Welcome, Speaker:

June 18/2014: The newly elected Speaker of the just elected 15th Orissa Legislative Assembly (OLA) has made his mark with a ruling that is not only monumental but also an extremely welcome one. Sri Niranjan Pujari, the Speaker, has said the Members of the House will not be encouraged to speak in any other language except Oriya and English while deliberating on the floor of the Assembly. Unfortunately, most of the local media did not give due prominence to such an important decision.

The Speaker’s decision bears a lot of importance in these present times. Oriya, as a language, has just recently earned its rightful place as a ‘classical’ language of this country. Sadly however, all those fighting for encouraging the use and development of Oriya as a living and vibrant language have been misguided for a long time. Their salvos have, invariably, been aimed at discouraging the study and use of English amongst the youth of this state.

Resultantly, English has become a language that goes over the head of the average Oriya educated youth. Teachers, parents and now it seems even political and other leaders of this state are putting more stress on the use of Hindi.

Linguists the world over are conscious of the concept of the ‘killer language’ China for example used Mandarin as the official language. When the Communists took over late 1940s, they thrust Mandarin on the Cantonese speakers. In the initial stage, when this process was being implemented, it sparked wild protests. Eventually, Cantonese has diminished in importance and Mandarin rules the roost. When today we say a person is speaking ‘Chinese’, it always implies Mandarin.

Similarly, after Independence, Pakistan also had a situation akin to what we see in India today on its hands. The Pushtu, Sindhi and Baluchi (along with a few other dialects) users were swamped by the more prosperous and strong armed Punjabis with their language. The users of the other languages were relegated as secondary citizens of that nation. Those who had migrated directly from different parts of India were labelled ‘Mohajirs’ and their languages were subjected to ridicule and eventual obliteration. By making Punjabi as the official language, the other languages were mercilessly exterminated.

With the formation of the Soviet Union, the smaller states were subjected to the so called unifying language—Russian. With official use of that language, communist politicians across that vast stretch of a nation had to deal with superiors at Moscow who only spoke Russian as they were mostly from the European part. This use of the ‘unifying’ language trickled down to the nook and corner of the vast Soviet land mass and the youth in most states (which have become independent countries now) started speaking and communicating only in Russian. 

This helped ‘kill’ many languages that were prevalent in Central Asian and other countries which were previously part of that Union. Now the best that the youth of these nations can be engaged in work are as stewards or menial help in Russia. 

These are but only a few examples. History also teaches us how Sanskrit, primarily an Indo Germanic language, killed our home grown Pali. Having an immensely large vocabulary and an unique script, Pali was alive and much used in North and Eastern parts of India. Many linguists believe Oriya with a script that, unlike Sanskrit derivatives, does not scratch a line on top of the alphabets is one of the purest forms of Pali. It is said that even Goutam Buddha was fluent in Oriya. Sadly, we as Oriyas are ashamed to speak in our mother tongue. A Bengali travelling to Puri would insist on speaking in her language while dealing with a shopkeeper or a rickshaw puller. These people however would reply in Bengali or Hindi. A business man from Delhi or Ranchi would always insist on speaking in Hindi while doing deals at Bhubaneswar or Jharsuguda. The educated Oriyas and the political leaders of these areas would hate to reply back in their own mother tongue. The same business man, travelling to Madras, would try to speak in a spattering of Tamil or Bengali in Calcutta.

It is therefore imperative that we Oriyas learnt from the past and did something right now to save our language. We have to realize that Hindi can easily be discerned as the ‘killer’ for a language such as Oriya. With its vast back up from the Bombay entertainment industry, it would but be a matter of a few decades when our youth would completely abhor using Oriya for their communication needs. While trying to make our youth competitive at the national level, we must encourage proficiency in English. At the same time, to keep our identity intact, we must thwart the onslaught of Hindi and insist on speaking in Oriya. This should be implemented vigorously in the border districts of the state.

Seen in this light, the recent decision of the Speaker of the Orissa Legislative Assembly to disallow use of Hindi in deliberations is a very welcome step in spite of the Hon’ble Speaker going back on his ruling and clarifying that he did not ban the use of Hindi.
 

Sad, indeed!.