Editor's Pick

Bangla . . . the way it was, and is

2 February 2010, 18:00 PM
EDITORIAL
Syed Badrul Ahsan
NOW that the ambience of Ekushey is here once again, it is time to reflect on the state of the Bangla we read, speak and write in our times. When we waged that epic struggle for the Bangla language to be accorded the respect and status it deserved in the state of Pakistan in the early 1950s, our goal was much more than making sure that it became the predominant language or one of the predominant languages of Pakistan. The struggle was, in so many ways, one of telling ourselves that the sophistication and modernity, indeed the dynamism that gives a language its energy and its verve, would all be there once the non-Bengali ruling classes had acknowledged the justness of our cause. Nearly four decades into freedom as an independent nation, we are not happy with what we have done to the Bangla language. Take, first, those who have somehow come round to the conclusion that they can change the way we spell some of the words in the language. In our younger days, we went to school and grasped the fundamental ways in which Bangla words could be spelt and we did that with pleasure. We did not imagine then that in the name of evolution some individuals or some groups would arrogate to themselves the right to tell us that we need not spell words in the traditional way. But, you see, tradition is what really matters. Everything else is subservient to it. Spelling apart, there is today a clear set of circumstances where few worry about speaking in chaste and pure Bangla. It is a malady you notice in almost everyone you see -- in politicians, academics, bureaucrats, journalists and the young. The heart breaks when a newscaster pronounces the name of Bangladesh's founder as Sheikh "Muzibur" Rahman. He is not the only one with bad pronunciation. In the political parties, men who feel little embarrassment about the rustic way in which they speak Bangla are legion. That leads to a dampening of our sensibilities. If men holding public office or aspiring to do so, speak so badly, it has something of a ripple effect on the multitudes around them. Think of some of the bureaucrats, and pretty senior ones too, who simply cannot speak a sentence in pure or shuddho Bangla. Does it need that much effort to have your speech come soothingly to the ear? In the old days, it was unthinkable for a young man with aspirations for the civil service to speak his language or any other language for that matter in a bad way. And where Bangla was concerned, it was everywhere expected to be spoken in the correct way. In the movies, on the radio, on television and at social gatherings, you were expected not to go down to a bad presentation of Bangla through having it mangled or come out in the particularities of your dialect. Nobody could dream in his wildest imagination that terms such as ganjam and khobor aase and dui nombori would come into polite conversation. In these past many years, there has been a clear and dangerous decline in the way we speak our own language. Not that we speak other languages any better. Take English for instance. These days, for reasons you are not likely to comprehend, nearly everyone you know wants to speak it. That ambition is to be praised. A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for? With due apologies to Robert Browning, we will note that there is today a pretty wide gap between an aspiration for English and an actual use of it. The problem is somewhere else, though. There are far too many people who resort to a medley of languages when they deliberately have pointless English terms infiltrate their Bangla. If a television presenter on a Bangla programme cannot get her Bangla straight, but must impress the audience with a smattering of English, you might as well not have that presenter there at all. The bad spectacle of artistes using English phrases to thank their listeners does not sit well with us. What is wrong with dhonnobad and why must "thank you so much" come to a singer who has just rendered a beautiful song in Bangla? Our television plays are no better. Throwing up plays in local dialects is all right, only up to a point. But if you turn it into a trend, into a norm, you are simply making us forget that there is a formal structure of Bangla we would rather see come back to the small screen and even in the movies. It is time for all of us, wherever we are and whatever our class identities, to go back to the pure Bangla we grew up speaking and hearing and writing. The old art of letter writing is gone in all this avalanche of e-mails, sms and now twitter. But recall those letter-writing days. How many of us used bad Bangla when we wrote to our grandparents, to our parents and to our friends? Language loses its lustre when it dwindles into the plebeian. It cheers the soul when a patrician gleam comes to it.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star.
E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk

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