I have been thinking a lot lately about the abomination called ‘Hinglish’, and how it is spreading like a contagion all over northern India and Mumbai. I am compelled to call it an abomination despite being fully cognizant of the rich effects of all languages on one another. Of the reasons thereof, let me speak later.
Let me stress right away that all languages import words and expressions from non-native sources, rarely by conscious design and more often due to the natural process of growth and development. English would never be as rich as it is if Latin, Greek, French, German and other foreign words and expressions had not been imported into it. Even our own languages have contributed words to it that the native speakers hardly consider foreign anymore. Pundit (for a columnist or TV commentator), mogul (for a mighty entrepreneur), brahmin (for elite, as in Boston brahmins) from Hindi, and bungalow and shampoo (from Bengali) are just a few of the obvious examples.
Turning to our popular tongues Hindustani and Urdu, they are as completely hybrid in diction as any. Turkish, Farsi, and Arabic words in them are so abundant that were they to be withdrawn the two languages would simply wither and die on the vine. Again, let's think of some very common words: Asman, zameen, dard, hamdard, chadar, muhabbbat, ishq, dost, qismat (in Arabic), muqaddar, sirdaar, husn, haseen, sawaal, jawaab, tareef, mubaarak, sarkar, dawa, dua, bimaar, pareshaani, ilaaj, taqleef, mushqil, asaan, jaahil, tehzeeb, khushi,dushman, aman, qaatil, sazaa, insaf, qaid, qudrat, qeemat, araam, bechain, dahej, talaaq, sipahi, azaadi, taqdeer: One could go on for a hundred pages to show how without imported words Urdu and Hindustani would not survive. When we utter a compound such as dukh-dard to reinforce the meaning of suffering, we are hardly aware that the first word comes from Sanskrit roots and the second from Farsi; that they have their separate mothers. Rather, it's as if the two are genetically joined at the hip.
Of course, we also have domesticated many English words, sometimes in variant sounds and spellings: aspataal (for hospital), godaam (for godown), daaktar (doctor), teacher, engineer, principal, police, operation (for medical procedure), station, ticket, train, bus, party, railway, school, car, computer, and so on. In Punjab, where careers in the army have long been highly prized, English words for certain ranks long ago found their way into even rural diction and became fond names for sons: Think of Jarnail (General) Singh, Karnail (Colonel) Singh, Laftan (Lieutenant) Singh. Again, the list of such words can be easily expanded. Western words in the military, science, medicine and technology are especially proliferating in our discourse because a great deal of advances in those fields are coming from the Western world. This is as it should be. These imported words are called ‘loan’ words by linguists, but I prefer to call them ‘imported’, for loans are supposed to be returned, aren’t they?
So what is the problem, then? I often say we should speak with due respect to the integrity of each language. The core of any language should remain native, but imported words should be domesticated gradually on the periphery. Urdu and Hindustani grew up with imported words all over their fabric because they were organically of mixed parentages. Both are deeply rooted in the Indo-Islamic cultural soil nourished by contiguous territories of India, Iran, the Arab world, and Turkey. When the citizens of those lands love our music, for example, their engagement is instant and automatic, even if the lyrics are identifiable to them only in some random fragments of diction. This is not the case between our music and poetry and the original English-speaking lands. When we randomly throw English words into Hindi conversations, there's no organic harmony, just a cacophony; everything sounds jarring to the ears, for we end up speaking very superficially. We become stranded between extremes — neither here nor there. Our typical daily conversation to me now sounds much like that — on the street and on TV both.
If someone, for example, asks, “Tab is serious problem ko government kaise solve karegi? Us ki kya policy hai?” I feel disheartened at the insult to both Hindi and English. A perfectly serviceable natural, organic, sentence in Hindi would be: “Tab Is gambhir samasya (or sangeen sawaal) ko suljhane ke liye sarkar ki neeti kya hai?”
I am only giving one example of the general deterioration in our speech. Being reasonably proficient in Chinese (classical), modern Korean, and Japanese, I can testify that people in those nations conduct their conversations and serious work almost entirely in their own languages, with imported words confined to the most modern needs in highly sophisticated fields. Their ordinary speech (including lectures in colleges) is almost totally devoid of anything akin to what we commonly call khichdi in Hindi, an unappetizing gruel of rice and lentils. One reason they can get ideas across more rapidly and intelligibly to the country at large is that they share a high regard for their own language (‘languages’ in the case of China). Communication is faster, learning is faster, working together is faster, economic development is faster, national solidarity is deeper, and elite- non-elite chasms are fewer — not absent, but fewer. They are not without their problems, but we remain a lot more fractious and a lot slower than them.
A nation’s progress requires many policies, many plans, and actions on many fronts. On the speech front, we can all do something individually if we change our idiom of communication. What we can do in the north can also be done, of course, all over the land in regional language contexts. Give it some thought, folks.
(The author is Professor Emeritus of Asian History, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts. Email: vichan36@gmail.com )
