Ground Realities
The mangled Bangla that we speak …
All these years after the Language Movement, it makes sense to ask what we have lately been doing with Bengali, or Bangla as many would like to call it. That sense of inquiry becomes rather important, indeed acquires urgency of a sort, considering that in a very large number of instances the Bengali language has been getting pretty mangled and, in the end, muddled altogether.
Think of a time, in school, when the stress, on the part of our teachers, was on a clear enumeration of the language, with the appropriate emphases on pronunciation and the like. We were taught the proper grammatical use of the language. We came home from the classroom knowing that no matter how much of a dialect we employed in our interaction with our families, in terms of a formal use of Bengali it was always standard language that we needed to keep going in our interaction with broader society.
That legacy, somehow, seems to have fallen through or become badly frayed at the edges. When you hear some media people, generally young reporters on any of those ubiquitous television channels, unabashedly using bad pronunciation, you begin to wonder who got them those jobs in the first place. Or was there no one, within the organisations that went into hiring them, to impart a rigorous level of training to them before sending them out on their early assignments?
You hear a reporter use satra where he should be saying chhatra. You cannot truly believe that you are actually being treated to such manifest indignity as seeing the language you were born to getting all twisted out of shape. A simple term like sthitisheel is cheerfully pronounced as isthitisheel. You then find yourself rooted to the spot, in a state of considerable shock. It did not have to be this way, but it is.
When you spot a beautiful, smartly attired young newscaster getting into difficulties over a pronunciation of namaz-e-janaza -- it comes out as namaj-e-zanaza on her tongue -- you somehow know just how big a drift has occurred where Bangla, or Bengali, is concerned.
The malady is not confined to the media alone. We have had presidents who have stumbled badly in making their use of the Bengali language coherent, especially in pronunciation.
When a head of state does not know that the word is jaati and not zaati, you are left with that certain feeling which tells you how much you may have wronged the martyrs of 1952. For years on end, many of our parliamentarians have seen their use of language collapse (and they have blissfully not been aware of it) on the floor of Parliament.
Time was when oratory, or smooth, sophisticated use of language by politicians proved decisive in the making of epochal decisions. But that was a long time ago.
Today, you and I are not greatly enthused by thoughts of taking our children to places where they can hear our politicians perorate on national issues in inspiring language. So where can we take them? Or, to be more precise, what advice should we be giving them regarding an improvement in their language skills? Television plays, once a mode of entertainment eagerly looked forward to by families, have today dwindled to a state where it is quite all right, almost the in-thing, to have dialects or colloquial language intersperse the dialogues.
It is likely that you will argue in defence of the everyday dialect we employ in our homes and elsewhere. You might even be tempted to suggest that we are being purists, in fact elitist, in suggesting that proper Bangla be used in entertainment. You certainly have the right to your opinion. But consider this: isn't language a matter of aesthetics, and shouldn't we be upholding the finer aspects of it that have secured for it a place in the world?
Back in September 1974, when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman spoke in Bengali at the United Nations, we went wild with excitement. Further back in time, in 1913 to be exact, when Rabindranath Tagore came by the Nobel Prize for literature, we held our heads high in justified pride.
These days, when Amartya Sen and Serajul Islam Choudhury and Syed Shamsul Haq and Zillur Rahman Siddiqui speak in Bangla, we are reminded of the heights of beauty a language can reach. They speak wonderfully, as did the late lamented Abdullah al Muti Sharfuddin. There are quite a few others, but it is the rest of the crowd that worries us.
And part of our worry has to do with the enervating influence that English appears to be exercising on the Bengali language, particularly in the realm of television. We have advisers, in this caretaker government, who certainly cannot stay away from injecting huge and absolutely unnecessary doses of English into their conversations or speeches.
Television personalities, in the mood to mimic the bouncy attitudes of their counterparts outside Bangladesh, clearly feel little or no embarrassment in liberally sprinkling their presentations with English, despite the fact that these presentations are supposed to be in Bengali. Where they should be speaking to their dorshok srota, they feel no qualms, none at all, about addressing their "dear viewers."
As the level of their excitement registers a progressive rise, right before the audience in the studios as well as at home, they begin to punctuate their statements with innumerable renditions of that asinine Americanism "wow." And have you realised that another Americanism, or a variant of it, has already made inroads into our vocabulary?
We do not refer to "January 11" to describe the political conditions associated with that date. In line with America, which has its 9/11, we call it 1/11. No one tells these happy mimics that a nation's pride slips quite a few notches when it loses sight of its individuality. It is all right to speak of a road map for Palestine. But should that be inevitability here in Bangladesh, even if the Election Commission insists on a use of the phrase to underline its polls program?
One of the more grievous of blows to land on the Bengali language has come through the accented Bangla a certain class of Bengalis has employed in its conversations. In such a situation, the word amar will come across as pretty westernised, with a thickness pressing down on the "r." Why some people should be doing that is rather a disturbing question.
Equally worryingly, the unchecked tendency on the part of some perfectly Bengali citizens to construct sentences in a clear fifty-fifty Bangla-English division goes on.
We are not prepared to believe -- are we now? -- that these good citizens of Bangladesh, having been born here and having lived here and having gone to normal schools here, are incapable of speaking in pure, untainted Bangla?
In the run-up to this year's observance of Ekushey, it is the systematic mauling of the Bengali language, its dilution that puts us to shame. The charm of a language comes through speaking it coherently, with all its words and phrases falling in a clear, uninterrupted pattern. Watch the French and the Japanese and the Germans and the Arabs go through life making optimum use of the mother tongue. Listen to Aparna Sen and Buddhadev Bhattacharya, just across the frontier, getting their thoughts across in impeccable Bangla.
How did our Bangla get mangled anyway?
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