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All Farsi To You?

Our new realities call for new language skills

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All Farsi To You?
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Languages To Learn

  • Chinese: China is India’s biggest trading partner; also a neighbour
  • Pashto and Dari: Spoken in the strategically important Afghanistan
  • Burmese: Burma is one of India’s most important partners in the east
  • Persian and Arabic: Help further India’s reach in West and Central Asia

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It’s no longer just French and German. As India’s strategic interests evolve, its linguistic priorities too are maturing. Recent months have witnessed a clutch of advertisements seeking to recruit speakers of less popular but equally important languages like Pashto, Dari, Burmese, Sinhala and Chinese. Leading the drive is an ad placed last October by a “premier government science and technology organisation”—widely presumed to be the National Technological Research Organisation—that sought to fill an unprecedented 36 posts for language specialists.

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These include six posts for Pashto and Nepali, four posts each for Chinese, Dari, Burmese and Sinhala, three posts for Arabic, two posts for French and one each for Balochi, Tibetan and Turkish. The same advert called for applications from speakers of Indian languages like Kok Borok, spoken along the Indo-Bangladesh border in Tripura. In November 2009, the ministry of external affairs, which is also expanding its linguistic reach, issued ads seeking interpreters in Arabic, Persian and Chinese. The cabinet secretariat  (read RAW) followed in January with its own notice, seeking translators who specialise in Turkish, Arabic, Nepali, Korean, Sinhala and Chinese.

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Many language specialists work with the government’s Central Monitoring Services (CMS) that keeps a tab on radio, television and Internet communication in foreign languages. Set up by the British during World War II in Shimla to monitor Nazi propaganda, it was shifted to New Delhi in 1981. Akhtar Mahdi, formerly with the CMS and now head of the Centre for Persian and Central Asian Studies at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), says, “There has been a regular intake of Persian speakers from my centre. Over 20 have joined the CMS since I joined JNU in 1990. The requirement for Persian speakers is only going to expand as India develops ties with Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia.” Persian, because of its historical relevance, is also in demand at the department of unani medicine, the Archaeological Survey of India and other wings of the ministry of culture.

The ministry of defence runs two language schools, one each in New Delhi and in Pachmarhi in MP, where officers from all ministries can learn 16 different languages. The ones in demand include  those that are intimately linked with India’s security matrix (like Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Dari and Burmese). Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the US government realised how short it was on speakers of Arabic, Persian, Pashto and Dari. Since then it has made an effort to reach out to speakers of these languages. There has been no comparable effort by the Indian government to identify strategic languages, prioritise them and develop their speakers. Despite Sri Lanka’s strategic importance, there is only one serving ifs officer who’s conversant with Sinhala.

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Moreover, the Centre’s drive to recruit foreign language speakers is being undercut by the expanding private sector. Nowhere is this more evident than among those who learn Chinese. In the 1980s, nearly all graduates of JNU’s Centre for Chinese and South East Asian Studies would join the government. Now, when political and especially economic ties with China are developing rapidly, only about one in every hundred Chinese students joins the government. Most head for lucrative jobs. Gautam Kumar Jha, a fluent speaker of Bahasa Indonesia and Portuguese, who quit working for the CMS in 2004 to join J.P. Morgan in Mumbai, is a case in point. “I was paid just Rs 800 per day and would often get the money after a gap of four months. What’s worse, foreign language speakers at CMS are not respected and valued the way they should be,” he says.

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