Whether
to follow the letter, or to follow the spirit is a perennial dilemma
of the literate world. A frequent moot point in all legal and
constitutional matters, this question can in fact arise in any matter
that involves written representation of any idea/object/sound, in
other words in any literate matter. This letter/spirit dilemma
regarding transliteration of Bengali words into English by using
Roman alphabet is what I am going to draw your attention to.
The
Sanskrit standard of transliteration into English is pretty evolved,
is standard and undisputed. Bengalis have followed it probably out of
their natural affinity (an affinity that may not be just limited to
upper castes) for Sanskritic structures, and also because it is
always easier to conform to an existing universal standard than
undertaking a trouble of founding a new local one. The question of a
new one comes, because the received Sanskritic standard (from
North-West India) does not adequately represent the Bengali nuances.
But
then again, do we have a strange spelling custom in Bengali language
that in order to preserve the original shape of the word has so
entirely ignored its current form in received/standard Bengali
pronunciation (i.e. the Kolkata/Nadia standard)? There is no use in
suddenly being fond of diversity and plurality and giving the excuse
of multiple living dialects that should ostentatiously force us to
retain the Sanskrit system of spelling, not when all (plural) the
living forms of the word widely differs from such a spelling.
It
brings the issue of tatsama/totshomo vs tadbhava/todbhobo once more
to the fore. I think it was Tagore (or Suniti Chatterjee, or may be
both) who once said that the presence of tatsama words in Bengali
will be drastically reduced once the words are stripped of their
conventional clothing and restored to their phonetic and
morphological actualities. Most of the Bengali words which we
consider as tatsama, actually are tadbhava. The word tatsama itself,
in fact is pronounced as totshomo. There can be righteous indignation
over this discrepancy once we no longer operate within a closed
audience of the native-language users, the cognoscenti who are
familiar with spelling customs and conventions, this is the case that
might happen when you meticulously remind a non Bengali who is
unfamiliar with the Bengalis' spelling customs that though it is
spelled as Satyajit, it is actually Shottojit. So perhaps fresh
customs need to be invented when we deal with a new audience, keeping
in view the nuances and demands and rules of representation of a new
medium.
Surely
any foreign custom of spelling cannot be introduced in an intact
manner in a transliteration into Bengali without some serious loss of
data that needs to be transmitted. Silhouette is not pronounced as it
is written, so a transliteration into Bengali will most probably try
to capture the essence of the word and not the spelling custom. But
the fact is, we shall still spell Padma in Roman alphabet, quite
ignoring the phonetic and structural constitution of the Bengali
word. Exactly why do we conform to a standard that is visibly
inadequate to transliterate Bengali words into English?
The
desire to conform to an existing powerful standard is akin to finding
employment while searching for a standard of one's own is akin to
founding a business. Bengalis are conformists and employment seekers:
that's a piece of timeless wisdom we have inherited from our
forefathers. Our natural propensity for shying away from confident
and powerful self-assertions is only matched by our anxiety to
conform to the standards of power. That's why we are always so very
enamored by those who can speak impeccable and pucca English. If
there can be an Indian English, why there cannot be a Bengali
Inglish, or
Benglish (I am instantly reminded of “Kolaveri di”. This song
has kind of shown the appeal of a broken Indian English).
I
remember an anecdote about a Bengali Pandit (the term pondit in
Bengali means a scholar, sometimes more particularly a Sanskrit
scholar, unlike the north indian pandit which simply and invariably
means a brahmin by birth) in Kashi.
A
Sanskrit symposium was held at Kashi. This Pandit of ours attnded
every session of it, sitting at a corner, following the proceedings
attentively. After a few sessions, a person sitting next to him
asked, “sir if you don't mind, are you a Bengali?” The Pandit was
surprised and enquired what gave him away. The person, a local,
replied, “it was your silence. Bengalis know Sanskrit well, but
because of their pronunciation, are full of inhibitions and usually
don't speak in such gatherings.”
Bhanu
Banerjee, noted Bengali actor, once spoke of his frustration, “what
is this huge fuss over my Bengali accent in the Hindi movie I acted
in (yes, Bhanu did a Hindi movie once)... If there is a Marathi way
of Hindi speaking, if there is a South Indian way of Hindi speaking,
if there is a Punjabi way of Hindi speaking, then why not a Bengali
way of Hindi speaking as well?”
In
their anxiety to conform to the standards of power, Bengalis are
perhaps losing some valuable resources of their own. Silence,
censuring and censorship are some of the aspects of our conformist
anxieties.
But
there is a sporadic but not negligible resistance to this replication
of Sanskritc structures of Bengali spellings in English
transliteration. Spelling Aurobindo the way it is done is one such
instance of Bengali resistance. I know a Bengali residing in Delhi
who writes his surname Gupto just the way it sounds in Bengali, and
not as our Sanskritic transliteration system demands, which is Gupta.
Freud once coined a concept called Narcissism of minor difference.
This is a classic illustration of this idea. When identities are
built, the minor differences really become the rallying points. So
when a community wants to celebrate its uniqueness, and its separate
identity, it celebrates the minor difference that separates it from
its immediate neighbour/s.
Non-Sanskritic
words like roshogolla, mishti doi and macher jhol (and they are our
great cultural capitals as any restaurateur doing brisk business in
Bengali cuisine will tell you, so it is only imperative that their
transliteration should reflect that essential Bengaliness as “maach”
as possible) immediately render themselves unto transliterations
closer to Bengali sounds. But what about Gandhi's pronunciation and
spelling of the Sanskrit word for untouchability, as “asprushyata”?
Well, “rru” is how a lot of Indians including Gujaratis (even
Oriyas do the same) pronounce the same Sanskrit vowel Bengalis know
as “rri”. The fact remains that neither the Bengali nor the
Gujarati pronunciation is able to capture the original Sanskrit
vowel, so the logic here is that each should be free to construct its
spelling according to their own standards. Another such example is
the representation and transliteration of the compound consonant
“ksha”. “Murdhanya sha” is not the same as sha. The Sanskrit
“murdhanya sha” is a sound closer to the Gemran “ch” (as in
the word Brecht), as Syed Mujtaba Ali once pointed out. Murdhanya sha
of Sanskrit was actually somewhere between “kh” (as in Urdu words
“Khaled”/“khali”/“khayal”) and “sh”.
We
have, following the Eastern/Purbo Magodhi linguistic culture,
retained the kh component in the word dikkha, while the North Indians
have gone for deeksha. Under such circumstances, one should be free
to construct a model of transliteration according to the local
Sanskrit/Prakrit traditions. This in fact brings us to the question,
was there ever a single monolithic Sanskrit standard, or were there
many local Sanskrits (sounding however hopelessly liberal in the
process of asking so) since there were so many Prakrits which were
derived from Sanskrit?
I
believe that our words have a distinct morphological shape that is
being hidden beneath the Sanskritized spellings (Bengali language is
unusually Sanskritized; even today, compared to the lately generated
Sanskritization of Hindi, Bengali outshines Hindi in its gamut of
Sanskrit repertory in everyday lived vocabulary). I trace the
beginning of this process to the Sen experiment, let me say this at
the cost of repetition. An archeological excavation is not required
to find out the Eastern Indic characteristics of Bengali language:
our words celebrate those roots as these are preserved within living
traditions of speech (the synonym of word in Bengali and Sanskrit is
Shabda, which also means sound). What I want to emphasize is that the
eastern Indian people have a linguistic cultural history that modern
modern day Bengalis must recognize and celebrate: that history cannot
be stifled with the excuse of Sanskrit. There were many Sanskrits,
otherwise many Prakrits could not have evolved. Bengali bhadraloks
are remarkably different from their counterparts from the other
nationalities in one attitude of exclusion and elitism in their
speeches: we usually purge our lived speeches of indigenous words
(unlike the rest of India: our comprador characteristic is born out
in the fact that we shy away from using the language of ordinary
people and consider their vocabulary akin to slang) and prefer to use
choice words from English and Tatsama. Thus the bhadralok's language
becomes further reified, and distant from the lived ordinary Bengali
speeches.
The
Sanskritization of spelling results from bhadralok obsessions with
conformism and chastity. Needless to say, such obsessions stem from
concrete material conditionalities. Because Bengali upper classes
exhibit comprador characteristics, they have an anxiety to conform to
norms of established power and perform acts of chastity in speech.
Our refusal to Bengalicize our spellings is a result of comprador
anxieties of performance and conformism.
Noted
Indologist Dr Prithwin Mukherjee objected against Agni Yuga being
spelt as Ognijug, and in recently pointed out in a letter to me that
j stands for “bargiya ja” in Bengali, so if one transliterates
back the term jug in Bengali, it will create a confusion. First of
all, I think there is no confusion when we transliterate back Bagha
Jatin (Prithwinbabu's grandfather) or Jatin Das from English to
Bengali, as we dont think of using a “bargiya ja” in our
transliteration. Still, Jatin is only partially close to our
language: Jotin is closer.
Anyway,
Jatindranath Mukherjee surely was not wrong in spelling his name as
Jatin, and nor are we. Secondly, I am not worried about the audience
at home that is familiar with the rules of the Bengali spelling game,
I.e. the native Bengalis and those who know their ways. I am
concerned about that reader of JBS who is not familiar with the
Bengalis and does not know that Agni Yuga in Bengali is pronounced as
Ogneejoog. I have tried to convey the spirit of Bengaliness to such a
reader, while being fully respectful to the anxiety of some of the
nationalists from the (existing) old schools.
Identity,
independence and self-assertions (in transliteration as in elsewhere)
are always matters of great anxiety for the Bengalis, because they
involve a democratization, it involves an empowering of the lived
experience, something that has remained a taboo since the rulers
imposed Sanskrit, Persian and English respectively and people knew
that they need extraneous certification for their experience to be
valid and that they need to conform to the standards set by
power-centre in order to be legitimate, though Sanskrit was not an
alien language like Persian and English, and could inform parts and
bits of the lived experience.
I
remember meeting a Ukrainian youth (this was some 10 years after
Ukraine became independent), whose name's spelling was Volodymyr.
This is closer to how the name is pronounced in his mother language,
that is Ukrainian, though the Russian Vladimir is more standard,
known and established. He confidently privileged his free,
easy-flowing and natural lived speech over the Russian norm. It
asserted his uniqueness, celebrated his culture's “minor”
difference with Russian and gave his an identity.
One
argument against a Bengali standard for transliteration is that it
will look unfamiliar and alienating to our eyes if we attempt it. The
same can be placed as an argument in favour of the loss of Bengali
identity, because identity/communal feeling looks awkward to many
Bengalis who have dispensed with it and are quite happy about their
achievements. Let us not bring this excuse now into a left,
postmarxist, revolutionary discourse of Bengali nationalism, which
has to by default deconstruct the familiar cliches and dare to rush
in where angels fear to tread. Here I give a call for a Bengali
system of transliteration.
One
quality that such a transliteration system embodies is that it is far
sighted. With the advent of Avro and phonetic typings in unicode
Bengali, I believe that we shall increasingly see a switch over to
phonetic spellings among the computer savvy digital writers of
Bengali language of new generation, because we cannot sustain a
dichotomy for long. I shall swrite tomal if I want to write my name
in Bengali letters, following Avro. I write my name as Tamal in
English now. In Avro, typing Tamal will give টামাল.
Unicode typing of Avro might appear insignificant now, but its effect
will be seen in the long run.
Bengalis
must become self-sufficient and strong: time has come when they will
have to become powerful in their own right. That is the only way to a
strong Eastern India and a strong Indic identity (and a strong
India). Harping on a false but deeply ingrained uniformity of
Sanskritized spellings defeats the very cause of Indigenous interests
of a resourceful Bengaliness which we believe is important for India.
If we can have an Eastern Indic system of transliteration, we can
place Bengalis within the Eastern Indian cultural space, within the
Bengali group of languages and cultures. A Universalist,
internationalist, elitist and Westernized Bengal is restored to Its
place in Eastern India and is reunited with Bihar, Orissa and Assam
in such a transliteration project, as I envisage.
I invite scholars from linguistics to take this debate further. I lack the authority, expertise and scholarship to do anything else apart from providing a take-off point for a critical debate on transliteration. Let us begin this debate; let us not be deterred by the possible resistances put up by old habits: after all we were able to change Calcutta to Kolkata, were not we?
--Tamal Dasgupta, 11 February 2012, 15:12 IST
