Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Mother Tongue (n’ Cheek) : The Rajbhasha racket

I feel so sorry at the fate of Hindi: our national language….and well, also the Rajbhasha…language in which Government of India functions …err…at least , tries to function- that too at a huge cost in terms of money . With all its defects and mixed lineage I still find Hindi the most convenient mode of communication. This being my mother tongue, I still dream, pray and scream in Hindi by default. I love listening to Hindi songs and enjoy Hindi poetry , stories and jokes much more than in any other language . But if you look the way Hindi has been imposed on Government working, you feel so disgusted.
In most government offices, especially in Non Hindi regions, one section which has almost no work throughout the year is Hindi section…Rajbhasha section to be more precise. Their job is to ensure that a certain percentage of work including letters, reports, file noting is being done in Hindi, as per the provisions of Rajbhasha Act.Very faithfully in the quaterly meetings each section will be taken to task for not filling up the required percentage of work in Hindi, not required signatures in Hindi , not labeling files in Hindi . Then some shortcuts will be suggested to comply with formality of use of Hindi..e.g. add a printed forwarding in Hindi with every letter and count it work done in Hindi even if the main letter is in English. Even more outrageous is writing a letter first in English and then sending it for translation in Hindi which will come at times one month after the original letter. Well, all important rules, reports are to be bi-lingual. Then occasionally we will find some people landing up from New Delhi to check compliance of Hindi. At times I wonder why these Hindi-auditors land up only in the tourist stations or in organization which can “facilitate” their comfortable stay and touring.
I am a staunch supporter of Hindi’s progress ,use and publicity and still I feel that if there is one act which has put Hindi in such a low state it is the Rajbhasha Act. Every year in the name of progress of Hindi , each government office has to organize Hindi functions…quarterly reports on progress of Hindi are submitted, trophies and medals are given for use of Hindi and magazines are brought out in Hindi. Even in offices where due to nature of work, working/correspondence in Hindi will not make any sense, Hindi computer software licenses are purchased. Hindi books are bought every year to fulfill the quota ….though no one may be reading those books at all. In my previous office in Calcutta for example they had a well established Hindi Library with more than 500 titles added every year mindlessly. But when I started taking books from there I realized that besides me only 4-5 people were reading these books. Some of the titles dealing with the research or very specialized topics has not at all for an office library like ours…but who cares as long as they are in Hindi and can help in filing the Hindi book budget for the year . I was amazed at this gross wastage of Public Funds. And the same story is there in most government offices in Non-Hindi speaking states. Often it’s a hilarious sight to find the main speaker on Hindi functions struggling hard to speak in Hindi from a page written by someone else .
This is not all, this Rajbhasha racket includes a group of Holier than Thou organizations dealing with “the progress of Hindi” doing nothing much except organizing some functions to facilitate this and that and to publish few books which no one will read. I call these organizations as mausoleums of Hindi . They are to a large extent responsible for the apathy even hatred which non-Hindi speakers feel for this forced dose of Hindi .

And Hindi…and its progress, well that is happening without any efforts from this Government paraphernalia. In fact , the group which is most responsible for increasing non Hindi speakers’ working knowledge of Hindi is media Number of Hindi TV /Radio channels and Hindi newspapers is increasing. Most foreign channels also realize the necessity of having Hindi content for their channels. Well, I am afraid I cannot say the same about the books in Hindi…but to a certain extent that is also happening . Those who love Hindi are still working for it …working in it. There are number of Orkut groups, websites, blogs in Hindi.

Ironically the Hindi used as Rajbhasha is so sanskritised that often a layman can make no sense out of it despite good knowledge of Hindi. It is even more ironical that this sanskritization is happening for a language which has always taken the form of the region it is spoken into. Hindi even today is known more in its dialects like maithali, bhojpuri, Hindustani and others than in the pure “ Khari Boli” version. For example I belong to the city of Lucknow which takes pride in its Ganga-Jamuna culture and also in its Urdu –mixed language .

As for the government’s efforts to promote the progress of Hindi , I feel left to its own Hindi will do far better.