THE TRAGEDY OF THE KASHMIRI LANGUAGE हा बटव,कोशुर बूल्यतव, पॅर्यताव त॒ लीख्यतव़ The upheaval suffered by the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990 as a direct result of the Islamist Terrorism has had many unfortunate consequences. The political, cultural and religious ones have been discussed in detail on various fora and debated vociferously by the concerned parties. But one aspect of this tragedy has not received the attention it deserved, the Kashmiri language, ‘Batta Koshur’, as spoken and written by the Kashmiri Pandits. This is partly because, I am sorry to say, Kashmiri Pandits never really loved their mother tongue the way other ethnicities do. Take a Bengali, for example. The pride of place which he gives to his beloved Bangla, wherever in the world he is, is second to none. He may be a Professor of English in Great Britain but at home he will always converse in Bangla. He will make sure that his children too talk in the same language with them. On the other hand, Kashmiri Pandits even in the good old days back in Kashmir used to view Koshur with contempt, as if it was the language of the uncultured and illiterate masses. The first step in cultural ascendancy was to discard Koshur and speak in Urdu or Hindi. Of course, many a time it had very funny consequences too. I remember one child of such a family asking her mother in a typically Kashmiri accent, “Mummy, Mummy, Maain Naali Par Baith Kar Gus Karoon?” Such was the craze among young teenagers, particularly girls, to speak in Hindustani that they refused to converse with one who ever dared to speak in his/her mother tongue! In fact such a person was looked down upon by these more ‘sophisticated’ people! A lot of water has flowed down the Vyeth since then. Kashmiri Pandits have now started to realize the importance of the Kashmiri language in their lives. As the community seems to be heading towards oblivion, the dying pangs of the language as spoken and written by them seem to be getting heard more often and scholars have been trying to devise ways and means to revive the language. So, without wasting more time, let us get down to business! The officially recognized script for Kashmiri is the Perso-Arabic one and therein lies our tragedy. I have nothing personal against this script though everybody knows that it was introduced under highly charged political conditions after independence and is rather inadequate for the peculiar vowels and consonants of the language even after the introduction of the diacritical ‘Hamza’ to cover up the glaring lacunae. It is true that the script had been in use for a long time after the Islamic conquest of Kashmir and even the Karkun Kashmiri Pandits used it for official purposes, obviously because that was a necessity of the times. However, Sharda which was used from as early as the Tenth Century continued to be used by the Jyotish and the Guru Kashmiri Pandits for the various Shaiva and other religious and astrological works. Unfortunately, the Sharda script has suffered a decline in the last century or so and is nowadays hardly used at all. Attempts to revive the script too have not been very successful for various reasons. It was against this background in 1995 that a committee of scholars met and agreed to devise and adopt an innovative set of diacritical marks for the various peculiar Kashmiri sounds. This set of diacritical marks continued to be used in Devanagari-Kashmiri till the year 2002, when another committee of experts with the able stewardship of Dr. Roop Krishen Bhat met under the auspices of Northern Regional Language Centre of the Central Institute of Indian Languages (Ministry of Human Resources Development). The committee decided to further modify the diacritical marks because some of the previous ones were found to be rather unsatisfactory. These scholars agreed upon a set of modified vowels and diacritical marks which led to the finalisation of the Standardised Devanagari-Kashmiri script towards end of the year 2002. This Script is now being used, or set to be used by all for uniformity in writing Kashmiri in Devanagari. TO BE CONTINUED… Image: courtesy, kashmirblogs.wordpress
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 09:59:04 +0000