Tarai’s language dilemma
- Pramod Mishra
Those who have designated Hindi as their mother tongue in Nepal can’t write it correctly Khas-speaking Nepalis oppose Hindi because they fear Hindi will, with its bigger force, undermine the predominance of Khas or challenge the Khas-dominated national identity. A few Maithili and Bhojpuri (I haven’t seen any Awadhi-speaking opposition to Hindi) speakers along with some Khas speakers oppose Hindi because they rightly think that Hindi will eat up these weaker languages spoken as mother tongue in the Nepali Tarai. On the other hand, the Tarai parties almost unanimously support Hindi’s prominence along with Maithili, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and so on. What is the underlying mystery behind this confusing language politics?
While I leave the specialized analysis of linguistic complexity to professional linguists such as Drs. Ramavtar and Yogendra Yadav, who have done significant work on Maithili and Nepal’s other languages, I am going to offer here my understanding of the tussle between Hindi and Maithili.
Why has Hindi become the lingua franca of the Tarai despite the absence of any curricular, official support as it exists in India? Bollywood and Indian television may have been reasons in recent years for its spread but the main reason is the failure of Maithili, Bhojpuri and Awadhi to shed their rustic, dehati association, on the one hand, and the discriminatory politics of successive Nepali and Indian governments on the other.
There is a two-fold reason for the failure of Maithili as a formal language of widespread use: political discrimination and philological misunderstanding, on the one hand, and the vice-like grip of the big castes-predominently Brahmins but also Kayasths and Rajputs and to a lesser extent Bhuminars-of Madhubani district of Bihar (panch kosh) on its written verse and prose forms, on the other. Maithili dramas have a more mixed nature because while these are written by members of the big castes they are performed for the general public in a Maithili spoken.
The situation of Bhojpuri and Awadhi resembles Maithili in their dehati nature but not in the six hundred years of Maithili’s written literature. True, Awadhi has Tulsi Das’s 16th-century Ramcharitmanas and Malik Mohammad Jayasi’s Padmavat of the same period but anything else of note after that? And Bhojpuri may have some recent activists championing its written verse and prose forms without much traction in the curriculum and the official world, it certainly is roaringly popular as a dehati language of racy, raucous songs and poems-“Ara heele Baliya heele, Chapra heele la” readily comes to mind-and recent movies of north Indian village culture. One is not sure if recent activism alone will make Bhojpuri and Awadhi shake off their rusticity and rise to the formal, official level without years of government support.
Mathili’s case is more complex. Richard Burghardt, whose untimely death was a great loss to South Asian area studies, has written an incisive essay on the fate of Maithili as a language. What I knew from my general observation and experience as a Maithili speaker, Burghardt confirmed in his scholarly findings. For example, I knew that Maithili and Sanskrit as elective subjects in Bihar’s Public Service Commission tipped the balance in favor of Maithili Brahmins and Kayasthas in Bihar’s state-level jobs, the same way the alumni of Tindhara Pathsala in Kathmandu become Nepal’s civil servants in hordes by writing their public service exams with Nepali and Sanskrit as optional subjects with the added advantage of Nepali as a medium of writing and interview. As far as I know, Lalu Yadav put paid to this unfair advantage that went against non-Maithili writing Biharis, such as those who spoke Maithili but didn’t learn its written forms and Angika, Magahi Bhojpuri and Bajjika speakers.
This government disfavour dates back to at least the 18th century. But one can easily extend this discrimination against Maithili farther back in time because after the Muslim control of north Bihar, Persian became the language of official business and gradually Urdu the spoken form in the official world. Maithili may have thrived better in the palaces of Malla kings in medieval Nepal but its fate in north Bihar remained tied with the Maithili pandits’ finicky written form and the rural folk’s language of folk songs, plays and to a limited extent verses.
Burghardt clearly lays out how Maithili suffered in the 19th century since the first census of 1872. George Grierson, the first philologist to have investigated north Indian languages thoroughly, studied Maithili extensively and fluctuated between designating it as an independent language like Bengali and Oriya and denigrating it as a descendent of a non-existent “Bihari” language. And the British census takers, too, following the philologist considered it as a dialect of Bihari and later the Indian government after Independence counted it as a dialect of Hindi to bolster the Hindi-speaking nationhood and avoid the Maithili-speaking areas separating from Bihar. Thus, Maithili always suffered from philologists’ misunderstanding and Indian government’s political exigency. And in Nepal, Khas became Nepali and the Rana and Shah rulers left no room for any other language in the state structure.
But the Maithili elite were no less to blame for Maithili’s misfortunes. For example, in the 1961 Indian census more than half of the Maithili-speaking population dropped Maithili as their mother tongue in favour of Hindi. Why?
True, Mathili is spoken by almost everyone in its various forms from the border of Bengal in the east to the border of Bhojpuri-speaking areas of western Bihar and central Nepal. Even in Jhapa and Morang, save for the Rajbanshis and Bengali Muslims, other Taraiwasis, such as Yadavs, Kebarat, Gangais, etc., speak Maithili. But they would much prefer Hindi to Maithili when it comes to Maithili’s written form. Why? The reason is the dominance and monopoly of the big castes, especially the Maithili Brahmins on its written form and their idea of what is chaste or shuddha Maithili. In particular, the so-called pure Maithili spoken within what is called panch kosh in Madhubani district of north Bihar; it has monopolized its written form. That sort of Maithili, they say, “is the preserve of those who cultivate their minds, not their fields.” To further quote Burghardt, “In the former category one finds Maithils from the so-called ‘big’ castes: the Maithil Brahmans who are guardians of Sanskritic knowledge, the Bhumihar Brahmans who are the traditional landlords of Mithila and the Kayastha scribes who kept the accounts and revenue records for the Bhumihars.” Burghardt left out the Rajputs. That is why, having grown up in a Rajbanshi environment, when I first encountered the written form of Maithili in my college on the banks of the Ganges, it appeared an alien language to me. So I never studied Maithili either in high school or college, opting instead for Sanskrit and speaking Maithili only as my mother and father tongue and loving its folk forms, from hilarious parodies to Vidyapati’s more nuanced, somber and erotic songs.
And my father always wrote his letters to me in his broken Hindi and when he died, I switched from Hindi to dehati Maithili to write letters to my mother, which others in the village read out to her. Writing in Nepali, Hindi or chaste Maithili would have felt artificial, embarrassing to me and to her. That’s why, it is also said that “Maithili is woman’s speech, the menfolk opting for Hindi in their more public lives.”
Maithili, Bhojpuri and Awadhi by all means need state patronage and promotion. Maithili certainly deserves the status of an official language but its written form has been the preserve of the Maithili Brahmins and Kayasths of certain districts of north Bihar. They will be its immediate beneficiary in government jobs rather than the larger populace who speak it but do not care for its so-called pure, panch kosi form.
On the other hand, Hindi is nobody’s mother tongue. And even those who have designated it as their mother tongue in Nepal can’t write it hundred percent correctly because of Hindi’s complex grammatical gender system. Hindi is a learnt language for everyone. A Nepali-, Maithili-, Bhojpuri-, Awadhi- or whoever has to labor equally to learn it. For example, when I went to India to study, it didn’t take me long to beat most Biharis in Hindi exams. Although Sanskrit-knowing Brahmin teachers and writers and Hindutva ideologues still try to steer it toward tatsam vocabulary and pandit-Hindi, Gabbar Singh-Hindi, Lalu-Hindi and Ghazal-Hindi are too powerful a force to be tamed by the RSS volunteers.
Now, if Maithili breaks free of its caste and geographical barriers in its written form and Maithili, Bhojpuri and Awadhi manage to have infrastructure in schools, they certainly deserve their due official recognition and government patronage because a common Taraiwasi lives in these languages.
But then the question of the recognition and empowerment of languages in Nepal is not just the internal dynamic of a specific language; it’s more a matter of how those who do not speak Khas or Nepali as their mother tongue and are not hill high caste Hindus can have parity with Khas-speaking hill high castes in the state structures. That is the crux of the language question in Nepal. If the new constitution addresses the bigger issue, the language question will no longer remain as volatile.
Beyond language wars
- Pramod Mishra
The Vice President’s oath in Hindi and the Supreme Court’s judgment against it has once again thrust the contentious issue of language center stage. Even as Nepal worries its head over whether VP Jha ought or ought not to retake his oath in Greek or Farsi or Swahili, it’s time to give a different turn to the language question.
Yes, Khas-speaking Nepalis (I am going to use “Khas” for “Nepali” just to separate the language from the nation-state and language-based nationalism and see how it works in the discourse about languages in a multicultural country) must be proud of the Khas language and so should the speakers of Hindi- or Nepal bhasha- or any other language. And when Khas-speakers or Khas sympathizers like me, who now speak Khas more than any other language, celebrate Khas language and literature at home and abroad, we should all be proud of its achievements. A language spoken by a handful of hill Hindus only a couple of centuries ago has spread all over the country and beyond and produced, since Bhanubhakta’s days, an admirable body of literature.
Let’s all celebrate it.
But Khas speakers and their enthusiasts and its sympathizers must not try to impose the language on others in the state institutions at a time when Nepal and Nepalis are engaged in redefining Nepali identity and restructuring the Nepali state. Khas speakers trying to impose and belligerently shame VP Jha into retaking oath in Khas is the same hubris if VP Jha would say that everyone else in Nepal should take their oath in his language, be it Hindi or Maithili or whatever. In other words, the emergent Nepal cannot have a monolingual identity.
I of course know that Khas in time changed its name and became Nepali, with the barrel of the gun became the language in which the government functioned, and during the Panchayat era became invested with emotional nationalism, but we are not living in the Panchayat or Rana periods. We have had more than one uprising and over ten years of insurgency and more than ten thousand deaths. Why? To repeat the exhausted slogans and ideas of Panchayat nationalism? Instead of broadening the field of discourse, expanding the mental horizon and making our hearts capacious, the Supreme Court decision has made it a backward-looking force, which it has often been in matters of ethnicity — It defeated the attempt to make Maithili and Nepal Bhasa mediums of communication in Janakpur and Kathmandu municipalities respectively and sat on the citizenship bill in the 1990s just because some advocates filed petitions. So, the Supreme Court in its present form for all its legal expertise and service has fallen short of a new Nepal.
In the new constitution, the structure of the Supreme Court needs to be revamped and justices need to be chosen or elected, somewhat like in South Africa, by an independent panel comprised of the diversity of professions, political parties, civil society, legal experts and so on so that those who become justices are not only legal luminaries but can keep the interest of the country’s diversity and future in mind rather than advocate the failed ideas of the past about language and nation and national identity. At this sensitive point of transition from the past to the future, the best the Supreme Court could have done to help the country was to sit on the petition against the Vice President’s oath and let the Constituent Assembly (CA) make the decision about language in due course.
What are the consequences of the VP retaking his oath in “Nepali”? Have the justices thought about it? It will further alienate the Tarai from the mainstream and give the separatists and hate-mongers another pretext to spread their hate against Khas-speakers. No matter how Khas-speaking Nepalis can show their belated advocacy of the Tarai languages, they should know that Hindi remains the lingua franca of the Tarai, whatever the number of its speakers as mother tongue. That is a fact. And since the census has found that about two hundred thousand Taraiwasi speak Hindi as their first language, and members of parliament and even ministers take their oath in Hindi, what was the harm in the VP taking his oath in Hindi and signing the Nepali version for the records? He could have taken his oath in Farsi or Greek or whatever for all I care as long as what he says in his oath commits him to be an honest, Nepal-loving, Nepal-defending high official of the state.
This is not a time for narrowness; this is a time to expand one’s intellectual horizon and political sympathies. That day would be a truly multicultural day when a Khas-speaking high official takes his oath in Hindi or in any other language than his mother tongue and a Madhesi or any non-Khas speaker voluntarily takes his oath in Khas rather than being forced by the Supreme Court. In order to cultivate a multicultural habit of mind for a new Nepal, how about mandatory taking of oath of office in other than one’s first language for at least ten years?
In the interest of plurality and internationalism, I offer the following:
a. Almost every VDC, at least in the Tarai, now has an English medium “boarding school” where anybody who can afford sends his or her child to study in English medium. In the past decade, there has already been a sizable number of young folk who use English. hat will be the role of their English in Nepal? Only tourism, English teaching and English journalism, science and technology, and manpower export to the English-speaking West? What about their role in the state structure as civil servants, security officials and politicians in a globalized world?
b. It’s not just the foreign ministry that needs English-capable personnel. Almost every ministry now needs personnel fluent in English. And especially those ministries that need high ranking officials to interact with our neighbors need to be efficient in the languages of the neighbors. There are examples of Nepali officials in the border areas where they have to sit in meetings with Indian or Chinese officials, but they know neither Hindi nor English nor Chinese enough to serve the interest of the state well. As a result, they cannot effectively accomplish the international tasks.
c. On the other hand, those who are posted in ethnic areas within the country need to be efficient in the local languages and cultures of the region. For example, an Indian Administrative Service official who becomes a cadre of a particular state learns the language of the state in addition to his English, Hindi or whatever language he has as his mother tongue in order to carry out his or her duties effectively. And because they don’t know ethnic languages other than Khas and/or their mother tongue within Nepal, they fail to win the hearts and minds of the people and serve them effectively. In a new Nepal, the civil servants’ and security officials’ language skills need to be mandatorily broadened even as diversity is created in recruiting personnel. Emphasis on Indian or African language learning became the core of a colonial official’s training for employment in the British Empire. In this sense, Nepali officials have been worse even than the colonial officials.
d. A new Anglophone Nepali ethnicity has come into existence in the past decade or so in Nepal. This is not just the case of Nepal. It’s all over the world. English is gradually supplanting Hindi or at least going hand-in-hand with it in India. One needs to look at the crop of young journalists and writers who have emerged in the past decade in the Nepali public sphere. And the mushrooming English-medium schools are going to produce thousands of Anglophone Nepalis in the future. Nepal-loving and patriotic, this Anglophone manpower will not be Khas- or any one-language fanatics. They will love their languages and do everything to enrich them but because of their broader training and exposure to the English language and its treasures of ideas, they will more likely be more broad-minded and balanced in their judgment; they may not wish to impose their language, culture and way of life on others. They will be more willing to go out of their narrow box and reach out to other cultures, languages, classes and peoples who are not like them, don’t dress like them, or speak like them. They will have more tolerance and room for ambiguity in matters of identity and culture.
And so it is time that we thought of issues of language and culture not in terms of outdated national identity but in terms of how Nepalis will survive and thrive both as a multicultural country and as part of a more complex global community. It is only through the acceptance of one another rather than rejection of others or imposition of one’s language and culture on others that a new society can come into being. And English can work as a powerful force to create that expansive vision. And when Khas-speaking Nepalis’ hearts and minds expand and become inclusive, Khas language may truly become Nepal’s beloved language acceptable to a broader swathe of non-Khas ethnicities in addition to its continued relevance as an official language. But narrow-minded belligerence will only breed narrow-minded counter-belligerence.
