How I lost my language, Bengali?

How I lost my language, Bengali?

I was born in an Independent India a period when the memory of independence is still fresh in Indian psyche. India just settled one of its national integration issue, language, with the division of the country into smaller states based on the vernacular.  Hindi was grudgingly accepted as national language, supposedly a unifying factor, at least on paper. This would change soon by the sheer power of the artists working in the hindi movie industry as they transformed and churned the Indian cultural world and would become great unifier in the form of Hindi movies. English language as it existed then never stood a chance. It was a language which the previous ruler s and spoke and did not have the constructs to express the emotion of the Indian life. It was more of a language which existed in a glass box.  Yet the post Independent Indian rulers could not ignore it . They themselves spoke it, it was the language that brought the advances of Western Science and technology to India and was also the defacto language for big business.  Also since India was linguistically fragmented it did not have the critical mass in population to change Hindi, Bengali or any other into a tapestry where the idioms and expressions of modern science coexisted with the original  lexis that it already had. I would say, the will was not there.  Though majority of the population spoke Hindi and to some extent Bengali it was not the case for English. English, although by minority of the population, however was the only language within the subcontinent that was spoken in almost every geographic region. So English remained with us, as one of the many languages officially recognized by the government. More important, the result was that India was split once more by a language which conveyed the emotions, the blood and gut of the people , their mother tongue and English for more formal career advancement opportunities.  

It was a strange mixture but there it was.  Very Indian. My parents enrolled me to English Medium School where as my first language I was reading on Wordsworth’s daffodils wondering where on the dusty Indian road you could find them.  I spoke Bengali at home , read Bengali novels , argued with my friends in Bengali , listened to Bengali music  and yet at school  I was formally taught a language and literature which did not exists in the life I lived. So I grew up in this dual world, slowly over the years gathering proficiency in English and losing the ability to write and sometimes even to read formal Bengali.  I remember during my childhood I use to think in Bengali and write my school essays by translating them in English. It was a mistake which was pointed out to me a numerous times by my teachers. That also quietly changed over time, unknown to me  I started to think and write in English. In a way, truly losing the ability to write anything in decent Bengali and becoming one of those Indians educated in English. On the periphery , Hindi as a language never left me. I never spoke Hindi nor could I read the same, yet I understood a considerable bit of it. Thanks to the Hindi language movies and their mega stars which I enjoyed considerably.

In my teens, like any other, I went about in search of my roots and identity. Naturally I picked up Bengali and made it an intellectual priority of myself to thoroughly learn the language. I immersed myself in the Bengali literature, arguably one of the richest in the world. I read novels, poems, essays of numerous authors. I could identify with them, the words they used, the fabrication of their language, the beauty of their vision which were so very my own. I felt deeply satisfied and felt a strong sense of belonging.  That I was, a Bengali, it became a matter of pride for me. Still my intellectual curiosity did not want to end there, I wanted to know more, read more, and learn about the world. I wanted to read about the modern advances in science, works of the authors from various parts of non English speaking world, ideas and opinions of the philosophers from around the world.  I had to restore to English, the language in which I was trained in for all these years. It is in English, books were available on authors from around the world.

So I started reading in English as well. Books that were not my school books, books that I read at home for pleasure, to satisfy my intellect. As I moved from school to college, English became a even bigger part of my life. My physical reality remained Bengali as I lived , talked , did everything else in my life in Bengali but my intellectual world almost fully turned to English. I was studying technology in English , I was reading more and more works in English,  I was speaking English with students of other states who were similarly educated as me.  In this extremely competitive pressure of my academic education Bengali fell through the cracks. I did not get time to read Bengali novels and writing in Bengali was not needed at all.  All transactions that I did on my daily life, like buying bus ticket, train tickets to reading bills in restaurants or shops were done entirely in English.  The calendar we followed was English calendar, the shops had their names in both English and Bengali, Hindi movies posters were in English and Hindi, only Bengali ones were in Bengali. All street names, addresses everything was in English and Bengali. I did not need Bengali in any way, except to speak.   Still I made it a point to read the daily newspaper in Bengali, just to keep in touch; also I read poetry in Bengali.  Poetry is something which emotes the life, land and culture it arose from. I felt that it cannot be translated; it has to be the language of the earth. Also for practical purpose, for me reading a poem was a quick way to keep in touch with myself, my Bengali awareness. At least I thought so, at that time.

Years came and years went by. Nothing changed for me. Intellectual framework of my life remained same with English as the proactive medium and Bengalis receding to the background humming poignantly. With all these use of English in post independent Indian society arose a set of Indian writers in English language. They wanted to bring and make the language more Indian. They rebelled against the notion of teaching Wordsworth’s daffodils to the Indian kids of dusty Indian roads. Their novels, writing were much more Indian and way more familiar, rooted to the sub continent than even the pre-Independent India writers in English. We the new generation of educated Indians at once embraced these writers , the likes of Vikram Seth, Arundhuti Roy, and so on. There was also a new generation of Benagli writers , but they were writing about life in Bengal only,  most of them  did not have a pan Indian essence. Bengali Poetry was powerful as usual , but they were very personal.    

When I started my working career I started reading again. When I looked at the offerings, I picked up the new Indian authors writing in English almost instantaneously. I was very comfortable in English by then and my Bengali had become rusty because of years of neglect. It needed an extra effort of me to read and absorb Bengali novels whose language nuances slipped out my consciousness.  Anybody who wrote in colloquial Bengali was a friend, rest I ignored. Also many of the stories they wrote were very local, stuck to Kolkata or Bengal whereas I was a person whose colleagues were Marathi, Guajarati, Punjabi  flying all across the country reading novels at the airport and airplanes. I needed pan Indian stories.  I became the voracious reader that I was in my teens but this time, except for poetry I read almost exclusively in English.  I thought of writing but no words came to me in Bengali. I even lost my ability to think in Bengali. I had to write in English . I will have to  innovate in English language and make it to tell stories of my culture, my land and thousands of years of India heritage.  On the contrary I could not modernize Bengali  to mould it to express all the new ideas, concepts and science.  It is not economical, given the effort , the audience size is too low . More important, I lost my ability to do so. I lost my language, Bengali. It is just a medium with which I speak with some special people , I do not think, breathe or dream in Bengali anymore.