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Just Ektu Kachhe

Hindi-borne impurities irk Bengali language purists

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Just Ektu Kachhe
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It may be a universal skill but Bengalis do wield it with a special skill: injecting into every language they attempt to speak a particular sound that is forged in the smithy of their own accents. When Pranab Mukherjee, a famed practitioner of the standard deviation, assures all in his budget speech that he was “bhery” happy to “inphorm” the house on sundry matters, a newcomer to India could be forgiven for wondering whether his speech was indeed in English. The FM can’t of course change channels at this stage—and why must he? After all, accent is only an endearing oddity that may go into oblivion sooner than we think, as a standardised speech conquers everything in its wake.

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For, it appears Bengalis in general—for all their reputation for language conservatism— are not really as set in their ways as Calcutta’s trams. The hip, new Bengali playing on FM channels, in TV ads and soaps shows all the classic signs of hybridity. The all-pervasive influence of the mass media has ensured that Hindi is making subtle and not-so-subtle inroads into the language of Jibanananda’s poetry and Bibhutibhusan’s prose.

It’s a phenomenon that’s perhaps visible (or audible) all across India, but the   reaction has firmed up in Bengal. For, what one side perceives as ‘hip’ is inevitably seen by another as the very harbinger of linguistic doom. Bengali scholar Samik Bandyopadhyay, who runs a publishing house that brings out select Bengali texts, goes so far as to call it a “crisis of democracy” and a “gross mass production of communication”. He says: “The Bengali FM channels speak a language which is anything but Bengali”.

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Many condemn “bastardised” expressions peppering soaps and TV ads: the Hindi-ised “khana lagabo”, instead of “khabar baarbo” for “laying out the food”; “tomar ki laage”, instead of “tomar ki mone hoy” for “what do you think”; and “kichhu toh koro” instead of “kichhu ekta koro” for “do something, at least”. A seemingly innocuous TV ad for a health beverage has been singled out for high disapproval. In it, a schoolboy tells his friends, “Arre bhaab, juddher shokaley Alexander-er memory loss hoto toh?” (what if Alexander lost his memory on the day of the battle). To purists, this is a travesty of how the language should be spoken, since everything from syntax to intonation smacks of a Hindi touch. Homemaker Janaki Mukherjee finds it “so horrendous” that she immediately switches channels. “We never speak like that!” she insists.

Some are doing more than pressing buttons. Last month, filmmaker Anindita Sarbadhicary’s ‘Save the Mother Tongue’ rally, with posters like the one bearing Tagore’s quote, “Mother tongue is equivalent to mother’s milk”, was attended by nearly 8,000 culture-conscious souls, among them artists and authors. “This rally reflects the anger of a large number of people who feel that enough is enough, and something must be done to save the mother tongue,” said Sarbadhicary.

Some sceptics are asking, however, how exactly the mother tongue is to be saved from a trend which, in the words of Bengali author Sunil Ganguly, is “inevitable”. “Language is in a constant state of flux, you can’t stop that,” Ganguly told Outlook. Mandira Mitra, creative director of the popular daily TV series Bou Kotha Kou, which airs on the Bengali channel StarJalsa, chimes in: “This linguistic mix-and-match, and a similar sartorial and ritualistic pan-Indianism, reflected in popular formats like television, is part of a broader cultural homogenisation taking place across India.” She feels characters “whose lives have a look and feel” closer to their counterparts in mainstream Hindi soaps  “appeal to viewers’ aspirational tastes.”

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While sometimes the Bengali goes awry because of inexpert dubbing of Hindi or English commercials, at other times it is far from accidental, as bkk’s dialogue writer Sharmila Mukherjee says. “The dialogues have to reflect the way Bengali youth speak these days.” It is precisely this sort of argument that touches a raw nerve for purists, and indeed, they may have something to worry about. Ask Snehalata Adhikari, a class IV student, what her favourite TV ad is, and the answer is, the “Alexander” one.

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