Language occasions
Four days about language in India, from Hindi Diwas to International Mother Language Day, with dates and how to write about them in a country with 22 scheduled languages.
Language is not a neutral subject in India, and these four days sit on top of a long argument.
Hindi Diwas on 14 September marks the Constituent Assembly's 1949 decision to adopt Hindi in Devanagari as an official language of the Union. World Hindi Day on 10 January marks the first World Hindi Conference in 1975 and is the outward-facing one, observed at Indian missions abroad.
International Mother Language Day on 21 February commemorates the students killed in Dhaka in 1952 while demanding recognition for Bengali. International Translation Day falls on 30 September.
Writing about this without stepping in it
India has 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule and hundreds more in daily use. Hindi is an official language of the Union, not the national language; the Constitution names no national language, and saying otherwise is the fastest way to lose a reader in Chennai or Bengaluru.
The version that works celebrates a language without ranking it. On Hindi Diwas, write about a Hindi writer you read. On Mother Language Day, write in yours, whatever it is, and say what it carries that your working language does not.
For the many Indians whose mother tongue has no script, no textbook and no day of its own, Mother Language Day is the one that matters, and naming a specific language does more than the phrase "linguistic diversity" ever will.
The regional occasions are where most language celebration actually happens, since statehood days double as language days.