In a video that has recently gone viral in the Bengali inter-webs,
noted Bengali intellectual Chandril lets loose on the moribund state of the
Bengali language. To sum up his arguments: Bengali as a language is progressing
to its death. This is because speaking in English and Hindi has a premium feel
to it, while Bengali, in its most traditional form, reeks of “I am sorry, I
couldn’t do any better in life”. While recognizing the inevitability of a
language changing, he draws a distinction between a type of change that is
inevitable, like developing a bald spot, and the type of change that is death,
like having the head cut off. Bengali, he posits, is on the latter path, and
while one may have issues with his basic premise, one cannot but be amazed by
the way he delivers it, the turn of phrase, the Bengali he himself uses, and
the examples he digs out to support his contention.
For me personally, the change in Bengali is disquieting, in
the way many other changes to Calcutta and Bengal are. I first started being
aware of this change through the lyrics of Bengali movie songs like “Yeh
haowa silky silky bole jaaye baatein dil ki, chalo na bheshe jaai jowaare, rubaro,
masti maange dil maahi ve” and “Ooh lala I love you my Soniye ooh lala”
where the sheer number of Hindi words overpowered Bangla. And then I happened to watch some Bengali movies, and
listen to Bengali celebrities talk, and it’s not just the words that hit me in
the stomach, it was the effing pronunciation. For some strange reason, Bengalis
born and brought up in Kolkata can’t seem to pronounce Bangla anymore.
Where I disagree with Chandril is on the concept of death. A
language does not die as long as it is used by people. Here his counterpoint is
that just because a language is used by a lot of people, does not mean it is
alive, it matters only if it is used by rich people. This to me is elitist Bangla
has mutated, no doubt, and this makes many of us uncomfortable, but that does
not de-legitimize what it has become.
And to me what’s important is not that Bengali has mutated,
but why it has mutated. It is because the classical model of the pure tongue
has failed, decades of Communism by name and now Communism by proxy, has led to
flight of those who spoke in classical Bangla,
to other states and to other shores. Calcutta, the bastion of the fair tongue
whose demise Chandril laments, has been gutted of its middle class, leaving
either the super-rich, many of whom non-Bengalis by birth, or the poor,
immigrants from Bihar and UP and Bangladesh, and the mutations of Bangla, the influx of Hindi words and
the twisting of the pronunciations, reflect that shift in the underlying
demographics.
What Chandril ends up doing is articulating, in a very
articulate way, the anger of the last vestiges of the intellectual middle class
still in Calcutta, the reduction in prominence manifesting itself as rage at
the change in what was once a comforting constant, the words they hear.
Which also explains why there is the strong whiff of
persecution-mania that runs through this argument that , Bengalis are ashamed
of Bengali. As I had once said in a debate with the editor of Desh,
the language you will find most Bengalis want to learn is Java, (and yes Java
has all the characteristics of a language, there is good code and there is bad
code and there are rules of grammar), and it’s not because they feel ashamed of
the languages they know, but because Java is the language that affords them the
most opportunities. Bengalis write in English because they want to be read by
more people, not because they find it downmarket.
If there is something the Bengali intellectuals should be
angry at is the manifestation of the mutation, but what caused it, and most
importantly, their own continuing complicity in that very change. To put it
simply, you can’t go on lobbying for BongoShonmans by anointing Mamata
Banerjee as Rabindranath Tagore reborn and then turn around and rue the fact
that people use “keno ki” as a surrogate for “kyon ki”.
