BackHow should we celebrate Indian classical languages?
Forcing students to learn Sanskrit is not important for our future generation, making it easily available in the language he or she wants to read it is
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Today is the first anniversary of the government recognizing Odia as the sixth classical language of India. The ones that were accorded the status earlier are Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Sanskrit.
The status may mean little for the rest of India or even to people of Odisha, but such occasions remind us about the rich and diverse literary tradition of our country. Odia, with a history dating back to Bharat Muni’s Natya Shastra in the 4th century BC, is part of that tradition.
When the Twitteratti was celebrating Hindi and Tamil phrases trending on Twitter, making them the first Indian languages with the distinction earlier this month, a literary rage was still under way, started by noted Marathi writer Bhalchandra Nemade, the winner of the 2014 Jnanpith award, the highest literary honour in India.
Nemade termed English the “killer language" and criticized the literary distinction of V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Although Nemade may have touched a raw nerve in many, he raised a valid point about the neglect that regional language writers have received compared with English language writers.
To be honest, I had never heard of Nemade. Now I discover that he is the one who revolutionized modern Marathi literature. I am sure most of the non-Marathi readers of this article will sympathise with me. A quick search on Flipkart reveals his masterpiece Kosla (Cocoon in English) is indeed available in English translation though an English version of his latest masterpiece Hindu, published in 2011, is nowhere to be found.
When I posted on Facebook the news of eminent Odia novelist Pratibha Ray winning the Jnanpith award in 2011, except a few, most did not recognize her though she is a household name in Odisha.
I still remember of my childhood days during the summer vacations in our village my father reading out aloud chapters from her masterpiece Yajnaseni (translated in English as the Story of Draupadi) to his friends sitting on the verandah of our house over an evening cup of tea.
No doubt we have failed our literary heroes. There are eminent Marathi, Bengali and Malayali writers, but nobody knows them beyond the geographical boundaries of their states. Our national literary heroes are not the ones writing in our own languages, but in English. If you have still doubt on whether such writers write anything that would interest your modern tastes, then go grab a copy of The Bride in the Moonlit Night and the Other Stories from the Delhi Book Fair published by the National Book Store, which is a compilation of short stories originally written in Odia by Manoj Das, considered a living legend. Das is often compared with the medieval Indian master storyteller Vishnu Sharma for his unique stories and writing style.
The absence of a culture of translation is one problem. You have to be a Nemade, Ray or Das for some of your work to be translated. About the ones who have not been able to attract the attention of the Kendriya Sahitya Academy, the less said the better. But then most still don’t know Nemade, Ray or for that matter Das even with their translated works. It’s like we have given up on the Indian language writers.
There is hardly any review of their translated work in the literature pages of any of the English language dailies. There are 16 French, 12 German and seven Swedish writers who have won the Nobel in literature, but it is almost an impossible task for Nemade or Das to make it to the list. More than 100 years after Rabindra Nath Tagore won that most coveted literary prize, India seems to have not produced any literary work worth such recognition.
Indian language writers are fighting a battle for survival even on their home turf. In cases like in Hindi, while Bollywood churns out ₹ 100 crore-plus movies month after month, there is no taker for Hindi literature. My friends from north India tell me they have no knowledge of the contemporary Hindi writers or about their works. The situation must be varying from state to state.
For many Indian language writers, their readers are now dispersed all across the globe and they are finding it difficult to reach their readers beyond their borders. E-book publication has not yet picked up in Indian language writing and online megastores somehow have not seen an opportunity in this demand-supply gap. Regional language books are almost absent on their virtual carts.
The government has embarked on an ambitious mission through Digital India to connect every village and institutions through high-speed Internet across the country. While creating the virtual network is necessary for creating a knowledge society, our knowledge of this country will remain incomplete without awareness of our vast literary traditions.
While there are a few private institutions taking up the task of digitization of some classic literature, the task at hand is much larger. We need to focus on making it available in more than one language so that it reaches a much larger audience. Forcing students to learn Sanskrit is not important for our future generation to appreciate the great heritage of this country, making it easily available in the language he or she wants to read it is.
Otherwise, granting more Indian languages like Odia classical status will at best be tokenism and our aim of creating a true knowledge society will remain vacuous.
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