Spelling of Ognijug: A Case for a Bengali System of Transliteration

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