अपनी ही भाषा को आगे बढ़ने से रोकने वाले लोग (सामयिक वार्ता में शीघ्र प्रकाश्य)

हाल ही में आंबेडकर की एक किताब की भूमिका लिखने के बाद अरुंधती राय विवादों के घेरे में आ गई थीं। इस मामले में भाषा का भी एक पहलू सामने आया था। भारतीय भाषाओं के लेखकों ने यह शिकायत की कि अरुंधती ने आंबेडकर और गाँधी की तुलना करते हुए जो बातें आज कही हैं वही हम पहले से कहते आए हैं लेकिन उनकी तरफ़ कभी ध्यान नहीं दिया गया। उनका यह कहना है कि जो बात अंग्रेज़ी में कही जाती है उसका महत्व कई गुना ज़्यादा बढ़ जाता है। भारतीय भाषाओं की अनदेखी के इस पहलू पर बहुत कम लोगों का ध्यान जाता है। हिंदी और अन्य भारतीय भाषाओं के ज्ञान और विमर्श की भाषा नहीं बन पाने की वजहों की पड़ताल करते हुए हमारी नज़र सत्ता प्रतिष्ठानों के षड्यंत्रों तक तो चली जाती है लेकिन प्रगतिशील खेमे को हम इस मामले में दूध का धुला मान लेते हैं। अब समय आ गया है कि हम हिंदी पट्टी के बुद्धिजीवियों के पूर्वाग्रहों (इस शब्द पर आगे चर्चा करूँगा) पर बात करें। आम लोगों की ग़लत धारणाओं पर चर्चा करना भी ज़रूरी है।

सबसे पहले प्रगतिशील खेमे में अपनी भाषा को लेकर हीनभावना पर विचार करते हैं। हिंदी के अधिकतर वामपंथी लेखक यह मान बैठे हैं कि भारत में अंग्रेज़ी ही ज्ञान की भाषा बन सकती है। हिंदी के स्तरीय लेखन पर उनका ध्यान ही नहीं जाता। वे पत्रकारिता में हिंदी की समृद्धि की तरफ़ देखते भी नहीं हैं। हिंदी पत्रिकाओं में न जाने कितने स्तरीय आलेख छपे हैं लेकिन उनका सारा ध्यान अंग्रेज़ी में छपी सामग्री की तरफ़ रहता है। रघुवीर सहाय से लेकर सुनील तक वैचारिक लेखन की एक लंबी परंपरा रही है जिसकी अनदेखी अंग्रेज़ीदाँ लेखकों और हिंदी लेखकों दोनों ने की है। सामाजिक विज्ञान में हिंदी विश्‍वकोश तो छप गया लेकिन इस विषय को अंग्रेज़ी की छाया से निकालने की ईमानदार कोशिश आज तक नहीं हो पाई। अगर अकादमिक जगत के लेखक इस मसले को गंभीरता से लें तो ज्ञान के इस महत्वपूर्ण क्षेत्र में शोधपरक हिंदी लेखन की कमी की शिकायत हमेशा के लिए दूर हो जाएगी। बहुत-से लोगों ने व्यक्‍तिगत स्तर पर बदलाव लाने की कोशिश की है, लेकिन सच तो यही है कि यह काम संस्थान या समूह के स्तर पर ही पूरा हो सकता है।

भारतीय वामपंथियों ने भाषा से जुड़े मसलों पर जैसी वैचारिक शिथिलता दिखाई है उसे देखते हुए निकट भविष्य में उनके नज़रिये में किसी सार्थक बदलाव की उम्मीद नहीं दिखती। न तो भारतीय कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी की वेबसाइट हिंदी में है न मार्क्सवादी कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी की। संसदीय राजनीति का रास्ता चुनने वाली इन पार्टियों ने हिंदी की अनदेखी करके कितना बड़ा जनाधार खोया है इसकी वे कल्पना भी नहीं कर सकते। शायद कल्पना और दृष्टि के इसी अभाव के कारण वे लोक सभा के पहले सत्र में विपक्षी दल बनने के बाद आज अपनी ज़मीन की तलाश करते नज़र आ रहे हैं।

अब बात करते हैं आम लोगों में भाषा से संबंधित ग़लत धारणाओं की। हिंदी में व्याकरण को लेकर दो तरह के अतिवाद देखने को मिलते हैं। एक अतिवाद है व्याकरण के नियमों को पत्थर की लकीर मानना और दूसरा है व्याकरण को सिरे से नकारना।

पहले अतिवाद का लक्षण है दशकों पुरानी किताबों के नियमों के आधार पर आज की भाषा की शुद्धता-अशुद्धता तय करना। चाहे बहुवचन संबोधन में अनुस्वार के प्रयोग पर आपत्ति हो या 'परिषद्' जैसी वर्तनी को सही साबित करने की कोशिश, ऐसे कई उदाहरण हैं जो हिंदी में व्याकरण और वर्तनी के मामले में व्यावहारिक सोच की कमी का प्रमाण प्रस्तुत करते हैं। भाषा हमेशा बदलती रहती है और कल जो नियम सही-ग़लत के दायरे में आता था वह आज एकरूपता के क्षेत्र तक सिमट सकता है। उदाहरण के लिए, पहले 'किये', 'गये' आदि प्रचलित वर्तनियाँ थीं। अब 'किए', 'गए' को ही मानक माना जाता है। अगर आप 'किये', 'गये' आदि लिखते हैं तो आपसे यह उम्मीद की जाएगी कि आप इनके प्रयोग में एकरूपता रखेंगे यानी कहीं 'किये' तो कहीं 'किए' नहीं लिखेंगे। रही बात 'परिषद्' के हलंत होने की तो जब आप हिंदी में शब्द के अंतिम वर्ण में स्वर का उच्चारण ही नहीं करते तो उसे वर्तनी में अनुच्चरित दिखाने का क्या मतलब रह जाता है! अब बात करते हैं बहुवचन संबोधन में अनुस्वार के प्रयोग की मनाही की। अगर आप हिंदी के आम पाठक से यह पूछेंगे कि 'भाई लोगो' और 'भाई लोगों' में कौन-सा रूप सही है तो वह 'भाई लोगों' को ही सही बताएगा। फिर आप उसे बताएँगे कि व्याकरण के अनुसार पहला विकल्प सही है तो वह व्याकरण से आतंकित होकर अपनी ग़लती मान लेगा!

जब आप किसी भाषा को ज्ञान से जोड़ने की कोशिश करेंगे तो आपको एकरूपता, वर्तनी आदि से जुड़े मसलों से जूझना ही होगा। चूँकि हिंदी में भाषा को केवल विचारों की अभिव्यक्‍ति का साधन मान लिया गया है, इसलिए व्याकरण से जुड़ा विमर्श मुख्यधारा की पत्रिकाओं में कभी नहीं दिखता है। व्याकरण को भाषाई अराजकता से बचने का साधन न मानकर ऐसे शाश्‍वत नियमों का संकलन मान लिया जाता है जिनमें बदलाव संभव ही नहीं है। अंग्रेज़ी में ऐसा नहीं है। इस भाषा में पूर्वसर्ग (प्रीपोज़िशन) को वाक्य के अंत में नहीं रखने के नियम को अब अप्रासंगिक घोषित किया जा चुका है। अंग्रेज़ी के वैयाकरण यह कहने में बिलकुल नहीं हिचकिचाते कि इस भाषा के नियमों को लैटिन व्याकरण के नियमों के अनुसार नहीं ढाला जा सकता। अंग्रेज़ी में वर्तनी के मामले में भी व्यापक विचार-विमर्श होता है। अमेरिकी विद्वान ब्रायन गार्नर ने अंग्रेज़ी शब्दों की स्वीकार्यता के पाँच चरण निर्धारित किए हैं। ये चरण हैं : 1. अमान्य 2. बहुत हद तक अमान्य 3. बहुत हद तक प्रचलित 4. लगभग प्रचलित 5. पूरी तरह प्रचलित। अगर हिंदी में ब्रायन गार्नर जैसे विद्वान होते तो वे 'पूर्वाग्रह' को पाँचवें चरण में रखते। हिंदी में शिकागो मैनुअल जैसी शैली मार्गदर्शिका का नहीं होना भी एक ऐसा तथ्य है जिसकी अनदेखी होती आई है। अगर हमें हिंदी को ज्ञान की भाषा बनाना है तो शैली, व्याकरण, वर्तनी आदि से जुड़ी बातों पर ध्यान देना ही होगा क्योंकि ऐसा नहीं करने पर न तो लेखन में एकरूपता रह पाएगी न अनावश्यक भाषाई विवादों से बचते हुए विचार को बेहतर ढंग से सामने रख पाना संभव हो पाएगा। व्याकरण को सिरे से नकारने के अतिवाद पर भी बात होनी चाहिए। ऐसे हिंदी लेखकों की कमी नहीं है जो अंग्रेज़ी में वर्तनी, व्याकरण आदि से जुड़ी जानकारी हासिल करने के लिए बहुत-सी किताबों के पन्ने उलटा लेंगे, लेकिन हिंदी में वे 'सब कुछ चलता है' की बात आसानी से कह देते हैं। ऐसे लोग 'स्टेटस' को हिंदी में 'स्टेट्स' लिखेंगे और उसे सही साबित करने की कोशिश भी करेंगे। उच्चारण की ऐसी अनदेखी भी नहीं की जानी चाहिए जिससे शब्द का अर्थ ही बदल जाए।

Indian Languages Finally Making Their Presence Felt in E-Commerce (एनडीटीवी की वेबसाइट से साभार)

Online content in Indian languages remains limited, although many media companies are making serious inroads into the space. Video content in Indian languages is highly popular though, and international sites like Facebook have been localised with Hindi support. What's missing in all this is shopping - very few e-commerce sites allow you to shop in your own language. Both OLX and Quikr support Hindi (Quikr supports seven Indian languages in all), but these sites don't handle the transactions, and the listings aren't translated. While this article from July last year says Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Jabong were all working towards launching support for Indian languages, but only Snapdeal appears to have done this successfully.


One of the latest companies to enter this space is also one of India's most successful online businesses. MakeMyTrip launched Hindi support near the end of November last year. A few months later, the company is very close to launching support for more Indian languages despite some unexpected challenges along the way.

"We are looking at Indian languages as a strategic initiative," explains Pranav Bhasin, Head of Mobile Product at MakeMyTrip. "Hindi flight booking was just the starting point, and we're going to be rolling out rail services in a number of languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Gujarati, and Malayalam."

Less than six months down the line though, Bhasin tells us that the process of building support for Hindi came with a lot of unexpected challenges along the way.

"The concept seemed really simple to us at the time," says Bhasin. "All the technology is in place, and we just need to change the text, that's all. What we found though is that actually translating is quite difficult to get right, and it's a different market, a different customer."

The problems that the customers have are different, for one thing, Bhasin tells us. Payments are particularly an issue, and to work around this, MakeMyTrip is now weighing the pros and cons of solutions such as cash-on-delivery for rail tickets.

People prefer their languages, but understand English

"But the big thing was just that the language we used for translation was all wrong at first," says Bhasin. "Our users were English aware - they could already book a ticket, for example - but they wanted something more easily understandable."

(Also see: Are Indian Languages Ready to Replace English Online?)

This was something that was also observed by Snapdeal. The company launched support for Indian languages around a year ago, and claims that customer feedback has been quite positive.


Snapdeal's Amit Khanna, Senior Vice President Product Development also believes that there is a definite preference for people to use Indian languages over English.

"In the Indian context, people prefer reading in their local languages," says Khanna. "The buying behaviour is not that different on our site, but we see much better engagement with content."

According to him, Snapdeal isn't reaching entirely new audiences with Hindi content - just serving existing users better.

"People understand English, but aren't always comfortable," Khanna says, "so now the users spend more site, use more content."

Payments are finalised by banks, so those pages remain in English, but Khanna says that this is not a problem because the pages are very standardised and familiar - as long as you have some understanding of English, the pages are accessible.

E-commerce needs real-time translation

There's another wrinkle to be considered today - the e-commerce sites rely heavily on content from third-party sellers. Travel sites like MakeMyTrip also rely heavily on their partners for information, so even in this case, there's a lot of information coming in that won't already be in Hindi. Unlike a media site which can manually translate the content it requires, e-commerce has to use live translation.

According to Snapdeal's Khanna, part of the problem was that there weren't too many standard solutions that the company could just "plug into".

"Our content keeps changing, there are thousands of pieces of new content each day," says Khanna. "And these are real time listings. So we needed a solution. There were very few companies that existed when we were starting this, and we worked with them to create our own technology on top of that as well."
Of course, with translation there are the unexpected problems that follow as well - a Samsung Galaxy phone, for example, had its name translated too. "The Samsung Galaxy became Samsung Aakashganga," Khanna tells us. "We had to program all these exceptions so that the system didn't make mistakes."

This was the problem that MakeMyTrip also grappled with, and eventually the company decided it had to build its own translation technology, which includes a self-learning system that improves suggestions over time, the way your phone's autocorrect can learn new words these days.

A direct translation was not always easily understandable.

"No one wanted pure Hindi either," Bhasin says. "Hindi numbers for example, people are very used to the English script. We had to make fine adjustments like this all the time, to find the simple words people would understand after four or five iterations."

This meant accepting Hinglish phrases, like "Book Karo", or simplified language, like "Aana-Jaana", instead of "Aagaman-Prasthaan". There were even technology issues around using Hindi. "Our characterset was not initially Unicode, and so when we started using Hindi, it wouldn't work with our database," says Bhasin. "We had to make technology changes up and down the line, and now all our content is Unicode."

Isn't it still too soon?

This seems like a lot of effort to cater to an audience that both Bhasin and Khanna tell us is very small, and likely to remain so far a few years at least.

"The demand for the Indian languages won't be anything close to English languages for the next few years," Khanna says, but he doesn't think that Snapdeal has entered the space too soon. "Content has been available for a while, and we wanted to see how deeply we can also integrate Indian languages. The market remains to be seen, but I wouldn't say we entered this space ahead of time."

MakeMyTrip's Bhasin also agrees with this assessment, and says it will be years before the vernacular Web becomes as important as English is in India.

"Before we launched Hindi, we set up our own expectations with very low hopes and a two year profitability goal," says Bhasin. "With that in mind, we see a lot of activity on this product. A lot of the users are in the metro cities for now, whom we believe grew up in smaller cities and then moved to the big cities."

"We're seeing more users from tier-2 and tier-3 cities switching to Hindi, even though we're not really marketing it right now," he adds. "With around 75 percent of our users from tier-2 and tier-3 coming on 3G or even 2G, we'll probably see the numbers rising up as connectivity improves and 4G starts to grow."

Once this next wave of users comes on board, it's very possible that more e-commerce companies will also have to explore Indian languages. For now though, as the audience moves steadily towards mobiles and apps, companies like Snapdeal and MakeMyTrip are ensuring that new customers who prefer Indian languages will install their apps - something that is only going to keep getting more important over time.

Author: Gopal Sathe

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/features/indian-languages-finally-making-their-presence-felt-in-e-commerce-685972

Two languages or one? (डॉन अख़बार से साभार)

 In his remarkable book on the growth of Urdu’s literary culture, titled Urdu ka Ibtida’i Zamana, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi maintains that at some point in time between the lives of Mir Taqi Mir and Asadullah Khan Ghalib, what was called Hindi was first given the name — actually the title — ‘Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mu’alla’, or the language of the exalted court or camp, and later started being called ‘Zaban-e Urdu’ and gradually ‘Urdu’. However, Faruqi throws little light on the social conditions and the actors responsible for this change of names. Neither does he elaborate on who might have felt the need for this change. We can start by safely presuming that it was not the local people who lived outside the area jealously defined as ‘Urdu-e-Mu’alla’ and who had devised the language in the first place during the past several centuries.

It is interesting that the word ‘Urdu’ in the original coinage mentioned by Faruqi meant not the language itself but the place it was purposefully attached to. It denoted the area in the royal city of Delhi which housed the Red Fort and the abodes of the nobility associated with the royalty in one form or another. Before the local language of the area was appointed as the language of the Urdu-e-Mu’alla area or the privileged people residing there, Persian had enjoyed this status for the past several centuries.

Some strands of the story of Urdu emerging out of the original Hindi have been described by Tariq Rahman in his book From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History. But let us look at the phenomenon here from the angle of actors involved in it.

This interesting set of Shurafa Muslims — more than one generation of whom may have been collectively involved in the process of ‘re-christening’ a local language — invariably claimed for themselves a foreign, imported origin. Indeed the colonialist view was prevalent among them that they had brought ‘civilisation’ into the hitherto ‘uncivilised’ land of South Asia. Taking such an aggressive, snobbish position was perhaps considered necessary to maintain a privileged cultural status, not to mention the occupation of agricultural land and other resources.

Taking substantial help of the caste system firmly governing the Hindu societies on the one hand, and the division of the populace into free men and slaves in Islam on the other, the Shurafa Muslim community had imposed a hierarchy of ‘graded inequality’ on the people — raiyyat — professing different creeds, and professions mainly connected with agriculture. This privileged class had good reasons to insist on their non-local origin as that was what set them apart from the local people tilling the land occupied by the conquerors. The agricultural castes were supported in their task of working for the conquerors and their cohorts by artisans and others belonging to ‘service castes’, or in the words of Chaudhry Mohammad Ali Rudaulvi ‘khidmati qaumain’. These people (obviously constituting a vast majority) were supposedly born to serve those who occupied land and its resources.

However, when it came to the local language of Hindustan, adopted (or rather captured) by the Muslim rulers and members of their ‘exalted’ court — all claiming an imported lineage — it was difficult to claim a foreign origin for it. Hindi was a language which had developed, exactly the way other local languages did, in a real geographical location and social context by real, local people. It was unlike the trajectory of Persian which was undeniably of a non-Indian origin but which had grown into a local language of intellectual and cultural expression and discourse — and still kept its genealogy intact — during the centuries-long rule of the dynasties of Muslim invaders from the north-west.

The need to detach the ‘Urdu’ language from its real geographical and social context, however, seems to be the reason why a supra-local origin was concocted for it. This clumsily invented, kaleidoscopic history therefore allows ever new imaginary locations to be added to the fiction — Deccan, Bengal, Punjab, Balochistan and so on, although nowhere can it be shown to have ever been present in any form that could be reasonably connected to the ‘Zaban-e Urdu-e Mu’alla’.

This produces such absurd genealogies that imagine a link between Dakani and Urdu to be more plausible than that between Urdu and the language employed by Kabir, Mirabai and Malik Mohammad Jaisi for instance. This was in line with the carefully remembered fact — or fiction — of the foreign origin of the Shurafa themselves who had been using Persian for their political and social undertakings.

How the original ‘Hindi’ language, spoken in ‘Hindustan’, was turned into ‘Urdu’ — the language of a particular social class of a non-Hindustani origin residing in a small part of a city — by whom, under which circumstances, using what authority, and to achieve which purpose, is a string of intriguing questions which have not found their due place in the public discourse about the origin of Urdu.

It should at least be a matter of everyday curiosity for the readers of Urdu literature why, for example, Mir, who had known this language by its commonly recognised name — Hindi — is considered an Urdu poet at all. But it isn’t. In the reams of paper consumed for pleading the ‘case’ of Urdu against Hindi, the questions regarding the need for this change of names found no mention, let alone any attempt to find answers.

However, it has had some discernible consequences. One, it changed the way the history of Urdu was to be conceived and presented since the 19th century. As discussed in this space earlier, this invented, unreal history effectively disassociated the language from the geographical area — and indeed the community — that constituted its natural origin.

Two, in line with the practice of privileging the foreign and shunning the local, not only were the geographical variants of the language disrespected and excluded from the ‘standardised’ Urdu, the local sources of its vocabulary — Sanskrit and various Prakrits — were also neglected in favour of Persian (and, through it, the Arabic) influence. It must be noted that the same kind of influence is found in other local languages — Sindhi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bangla and so on — but nowhere else is it given such fundamental importance as is the case in Urdu. One routinely hears and reads such naïve, absurdly serious assertions about Urdu being a ‘lashkari’ language and taking in words and phrases from different sources — as if it is something unique to Urdu. Unmindful of the same process going on in every language in a natural way in the course of historical and political developments, it is claimed that Urdu contains words imported or derived from diverse sources such as Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, and even Hindi.

This point is worth pondering. As the example of Maulvi Syed Ahmed Dehlvi has shown earlier, this conscious choice on the part of the inventors of history did not change the fact that his Farhang-e Asafia still had about three-fourth entries of local origin. One is amused to see that these entries have been specified by the good Maulvi Sahib as ‘Hindi-ul Asl’ (‘of Hindi origin’). No one seems to have ever raised the question: if such an overwhelmingly large part of the Urdu vocabulary has ‘come’ from Hindi without any change, should these be treated as two separate languages or one and the same?

This is apart from the more obvious and undeniable fact that the grammar as it appears in the construction of sentences and phrases is identical in Hindi and Urdu. Also, the way we count is the same. And so forth.

The latter lexicographers took this work to an even more absurd level. Waris Sirhindi’s Ilmi Urdu Lughat has changed the origin of the local words, from Maulvi Sahib’s Hindi-ul Asl to simply Urdu.

Although a foreign origin is not claimed for Urdu, its local sources are not considered necessary for the study of this language. The result is that a scholar of Urdu may be able to enlighten you on the difference between muntazir and muntazar, (the latter as in Iqbal’s “kabhi ae haqiqat-e muntazar, nazr aa libas-e majaz mein”) but would be typically unaware of the origin of a local word such as hartal or oak (the latter as in Ghalib’s famous line: ‘pila de oak se saqi jo hum se nafrat hai’). A working knowledge of Persian (and the Arabic found in it) is generally considered necessary for someone claiming to know ‘good’ Urdu. In fact the examples showing a lack of such knowledge are the main argument used between quarrelling individuals and groups over the question of the ownership of ‘achhi’ Urdu. A similar kind of privilege is not, however, accorded to Sanskrit for instance. On the contrary, the use of Sanskrit is shunned and it is considered un-Islamic because of the fact that it is of local origin.

This takes us to another major consequence of the act of choosing a new name for an old language. By indicating, as Maulana Altaf Husain Hali did, that for someone to be proficient in ‘authentic’ Urdu, he is required to be from Delhi or the area around it — and a Muslim — a hitherto unknown religious identity was imposed on the language. It is interesting to note that Hali pushed the geographical boundary of the language-area seemingly to include Panipat where he hailed from, but at the same time excluded non-Muslims living in the same, freshly defined area. One can do no more than speculate here about the motivations of this twin strategy of inclusion and exclusion, but the results are evident for everyone to see. This important, decisive trend will be discussed later in this space.

Author: Ajmal Kamal
 
http://www.dawn.com/news/1178324/column-two-languages-or-one