The Hindu Business Line : Does the Pan Indian have a future?

The truth is that we as a society desperately need a more inclusive approach to everything; and surely all communication and culture starts with a shared language.

The next time you are tuned to the satellite radio, listen carefully to the language used by the radio jockeys, on two channels — Hindi film music and carnatic music, and you will notice a strange contrast. On the Hindi channel you will find the voice saying, in a rush and collapsing all the sounds into one, “Aur ab the next number is also by Kishore Kumar, lekin uske pehle, you will hear ek geet” a nd so on. On the other channel, however, you won’t catch a word of Telugu or Tamil except for the singer’s name, ragam, and so on. The sentences are in good, straightforward English, if you ignore the quality of the pronunc iation.

Pan-Indian phenomena

For some strange reason, it is assumed that the carnatic music audience ought to understand English better. Equally, the Hindi pop music audience, which is one of the few Pan-Indian phenomena in a fractured society, is expected to be more comfortable only in a random mixture of stilted English and street Hindi. Presumably, the announcers were told that this hotchpotch was much closer to real life conversations of listeners. Sure, we all slip in a few words of our vernacular into English nowadays even in official conversations in a multi-lingual group. If that is so, then, why does it not apply to the other channel? This anomaly apart, the way the words are jumbled up in the Hinglish version is far from natural, yet obviously done as a matter of deliberate policy. It is nothing like the way the mixed-up language is actually spoken.

Inclusive approach

Why does this merit a discussion? The truth is that we as a society desperately need a more inclusive approach to everything; and surely all communication and culture starts with a shared language. Yet, little attention is paid to this emerging divisive force, which will be compounded by the literacy and digital divides and become a potential source of conflict. Every patriotic Indian who wishes to see more of Pan Indian institutions (the all-India professional institutes, the civil service, the judiciary, the armed forces, and so on) must sense the fact that increasingly the country is getting split along the lines of those who are comfortable with just Hindi and the others who may or may not follow some Hindi but have to use English as a bridge language.

The TV and the FM radio have evolved their own way. Chat show hosts and anchors use a semi-literate and bilingual style of conversation, in English as well as other channels. Hindi is used sometimes systematically in alternate sentences, to bizarre effect. Bilingualism also comes naturally to the movie stars and sports heroes who take up most of the airtime in any case. The advertising now uses copy with regional language idioms and slang (unintelligible to someone from outside the state) written in the Roman script.

Effective communication

Meanwhile, the increasing demand for speakers of plain, clear, spoken English is seen as a great opportunity for the youth of the country, given the demands of an emerging global market for jobs and professional services.

Sadly, our schools and colleges are simply unable to meet this need because the teachers of English, or indeed any language, are far from ready for this task.

Clearly we are in danger of becoming a country at a loss to communicate effectively with itself, let alone with the rest of the world.

S. RAMACHANDER

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