My first Posting for Cry

The New Linguistic Survey of India and the Rajbanshi children

The initial workshop for the new Linguistic Survey of India (NLSI) is continuing with the promise of re-visiting Grierson, documenting the changed linguistic situations and mapping it. In the Central Institute of Indian Languages at Mysore, we-a group of linguists were trying to imagine the probable outcome of the NLSI report in various parts of India-where language contact and multilingualism is the norm, and language attrition and endangerment is overlooked.
I was attending the group meetings on the Tibeto-Burman languages because; one of my targets was to find out Tibeto-Burman elements in Rajbanshi, in order to show that it cannot actually be termed as a ‘dialect’ of Bangla.

Fortunately, I have found a person who is a speaker of Rajbanshi at CIIL. And normally, my first question to him was whether he is expecting a major change in the linguistic map of North Bengal and Western Assam or not. Surprisingly, his answer was- there may be a change in the linguistic map of AXom, but not in Bengal.

In linguistic surveys, we have to depend on the speaker’s statement regarding what his/her mother tongue is. But what about the children, who is expected to remain out of the language-politics circle of the state? What name can a child give to his/her mother tongue?

Shockingly, I have got the response from the Rajbanshi speaker (and also a field-researcher) that in Jalpaiguri area, the children have started to understand that they should not utter the term ‘Kamtapuri’ or ‘Rajbanshi’, otherwise they will go to jail. Children of areas like Haldibari-Mathabhanga-Mainaguri area have begun to understand that it is better to say ‘I speak Bangla’, even if they do not understand the question papers written in Bangla at schools, or the Bangali town-teachers laugh at them.

What can a linguist term a situation like this? Is it a situation when a language is endangered (in a different sense)? Or is it a situation where there is a typically pre-planned conspiracy of the State where many many Rajbanshi speakers are the victim?

Languages are born naturally, what is the reason for which the language policies of a state are compelling the Rajbanshi children of North Bengal to say that they are the speakers of a ‘dialect’; they are defeated people, nothing else.

Perhaps, the NLSI will not be able to answer this…..