Shards and words

Languages have grown out of the nation8217;s life

The words of the song rose like bubbles from the depths of my childhood memories and burst at the surface: Do shambaa bhai doshambaa, daakiyon ne kya kiya8230; And then the irony of it dawned on me.

I grew up in Lajpat Nagar 8212; a south Delhi colony, which had originally began as a refugee colony during Partition days. 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 meant.

Forty years later, as I sat at a university in Gujarat learning Farsi, I realised that 8216;doshamba8217; was a Farsi word meaning Monday. The children of Hindu refugees who had grown up on communal rhetoric of Partition sang songs containing words which belonged to a language generally associated with a community they had learnt to hate 8212; the Muslims.

Yet again, in Gujarat, which has recently witnessed the worst form of communal violence, my Farsi teacher tells me that 15 per cent of the words in the Gujarati language are of Arabic or Farsi origin. This is more or less true of most north Indian languages.

The saffron brigade had, at one time, taken upon itself the task of 8216;saffronising8217; Hindi by 8216;purging8217; 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 Sagar8217;s Ramayan, rather 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 travellers, conquerors and the conquered, all infused their own native tongues into the existing local languages and dialects.

This alchemy of native and 8216;foreign8217; tongues made what our languages are today 8212; 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.