India's Language Policy Hypocrisy

8/9/2019 India's Language Policy Hypocrisy

1/4

OUR LANGUAGE POLICY HYPOCRISY

It is said that Japanese Premier Tojo while replying to US PresidencyHarry S Truemans ultimatum of July 26, 1945 said that Japan would"Mmakusatsu" which in Japanese meant that his Government would'consider it.' But the translators quoted him in English as saying thatthe Japanese would 'take no notice of it'. So atom bombs destroyedthe cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.There could be several such undocumented and unnoticed bungles ininternational diplomacy. There are innumerable cases of individualinjustice due to multilingualism or ambiguity and misinterpretationeven in the same language. For example before the RussianRevolution an Assyriologist Netomelf was exiled to Siberia for life on

a charge of blasphemy because he was not given a chance to explainthat his book aboutNebuchadnezzar did not mean Ne boch and Netzar (Russian for NoGod and No Tzar)Once in UN, a translator translated "Out of sight-out of mind" into anexpression the Russians understood as invisible insanity. DuringNapolean III s coup detat one of his officers Count de Saint-Arnaudon being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard,coughed and exclaimed with his hand across his throat Ma sacreetoux! (my damned cough). But his lieutenant understanding him to

say Massacrez tous (Massacre them all ) gave the order to fire ,killing thousands.Every language suffers from syntactical and phonetical ambiguities inaddition to these if there are situations wherein importantnegotiations are required to be made wherein the negotiators may get

bogged down in the quagmire of too many languages and languageinterpreters. They can neither concentrate on the content nor canthey be utterly confident about what they have negotiated. Hencethere arises a necessity to bring down further, the number of

languages; and if necessary evolve a global language, and this has toemerge from among the existing languages, as we know theexperiments with artificially created languages such as Esperanto,IDO et, have failed for want of literature. A global language needs apride of ancestry, must be in popular use at present, and possess

worthy credentials to survive in the future.A language, which qualifies to become a global language, must be


2/4

primarily a significant one as per the criteria mentioned earlier. Butmere number of users cannot be a sufficient or justifiable parameterto classify a language as significant , because if that were the case wemay have in that list such unheard of languages as Wu in China ,Xhosa in South Africa , Pashto in Afghanistan , Quencha in Peru .

Amore justifiable classification would be, in addition to the number ofusers of a language, its geographical spread, the wide range and

variegated vocabulary to communicate and express as many ideas orevents as possible in as many fields of human activity , it must havethe syntactic plasticity, flamboyant flexibility suited to both simpleand complex modes of expression, and an enormously evolvedderivational morphology.If there is a language that fits into all these criteria adequately, that isEnglish. It stands as the unrivalled champion as a global language. It

does not mean that it is superior to all other languages or it is withoutany weakness. Definitely it does not sound as sweet as French. In factit does not have a word for Punya the exact opposite of sin. It hasnot a single word expression to countered social and psychologicalaspects of life, which many other languages even very insignificantones have as has been wonderfully brought out be Howard Rheingoldin the book titled They have a word for it. Here are a few of them;Tjotjog (Japanese) harmonious congruence in human affairs;Mokita (Kirinina-New Guinea) Truth everybody knows but nobodyspeaks; Yufen (Japanese)- an awareness of the universe that triggers

feelings too deep and mysterious for words; Fucha (Polish)-usingcompany time and money and other resources for your own ends; itdoes not have the grammatical subtleties of such insignificantlanguages as Chichewa, a language spoken by the unlettered tribes ofEast Africa which as per the studies of Benjamin Lee Whorf, has anextraordinary perspective on time through its two past tenses, one forthe real or objective past and another for the subjective or mentalpast. The primitive tongues of Algonquin languages have four personsin their pronouns; the metaphysically marvelous language of Hopi

Indians of Arizona reflects their excellent view of creation; instead ofa noun for wave they have only the participle walalata(Waving). Youmay wonder why this long preamble about language and canvassingfor according English the status of global language while discussingabout a national language for India .

We as a nation talk of global trade, global thinking, global concernetc. But when it comes to language


3/4

especially with so many different linguistic divisions we talk of theimportance of a national language and still hesitate to give the dueimportance to a global language at least as a link language; it is

because from the earliest times we suffer from certain stronginexplicable prejudices. Our emotionally charged feeling of patrioticnationalism was pursued with a religious fervor to effectively driveaway the colonial bosses. Like all ferventness which turns fanatical infunction and perception and blinkered in vision, our nationalism too,failed to see and acknowledge the good that our colonial bosses havedone.Gandhiji managed to communicate all over India and to the worldoutside through his good English.Dr.Ambedkar drafted a wonderful Constitution with his good English.But somewhere in the process even

Gandhiji was driven by extreme emotionalistic opposition toeverything that was British. As a result he caught hold of a rocket

without either a safe launching pad or enough space to zoom- therocket was Hindi-Hindustani as a national language which hepronounced for the first time in 1934 when he founded the BharatiyaSahitya Parishad at Nagpur. In fact this word was supposed to have

been used as early as 1892 by Bhoodev Mookerji.Later in 1945 at theHindi Sahitya Sammelan, scholar K.M.Munshi wanted it to be thenational language of India. Why all these men, who were very wellaware that at least 40 percent of the Indian peasants, labourers etc.

are contented with their mother tongue and are willing to serve thenation; why these honourable leaders who owed at least a sizable partof their prominence to the English language(which enabled them to be preferred as negotiators with theBritishers) all of sudden had a superfluous hypocritical need topromote Hindi Hindustani as a national language of administration

when English was sufficient to deal with the administrationrequirements, especially more so, at a time when all theadministrators were only people with an Engllish education.

In fact by adopting English as our only official language (I mean ashigher administrative, inter-state and state-centre link language ) wewill benefit on the global level and besides we will be manifesting oursuperior sense of understanding because on the one hand we would

be opposing the western approaches of divide and rule, axe and annexpolicies of trying to homogenize various political systems, proselytizeother faiths, colonize countries, marginalize smaller states, Balkanize


4/4

united provinces; on the other hand we would be welcoming what theBritisher has tried to harmonize and grow i.e. the English language,

by absorbing, assimilating and adopting words and expressionsplundered from other languages and wonderfully injecting them notonly in its literary forms but also in the laymans lexicon. In this liesthe strength and secret of the growth of the English language.It is wrong to presume that a United Nationhood can be broughtabout be either unity of religion or race or language. The Arab worldand Latin America are classical examples were despite all those unity,there are so many nations. Let English be our lingua franca. Let theGovernment stop wasting enormous time and money in imposingHindi on the whole nation. We can divert that money and time onother pressing issues. Let not he regional linguistic, chauvinistretaliate by making life miserable for Hindi-speaking people by

putting up all important public notices and boards only in theregional language. These acts remind us of what Pascal wrote in hisPensees; Mans sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to thegreatest are the signs of strange disorder.Let us remember one thing while all of us feel the need for unity, whatunity needs is feeling for all by all .Let us remember what the greatseer Bahaullah has said: If language can help create a sense ofnationalism, it can equally well help create a sense ofinternationalism.

Documents

India's Language Policy Hypocrisy