AR Rahman’s mass reply to Amit Shah’s controversial Hindi imposition statement

Amit Shah, who is the chairman of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, informed members that 70% of the agenda of the Union Cabinet was now prepared in Hindi. He added that when citizens of States who speak other languages communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India. Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages.

Amid strong reactions from Tamil political parties to Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement, Oscar-winning musician A R Rahman Friday posted about “Beloved Tamil” on social media. Rahman shared an illustration of “Thamizhanangu” of “Goddess Tamil”, a word from Tamil Thai Vaazhthu or the Tamil national anthem, penned by Manonmaniam Sundaram Pillai and composed by M S Viswanathan. He included a line written by modern Tamil poet of the 20th century Bharathidasan from his ‘Thamiliyakkam’, a book of Tamil poems, which read: “Beloved Tamil is the root of our existence.”

After this has gone viral on social media platforms, now a video of him addressing Tamil as the connecting language is going viral on social media platforms. When a reporter asked him to comment on Amit Shah’s controversial statement, AR Rahman said, “Tamil is the connecting language”This isn’t the first time Rahman has commented on the language debate. In June 2019, when there were plans to make a three-language policy mandatory for all states, Rahman had tweeted: “AUTONOMOUS | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary,” with a weblink of the word’s meaning in the dictionary. His tweet triggered a popular hashtag, ‘#autonomousTamilNadu’ by his fans worldwide.

Similarly, when the Centre decided to drop the provision of compulsory teaching of Hindi in non-Hindi speaking states, Rahman had tweeted in praise of Tamil Nadu’s two language policy: “Good decision. Hindi is not compulsory in Tamil Nadu. The draft has been corrected.”