Now if you want to have a language for the whole of India. what language has the largest claim? Certainly from the point of view of democracy from the point of view of the largest number of people speaking or understanding it, probably Hindi, which is spoken by about 14 crores of people. bag the strongest claim. Hindi has, however, a bewildering variety of dialects. People from U. P. have told me that if Hindi is accented as the State language the population of the western United Provinces would have to learn it afresh, because they do not know that language. Yet when the claim is made on the basis of statistics of 1931 that Hindi is the one language spoken by the largest number of people, according to the Common notions of democracy it may be all right But in settling language questions, mere theory of democracy must not prevail. If a language is spoken by a very large section in the land, it does not necessarily mean that it is the language of the majority.
