Words as dancers

August 22, 2014 05:08 pm | Updated November 17, 2021 12:05 pm IST - New Delhi

Kuldeep Kumar

Kuldeep Kumar

At 80, Lakshmidhar Malaviya continues to write and reflect on the past, present and future of Hindi. A grandson of Mahamana Madanmohan Malaviya, he has been living in Japan for more than four decades during which he taught Hindi at universities in Tokyo and Osaka and critically edited the famous Satsai (a collection of 700 dohas) of Biharidas, collected works of Dev as well as Umraokosh.

Recently, a collection of his thought-provoking essays titled Shabdon Ka Raas (Dance of Words) has been published by Aditya Prakashan and it’s a real treat to read them because he belongs to a tradition of scholarship that is fast becoming extinct. A glimpse of it can be had in the first essay Kah Shabdah (What is Word?) itself. Great grammarian Patanjali (circa 2nd Century B.C.) poses this question to begin his Mahabhashya (great commentary) of the works of his two great predecessors – Panini’s Ashtadhyayi and Katyayana’s Varttika . In this essay, Malaviya recalls how Kshitishchandra Chattopadhyaya learnt old Chinese language that was prevalent nearly 1500 years ago because he wanted to investigate how the word Hun occurred in Kalidasa’s Raghuvansham and how it could help in dating the text. Only after this did he write his 300-page treatise Kalidasa and His Age . Lakshmidhar Malaviya drew inspiration from Chattopadhyaya’s example and his painstaking research took him to uncharted territories of knowledge.

Script has been a dividing factor in the Hindi-Urdu conflict during the past two centuries. Therefore, it comes as a revelation when Malaviya discloses that the dohas of Bihari were originally written in the Persian script and were later transcribed into Devanagari. As Persian script cannot render the words and sounds of Brajbhasha exactly, the copies of Satsai had different versions of the same couplets. But these versions differed mainly in the use of vowels ( matras ). He employed the same method while critically editing the collected works of Dev. One may mention here that even Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmawat , a work that preceded Tulsidasa’s Ramcharitmanas and used the same doha-chaupaee format, was also originally written in Persian script.

The title of the book itself shows how sensitive the author is towards words and their usage. Raas is not an ordinary dance. The word is invariably used for Krishna’s celestial dance in the company of gopis. It became Rahas when Nawab Wajid Ali Shah started staging dance-dramas in Lucknow. Malaviya is concerned about the deterioration in the way Hindi has been used in the past one hundred years. Present day Hindi enthusiasts must pay serious attention to his considered opinion that had the development of Hindi, that was rapidly taking place between 1800 and 1920, not been thwarted, it would have become one of the richest languages of the world by drawing upon the numerous dialects of the Hindi region. Although he does not say so but the hint is clear. It’s an oblique criticism of the way an artificial, heavily Sanskritized, and utterly unusable Hindi has been created in independent India. While spoken dialects suffer from neglect, a language that is not spoken by anybody anywhere is being promoted by the Indian state as well as by Hindi enthusiasts who dream of replacing English by it.

Macaulay is a hated figure in India. Hindi enthusiasts hold him responsible for the dominance of English in India. However, Lakshmidhar Malaviya reminds us that Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, who came to India in 1834 as the Law Member of the East India Company’s Governor-General’s Council, wanted a few Indians to learn English so that they could spread Western knowledge among common people through local languages and dialects. However, this is a task that remains unfulfilled even to this day. Malaviya poses a question: “Why has every Dalit child not been made literate although Dalit governments have ruled in the cow-belt of North India for several decades?”

He is also greatly concerned about the apathy that we treat our literary legacy with. He has also written about the crass commercial attitude of Hindi publishers. The book merits a close reading.

The author is a literary critic.

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