The Hindi Newspaper Revolution: Teaching Reading of Print and Online News Media

There has been a revolution in Hindi newspaper publication and readership in the last fifty years. This has created new opportunities and challenges in the teaching of Hindi. This article is based on studies undertaken as part of the development and teaching of Hindi courses at La Trobe University from 1997 to 2007. Evident advantages of the newspaper revolution include: current content in classes; comparisons of English language and Hindi language stories; and the study of local level stories. The problems relate to what constitutes ‘standard Hindi ’ itself. The most notable challenge created by the newspaper revolution in India for Hindi teachers is the issue of what constitutes the ‘standard Hindi ’ we are teaching, as new editions of new Hindi papers continuously redefine what is regarded as Hindi. This highly contested area has seen a shift from a highly Sanskritized formal Hindi in the 1950s to constant code-switching between Hindi, Urdu and English elements in contemporary news media. This article concludes by arguing that there is only one way to deal with this contradiction; when teaching students how to read news media, Hindi teachers must also get students themselves to engage in the debate over what constitutes ‘Hindi.