OUR LANGUAGE POLICY HYPOCRISY

It is said that Japanese Premier Tojo while replying to US Presidency

Harry S Trueman’s 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 that
the Japanese would 'take no notice of it'. So atom bombs destroyed
the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There could be several such undocumented and unnoticed bungles in
international diplomacy. There are innumerable cases of individual
injustice due to multilingualism or ambiguity and misinterpretation
even in the same language. For example before the Russian
Revolution an Assyriologist Netomelf was exiled to Siberia for life on
a charge of blasphemy because he was not given a chance to explain
that his book about
Nebuchadnezzar did not mean “Ne boch and Netzar (Russian for ‘No
God and No Tzar’)
Once in UN, a translator translated "Out of sight-out of mind" into an
expression the Russians understood as ‘invisible insanity’. During
Napolean III ‘s coup d’etat one of his officers Count de Saint-Arnaud
on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard,
coughed and exclaimed with his hand across his throat “Ma sacree
toux!” (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 in
addition to these if there are situations wherein important
negotiations are required to be made wherein the negotiators may get
bogged down in the quagmire of too many languages and language
interpreters. They can neither concentrate on the content nor can
they be utterly confident about what they have negotiated. Hence
there arises a necessity to bring down further, the number of
languages; and if necessary evolve a global language, and this has to
emerge from among the existing languages, as we know the
experiments with artificially created languages such as Esperanto,
IDO et, have failed for want of literature. A global language needs a
pride 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
primarily a significant one as per the criteria mentioned earlier. But
mere number of users cannot be a sufficient or justifiable parameter
to classify a language as significant , because if that were the case we
may 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 of
users of a language, its geographical spread, the wide range and
variegated vocabulary to communicate and express as many ideas or
events as possible in as many fields of human activity , it must have
the syntactic plasticity, flamboyant flexibility suited to both simple
and complex modes of expression, and an enormously evolved
derivational morphology.
If there is a language that fits into all these criteria adequately, that is
English. 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 without
any weakness. Definitely it does not sound as sweet as French. In fact
it does not have a word for ‘Punya’ the exact opposite of ‘sin. It has
not a single word expression to countered social and psychological
aspects of life, which many other languages even very insignificant
ones have as has been wonderfully brought out be Howard Rheingold
in 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 nobody
speaks; Yufen (Japanese)- an awareness of the universe that triggers
feelings too deep and mysterious for words; Fucha (Polish)-using
company time and money and other resources for your own ends; it
does not have the grammatical subtleties of such insignificant
languages as Chichewa, a language spoken by the unlettered tribes of
East Africa which as per the studies of Benjamin Lee Whorf, has an
extraordinary perspective on time through its two past tenses, one for
the real or objective past and another for the subjective or mental
past. The primitive tongues of Algonquin languages have four persons
in their pronouns; the metaphysically marvelous language of Hopi
Indians of Arizona reflects their excellent view of creation; instead of
a noun for ‘wave’ they have only the participle ‘walalata(Waving). You
may wonder why this long preamble about language and canvassing
for according English the status of global language while discussing
about a national language for India .
We as a nation talk of global trade, global thinking, global concern
etc. But when it comes to language
especially with so many different linguistic divisions we talk of the
importance of a national language and still hesitate to give the due
importance to a global language at least as a link language; it is
because from the earliest times we suffer from certain strong
inexplicable prejudices. Our emotionally charged feeling of patriotic
nationalism was pursued with a religious fervor to effectively drive
away the colonial bosses. Like all ferventness which turns fanatical in
function and perception and blinkered in vision, our nationalism too,
failed to see and acknowledge the good that our colonial bosses have
done.
Gandhiji managed to communicate all over India and to the world
outside 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 to
everything that was British. As a result he caught hold of a rocket
without either a safe launching pad or enough space to zoom- the
rocket was Hindi-Hindustani as a national language which he
pronounced for the first time in 1934 when he founded the Bharatiya
Sahitya Parishad at Nagpur. In fact this word was supposed to have
been used as early as 1892 by Bhoodev Mookerji.Later in 1945 at the
Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, scholar K.M.Munshi wanted it to be the
national language of India. Why all these men, who were very well
aware that at least 40 percent of the Indian peasants, labourers etc.
are contented with their mother tongue and are willing to serve the
nation; why these honourable leaders who owed at least a sizable part
of their prominence to the English language
(which enabled them to be preferred as negotiators with the
Britishers) all of sudden had a superfluous hypocritical need to
promote Hindi –Hindustani as a national language of administration
when English was sufficient to deal with the administration
requirements, especially more so, at a time when all the
administrators were only people with an Engllish education.
In fact by adopting English as our only official language (I mean as
higher administrative, inter-state and state-centre link language ) we
will benefit on the global level and besides we will be manifesting our
superior sense of understanding because on the one hand we would
be opposing the western approaches of divide and rule, axe and annex
policies of trying to homogenize various political systems, proselytize
other faiths, colonize countries, marginalize smaller states, Balkanize
united provinces; on the other hand we would be welcoming what the
Britisher has tried to harmonize and grow i.e. the English language,
by absorbing, assimilating and adopting words and expressions
plundered from other languages and wonderfully injecting them not
only in its literary forms but also in the layman’s lexicon. In this lies
the strength and secret of the growth of the English language.
It is wrong to presume that a United Nationhood can be brought
about be either unity of religion or race or language. The Arab world
and Latin America are classical examples were despite all those unity,
there are so many nations. Let English be our lingua franca. Let the
Government stop wasting enormous time and money in imposing
Hindi on the whole nation. We can divert that money and time on
other pressing issues. Let not he regional linguistic, chauvinist
retaliate by making life miserable for Hindi-speaking people by
putting up all important public notices and boards only in the
regional language. These acts remind us of what Pascal wrote in his
Pensees; “Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the
greatest are the signs of strange disorder.”
Let us remember one thing while all of us feel the need for unity, what
unity needs is feeling for all by all .Let us remember what the great
seer Bahaullah has said:” If language can help create a sense of
nationalism, it can equally well help create a sense of
internationalism.”