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.
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.
3 comments:
That's funny ... I was straddled with Rajbhasha for around six months ... It is really tough to convince people to write in hindi ... most people consider it a ceremonial language these days ... otherwise whatever you get to read is downright insulting to the language ...
The most disheartening part is that even the people who are responsible for Rajbhasha, choose to ignore, avoid and mock at this ACT and LIABILITY.
Only Indians can feel proud of being able to use pidgin that ENGLISH language has become in India. You meet somebody for the first time and speak in Hindi, they take you for a 'Gowti' uncouth.
This time going again through your article reminded me of one in Sarita hindi magazine (published much later than this post somewhere around December 2009), which I borrowed ironically from the Rajbhasha library of PDA, Central, Kolkata office. It was a pun on these Rajbhasha people. I even showed the same to the people in Rajbhasha section.
I agree with you as I too have felt the same in Kolkata office but I beg to differ on “As for the government’s efforts to promote the progress of Hindi , I feel left to its own Hindi will do far better”. Though, the whole system of Rajbhasha promotion needs an overhaul (promote rather than enforce). I somehow feel that giving nil credit to the system for whatever (even if 1%) government offices have achieved in this front will be gross injustice. The act and the system as such have some faults too, the major culprit is the way it is implemented and negative approach (they police but do not assist etc) of people implementing it. I have gone through many articles on Rajbhasha by South Indians(including Tamilians) in our magazine लेखापरीक्षा प्रकाश and can feel that somehow this act has achieved something. I have myself seen a SrAO who hated Hindi so much that she answered in Bangla irrespective of the language of the query of a newly joined probationer from our batch and smiled at his helplessness in understanding her reply. I saw her transform herself gradually and last year I could see her taking part in Rajbhasha dictation and other events and she now takes pride in speaking in Hindi. I confirmed from others that this was for the first time in her service career that this had happened. I don’t know the exact reason but I guess the rumour of all India transfer (your reader March has correctly interpreted this factor, Ami bengale posting howar karonei bangle sikhte parlam!!) and somewhere the events organized by Rajbhasha section have their role. Our Kolkata office has correctly acknowledged the role of media and music in promotion of Hindi by including cultural program and antakshari in their list of events. The enthusiasm of people in participating and watching various events particularly word writing, debates, gup-shup, extempore, quiz was heartening. I know of some officials there who do not miss any such event in any year and have made good quality notes of their own for this. These people can be persuaded to act as help desk in their respective wings. Hindi movies DVDs in the Rajbhasha section’s library are always in high demand, though the same cannot be said for books.
Hindi has no enmity with any regional languages but is being promoted to replace English as a medium of communication between two states or the state and the center. But sadly because of lack of vision, faulty framing of rules, faulty implementation and fault in assignment of the job to proper people the perception of non-hindi people is not the same.
Hindi shares many words and grammatical structures with regional languages. Though too much sanskritization makes hindi suffocating, I feel judicious use of sanskritization too is required somewhere as Sanskrit being the mother of most of Indian languages has some words which can be equally acceptable to people irrespective of their mother tongue. Anyway why shouldn’t Hindi heartland people too do some labour, if doing so helps their brothers in other regions adopt hindi effectively?
Some people are hell bent on Anglicization of Hindi for reasons best known to them only. Strangely the same people these days take so much pride in naming their children using most difficult Sanskrit words. During my college days, one of the judges (a sahitya academy winner) of an event in Hansraj College had raised a question “What do you think of headlines in a hindi newspaper (Nav Bharat Times) which wrote “अब दिल्ली की होटलों में शराब सर्व की जाएगी” instead of “अब दिल्ली की होटलों में शराब परोसी जाएगी”. What’s wrong with the word परोसना? Why do you expect someone who barely knows how to read Hindi to understand this English word and make him put aside the newpaper branding it to be made for Bade Log? Aren’t you mocking at his lack of resources to learn English and discouraging him to learn more Hindi using them? The other judge Sudhish Pachauri was advocating for use of English for making Hindi more acceptable to people and gave example of Pepsi’s ad Yeh Dil Mange More and how television advertisements are now prominently in Hindi rather than English in contrast to earlier days of television. My young mind got confused and is confused till date on where to draw the line. (By the way, I have read your interesting post on difficulty faced by your father in teaching English to a villager who could not relate with the poems about things so remote to his imagination.)
You may view my thoughts about Hindi as a language in the google group meant for the same (By the way, Anupam sir too is its member.)
I would like to end with one of my slogans (an entry in rajbhasha slogan competition, pdackol which is displayed at the north side entry gate for first floor):
उधार की भाषा के सहारे नहीं हो सकता सम्पूर्ण विकास, बिना हिन्दी के गाँव गाँव को लगी रहेगी विकास की आस।
Sorry for the length of the reply. I am not so much experienced to speak on these serious matters and any mistake committed while replying to you may please be perceived as my ignorance.
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