Monday, April 7, 2008

The Alchemy of Language


‘Do shambaa bhai doshambaa, daakiyon ne kya kiya…..’ the words of the song rose like bubbles from the depths of my childhood memories and burst at the surface as the irony of it dawned on me.I grew up in Lajpat Nagar – a south Delhi colony which originally began as a refugee colony during partition days, consisting of Hindu migrants from Pakistan. One of the many games that I used to play with my friends as a child was about a police and a thief during which the above song was recited. Except for the first few words, the remaining song was in Hindi. None of us knew or cared what these words meantForty years later, as I sat at a University in Gujarat learning Farsi, I realized that ‘Doshamba’ was a Farsi word meaning ‘Monday’. The children of partition refugees who had grown up on communal rhetoric, sang songs containing words which belonged to a language generally associated with a community they had learnt to hate – the Muslims.Yet again, in Gujarat, which has recently witnessed the worst form of communal violence, my Farsi teacher tells me that fifteen percent of the words in Gujarati language are of Arabic or Farsi origin. This is more or less true for most north Indian languages.The saffron brigade had, at one time, taken upon itself the task of ‘saffronising’ Hindi by ‘purging’ it of all the Urdu words and replacing them with Sanskrit equivalents. Some of them still insist on speaking a form of Hindi which sounds more like dialogues from Ramanand Sagar’s ‘Ramayan’, than the Hindi spoken and understood by the common man!Our languages have grown out of the life of our nation. They imbibe in them the struggles and triumphs of this country, the agonies and ecstasies of a history so rich and diverse that few nations can compare with it. Traders and travelers, conquerors and the conquered, all infused their own native tongues to the existing local languages and dialects. This alchemy of native and ‘foreign’ tongues made what our languages are today – a multicoloured tapestry. Language is a reflection of the culture and history of a region and does not belong to any religion. It enshrines the spirit of the people who speak it.
This write up has also been published in the 'Indian Express' .