “Almost every country that prioritises English due to its colonial roots creates its own hybrid forms of code-switched, code-mixed versions of local languages and English,” she says.
Between Hindi’s wide appeal in northern India, and the modernity that English represented, Hinglish emerged as an accessible bridge across the wide economic and cultural gaps between, for instance, those who had studied in English as their primary language, and those who had not. “It was hailed as a form that democratised both languages,” says Gupta.
If Hinglish seems newer, it’s because it has steadily embraced slang — which is, itself, a rapidly evolving set of words in most languages that updates itself far more informally, and therefore more constantly, than the language itself.
By the 1990s, Hinglish and Hinglish slang were sweeping radio shows and privatised TV channels, seeking to appeal to advertisers and the youth. The advertisements themselves embraced Hinglish too. Think of Pepsi’s “Yeh dil maange more” and “Kit Kat break banta hai”.
Our favourites? Filmi, Auntji… and hai na?
