Increasingly adrift from linguistic pluralism

Bengalis, those speaking Bangla, at least living in Bangladesh, look happy about, or take pride in, being monolinguals. So is, it appears, evident in the ways Bengalis here treat or think of other languages — Chakma, Santali, Bawm and the like that are spoken inside the country or Hindustani supposedly a foreign language spoken outside the country.

It is not hard to come by people who, when asked about anything Hindi, would readily come up with a dismissing statement such as ‘Okay, I don’t understand Hindi. I hardly watch Hindi television channels.’ People of this breed, however, love listening to Hindi songs. Anyone asked about Urdu might make a sneering statement such as ‘We fought against Urdu in 1952. We should not learn the language.’ This breed, however, loves quoting a couplet or two from Ghalib, with an accent, to profess how culturally-minded they are.

The sense of Bangla supremacy surfaces when it comes to Santali, which has been spoken here for hundreds of years, or Bawm, the language of a small group of people living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts who hardly find time between their struggles for daily living to think about their language. The refusal to learn Hindi and Urdu or even Chakma and Santali is quite normal — no one wants to live in a society with linguists and polyglots swarming — but the insinuation that goes with the denial, or the refusal, is not.

This refusal or denial, in most cases, however, is wrongly premised; for 40 or so languages that are spoken or used — and in many cases, written — within Bangladesh, this is about supremacy; Bangla is the state language of the republic and others have no official status; for Hindi and Urdu, or Hindustai in a combine term, or Assamese and Odia which are linguistically so close to Bangla, this is about politics playing wrongly in the mind. The only other language that they like to profess dreaming in is English, not out of love for a language but for necessity. English is a cash crop. Any investment in learning English and any efforts being put in for this has worthwhile return — we get better jobs, we get better exposure to the outside world and we get more attention if we learn to use the language efficiently. We use English because our jobs so demand of us. English has become the stepping stone to all good things in life; this is why we learn English and prize it more than Bangla.

While English has remained the cash crop for most, Hindustani — Hindi, often equated with the big brotherly attitude of India where it is the official language, and Urdu, often denounced as the language of Pakistan (which is not true; the language developed in Delhi during the Mughal rule; and besides being one of the 20 official languages, Urdu has the official status in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana, Jammu and Kashmir and the capital New Delhi; Urdu speakers, according to a 2008 estimate, accounts for less than 8 per cent of the total population of Pakistan having a predominance in the urban Sindh) — have become no-no although the language, known as Bihari in the Bangladesh parlance, a mix of Hindustani strongly flavoured with Bangla and English, has come to be the third most spoken first language, with about 2,50,000 speakers, mainly in refugee camps in 13 districts of Bangladesh.

Although first-language Urdu-speakers are now concentrated to the camps, especially after Bangladesh’s war for independence in 1971, many of these people have been here, which had been part of India before 1947 and part of the united Pakistan till 1971, since the days of the British rule, a few even since the Mughal period, and they have been speaking the languages down the ages.

People of the land that now constitutes Bangladesh fought, in 1952, for linguistic pluralism; it was no war against Urdu as many in both Bangladesh and the present-day Pakistan believe, or they have been taught to believe, deliberately or otherwise; it was a fight, under a broad rubric, for people’s right to mother tongue and linguistic — therefore, cultural — pluralism. The Bengalis wanted Bangla to be a state language, not the only state language, of Pakistan; they wanted their basic right to be honoured so that a people of the Bengali ethnicity, along with its language and culture, would not become extinct; it was a fight against linguistic colonialism, of Urdu, by the rulers from the erstwhile West Pakistan. This fight for people’s right to mother tongue and against West Pakistan’s linguistic colonialism, embodied in the language movement, later rolled into the emergence of Bangladesh — the erstwhile East Pakistan breaking off the united Pakistan.

After the independence of Bangladesh, people failed to embody to the spirit of the language movement. We veered off what we believed in when we were being ruled. We fought for linguistic pluralism (we ultimately had a semblance of it; Bangla was recognised as an official language of the united Pakistan in 1956 when its first constitution was adopted; Article 214(1) of the constitution said: ‘The state languages of Pakistan shall be Urdu and Bengali’; the 1962 constitution of Pakistan iterated the national language status of Bangla and it had been in force until its third constitution in 1973; strangely enough, most of the Bengalis who grew up learning about the language movement hardly know of the language being officially recognised by the state of Pakistan only four years after the 1952 movement); but the moment we started to be in control, we stopped believing in the tenet, much to our convenience.

We have by then learnt to associate the language with the West Pakistani rulers and some of the Muslims who had lived here for ages or had left their birthplace in what makes the present-day India for a place here hoping for their rights to be better honoured. This idea of compartmentalised exclusivity has grown so deep in us that even now, more than four decades after the independence, the printing of posters or leaflets, even for people living in camp areas, in Urdu could cause quite a social commotion. In the process, on the analogy on, or in reaction to, our dislike, even detest, for Urdu, a similar dislike for Hindi became evident. Linguistic colonialism, especially by powers economically, not culturally in all the cases, stronger, has happened all the time but it is colonialists who are to blame for any such colonialism, not the languages.

We have, after the independence of Bangladesh, always demonstrated nothing but negligence towards other languages used by people in Bangladesh. This is tree about all languages, big and small, living and threatened. There are, according to the Ethnologue, published by Dallas-based linguistic service organisation SIL International, 41 individual languages in Bangladesh, living in varying degrees and ways — in an alphabetical order, Tibeto-Burman Atong, Indo-Aryan Bengali, Indo-Aryan Bihari (Urdu), Indo-Aryan Bishnupriya Tibeto-Burman Chak, Indo-Aryan Chakma, Tibeto-Burman Asho (Chin), Tibeto-Burman Bawm (Chin), Tibeto-Burman Khumi (Chin), Indo-Aryan Chittagonian, Tibeto-Burman Garo, Indo-Aryan Hajong, Mon-Khmer Khasi, Tibeto-Burman Koch, Munda Koda, Tibeto-Burman Kok Borok, Munda Kol, Dravidian Kurux, Mon-Khmer Lyngngam, Munda Mahali, Tibeto-Burman Marma, Tibeto-Burman Megam, Tibeto-Burman Meitei, Tibeto-Burman Mizo, Tibeto-Burman Mru (Mro), Munda Mundari, Tibeto-Burman Pangkhua, Mon-Khmer Pnar, Tibeto-Burman Rakhine, Indo-Aryan Rangpuri, Tibeto-Burman Riang, Indo-Aryan Rohingya, Indo-Aryan Oraon (Sadri), Munda Santali, Dravidian Sauria Paharia, Indo-Aryan Sylheti, Indo-Aryan Tangchangya, Tibeto-Burman Tippera, Tibeto-Burman Usoi, Mon-Khmer War-Jaintia and the Indian Sign Language for the deaf.

While all the languages are living, the Ethnologue classified three of them — Lyngngam, Riang and Sauria Paharia — as shifting, which means that the child-bearing generation can use the language among themselves but it is not being transmitted to children and five of them — Atong, Khasi, Kurux, Mizo and Rohingya — as threatened, which means that the language is used for face-to-face communication within all generation but it is losing users. We have been so averse to linguistic pluralism by now that while it is imperative for us (we once fought for our right to mother tongue and it dawns on us to fight for the right of other people to their mother tongue too) to try to save the eight languages that are reported to be in trouble, we have yet to give any official recognition to any of these languages.

Chakma, according to the Ethnologue, has 1,50,000 speakers in Bangladesh but in most cases, only the language as a means of oral communication has been transmitted to new generations; in many cases, it is not used as a means of written communications as many of the Chakmas do not know how to read and write its writing system or the script. Other languages that have their own writing systems are also in an almost similar situation, in a lesser degree though. The government in 2012 planned to publish primary textbooks for children of six national minority communities; the works was to have been completed by 2014; the government has now planned an advanced completion date by 2016.

By not helping these languages of national minorities to survive, especially with state patronisation, we have not only dwarfed these languages but also gradually been destroying a vast repertoire of folklore and their intrinsic knowledge of the land and their nature the way we have dissociated ourselves with Urdu, have not preserved what had been in print about ourselves in the language between 1947 and 1971 and have created a gaping wide in the continuity of our history and knowledge.

We have also betrayed hypocrisy of a sort in the celebrations of the International Mother Language Day, which has come to be observed, since February 2000, as a day to promote linguistic, and cultural, diversity and multilingualism, on a decision by UNESCO in 1999. We take pride in Ekushey February being observed as International Mother Language Day but we do not lift a finger to promote the linguistic diversity that we are in. National minorities cannot live in their languages unless there is state patronisation, at least in the present context of Bangladesh.

Certain people from the national minorities can labour on their mother tongue, but this does not guarantee them a living. This is where the state could, and should, step in. Any government officials posted to the region where these languages are used could be given an added advantage only if they could learn the language of the region. There are poor and very poor national minorities, living in an adverse condition in the Hill Tracts; they need institutional support for their language to be used for face-to-face communication with all generations in a sustainable situation, and to be used for literary and educational purposes in a standardised form, also in a sustainable situation.

While the history of the language movement, and the associated principles of linguistic pluralism and inclusiveness of linguistic diversity that we fought for, has remained to be the most momentous event in the nation’s history, walking back on the same principles after the country’s independence drifting towards exclusivity of official language, and the associated chauvinism over other languages, local or foreign, rolling into a monolithic, monolingual structure, has been the most disastrous event in Bangladesh’s history.

Akkas, Abu Jar M. (2015 Feb. 21). Increasingly adrift from linguistic pluralism New Age. 8

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