Nilanjana S Roy: Walls of words

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The list of the most untranslatable words in the world confirms that all languages have their secret, private essence. That essence runs under the surface of words and sentences, going straight to the heart of a culture; it cannot successfully be imported.

But what I like most about the Top Ten Most Untranslatable Words, compiled by The Times of London who polled a thousand translators, is that they have been translated, to the best of The Times' ability. They are: Ilunga (from the Bantu language Tshiluba): A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. Shlimazl (Yiddish): A chronically unlucky person. Radioukacz (Polish): A person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. Naa (Japanese, used only in the Kansai area): A word used to emphasise statements or to agree with someone. Altahmam (Arabic): A kind of deep sadness. Gezellig (Dutch): Cozy. Saudade (Portuguese): A certain type of longing. Selathirupavar (Tamil): A certain type of truancy. Pochemuchka (Russian): A person who asks a lot of questions. Klloshar (Albanian): A loser.

Their specificity remains elusive. Within their own linguistic cultures, these words need no explanation. Either you've experienced saudade or you haven't; if you're a shlimazl, then you differ in very precise degree from someone who's just plain unlucky.

It's this quality, I presume, that Sunil Gangopadhyay and the other members of the Bhasha O Chetana Samiti and Bhasha Shahid Smarak Samiti want to preserve and protect. They see Bengali as an orphaned language, one without honour in its own country. Last week, they demonstrated their anguish by employing the very intellectual device of threatening shopkeepers in Kolkata with violence if they didn't put up signs in Bengali as well as English.

The members of the Samiti say that they're merely soldiers in a just war. Oddly enough, that's the same argument the fine, upstanding members of the Shiv Sena and the VHP use when they rampage on the streets, smash shop windows and violently disrupt art exhibitions or plays, all in the name of defending Indian culture.

But all language wars, whether it's the French versus the English or the last few Basque speakers struggling to keep their tongue alive, are founded on a sense of injustice that is very real. The Samiti that Gangopadhyay belongs to lives by the war-cry, Bangla chay! (We Want Bengali!).Behind that stirring slogan is the bewildered question: where has our language gone?

As someone who lost and salvaged her mother tongue, I have an inherent sympathy with Sunil Gangopadhyay's basic struggle. My experience is hardly unusual: Bengali was one of the three languages along with Hindi and English that I spoke as a child. It wasn't taught in Delhi schools; it became the "domestic" language, the one you speak at home but not in the playground.

At 17, I spoke and thought chiefly in English and a friend made a bet: "You're so Anglicised that you'll never read Bibhutibhushan, never understand Apu; and if you never understand Apu, you'll never understand me." (It should be said that he was the school football captain, debating star and a singer of repute; in teenage terms, his approval was worth a lot!)

Relearning Bengali was harder than learning a completely foreign language; the words were familiar, the context alien. I ran aground on the shoals and hidden sandbanks of sadhubhasha versus chaltibhasha (High Bangla versus common or spoken Bangla would be a rough equivalent). My reading speeds in English were fast; to stumble along in my basic Bengali was torture, like being forced to ride an autobahn in a bullock cart.

Within a year, I was reading fluently enough; but it was only six years later that I realised a strange thing had happened. English was the language that I had made my own; I dream in it, write in it, speak in it.

But reading in Bengali (and increasingly, dreaming in Bengali, if in a deeply bookish variant!) offered a level of comfort, ease, rightness that I hadn't expected my cheerfully Anglicised self to feel.

English allowed me to travel in unsuspected realms, to roam across a world that contained Latin American sagas, introspective European novels, searingly talented writers from Afghanistan, from Morocco, from Taiwan. Reading in Bengali, in contrast, was like coming home.

This is not the experience of those who studied Bengali in school, I'm told. My partner remembers his curriculum with horror for its complete lack of imagination: Saratchandra's "Mahesh" was taught each year for six years, for instance.

It's interesting that Gangopadhyay didn't eschew English education for his son, who was educated in Don Bosco and lives abroad. Gangopadhyay was quoted saying in his defence that his son speaks and writes chaste Bengali. So, having seen that it's possible to allow your children exposure to another, global language, and still let them retain their own tongue, why would he want to shut off other people's options to do the same?

Where I disagree completely with Gangopadhyay is when he would elevate Bengali above all other languages. If you're born Bengali, then you must be forced to learn the language; those who support English are servile; parents who allow children to say "Bongs" should be ostracised; hotels, banks and offices who use languages other than Bengali should be penalised. These are all on his list of demands, as a report by Labonita Ghosh in India Today states.

The first provision ignores freedom of choice "" and we must accept that some will choose to remain ignorant. The second is a hangover from the Raj that ignores the importance of English as a global key to large areas of the world "" this key, incidentally, could very well shift to Spanish in the next few decades, in which case anyone who wanted to interact with the world would find themselves learning the language of Cervantes or being cut off.

The most repugnant of Gangopadhyay's demands is also the one that speaks most of the true goals of the Bangla Chay movement: he wants the government to reserve land for Bengalis and to prevent non-Bengalis from buying land.

In Rushdie's phrase, Gangopadhyay wants to throw up "walls of words". And what would the fenced-off territory be like inside these walls? Insular; resistant to change in the manner of all states that find immigration threatening; bland and defensive; monocultural.

To preserve the essence of a language is one thing; it's quite another matter to fossilise a language as you seek to create a paranoid enclave where nothing from the threatening "" and challenging "" world outside is allowed in.

nilroy@lycos.com