Chaman Lal

Introductory Note-This presentation was made at India house, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago before large Trinidadian audience, along with Indian staff of Indian High Commission and ICCR Mahatma Gandhi cultural institute. Though Trinidadian audience was mostly from Indian descent people, yet within a century, they have lost their languages-largely Hindi, but Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu too, as indentured labour has reached Trinidad from these areas from 1845 to 1915. There are 40% plus Indian descent people in Trinidad out of its 1.3 million populations and other 45% plus African peoples mother tongue has now become English. How colonialism has ‘colonised’ the mind of people, even after political freedom granted, this can best be seen in small Caribbean nations, most of these countries have lost their native languages to English, thanks to colonisation of these countries at British hands for long. At the moment English is official language of more than 65 countries and French of 40 plus countries in Asia, Africa and other parts of the world, despite British and French colonisers leaving these countries and despite many of these countries in Asia and Africa having their own strong native languages. More than one hundred out of 250 plus countries of the world has now just English and French as their official languages, apart from more than seventy countries having Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic as the official languages. This simply proves Prof. Ngugie Wa Theongo’s thesis expressed in his celebrated book-‘Decolonising the Mind’-Politics of Language in Africa’.
                   I started my presentation initially in Hindi, especially with greetings-‘Namaskar’, ‘Aadab’, Sat shri Akal and Good Evening(Function was in the late evening) and expressing sense of irony also for speaking not in Hindi, but in English to celebrate ‘World Hindi day’, declared on 10th January 1975 at the first ever ‘World Hindi Conference ‘ held in Nagpur(India).Since time allotted for presentation was only ten minutes, so I focussed mainly on facts, that too in modern social networking form of ‘tweet’, which in fact is an improvised form of term ‘sutra’ or ‘mantra’ in Hindi and Sanskrit- to express crux of the matter in most precise form and I literally tweeted some part of it on my twitter account.

                   Nguige Wa Thingo, celebrated Kenyan Gikiyu writer's quote-To starve or kill a language is to starve and kill a people's memory bank'
     There are about 7000 languages spoken in the world by 7 billion people residing in 257 countries of the world.6%languages spoken by 94% of the people of the world
Chinese or Mandarin is the largest spoken language of the world, spoken by more than a billion people of the world
Hindi is second largest spoken language of the world according to vistawide .com, but Krysstal.com puts it at no.4 and Ethnologue at no.5
If you add Urdu and other near languages listed separately in world language data Hindi would be close to 700 million speakers
Hindi is spoken in more than 20 countries of the world and is official language of India and Fiji, national language in Mauritius, and popular in Suriname
Hindi is taught in more than hundred Universities of the world as foreign language, other than two hundred plus Universities of India teaching Hindi as foremost Indian language.
This is strange that Hindi has still not gained its place in UNO as one of the official language, though French like lesser spoken languages have got that status. French is at 16th or 18th place in spoken language data of the world. Five other languages-Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish and Russian are among the first 7 or 8 most spoken languages of the world. Bengali, another Indian language is at no. 7, ahead of Russian in the data. Punjabi figures at no.11, Telugu at 15th, Marathi at 16th, Tamil 17th and Urdu at 19th.
   China and India count for 40% population of the whole world, but variety of languages spoken in India are much more varied than in China.
In India, there are 22 scheduled languages with constitutional status of national languages and 100 other languages in use as per 2001 census data, though there are 1500 plus mother tongues in India. Out of 22 scheduled languages Sanskrit and Tamil have been given classic languages status.
As per 2001 census, nearly 42% Indians are Hindi speaking people and if we add Urdu and Maithili among scheduled languages to it, which are very close to Hindi, number of speakers will increase to nearly 48%, a total of nearly 500 million speakers. Ironically the number of Sanskrit speakers in India are just 14135 placed at last among 22 scheduled languages, even Bodo placed at no. 21 has more than one million speakers, yet most of the budget for languages in higher education deptt. is appropriated for promoting Sanskrit.
This number is sure to increase much more in 2011 when census is taking place and it could very well reach near 600 million speakers
Apart from India, Mauritius, Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji, Guyana and Suriname are other countries, where Hindi speaking people migrated in large numbers in 19th century as indentured labor. Hindi speaking Indians also migrated to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Jamaica and many other countries of the world during British colonial regime, but these five countries had the largest concentration of Indian descent people.
      While Mauritius, Fiji and Suriname have been able to preserve Indian languages intact, but unfortunately this is not so with Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana, which have practically lost touch with Indian languages.
         To make Hindi as one of official languages of UNO and to make it a real world language, Trinidad & Tobago has to play a major role along with Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname and Guyana.
         But to play that role Trinidad & Tobago has to first revive Hindi and other Indian languages in the country. For that the teaching of these languages at school level is a must.
            Ranjit Kumar-‘Lion of the Punjab’, in the words of Prof. Brinsely Samaroo; who was also founder of Hindu Mahasabha in Trinidad & Tobago along with Mohd Syed Hossain played a major role in popularizing Hindi and Urdu through films and school education. Also Presbyterian Church schools played good role in promoting Hindi in its schools in early twentieth century. That tradition has to be revived in Trinidad & Tobago in relation to not only Indian languages, but African languages as well, as Prof. Ngugie Wa Thiongo started writing in his mother tongue-Gikiyu, leaving English only for critical writing. Colonialism even after leaving its physical presence has held colonized nations in cultural colonization. And a nation is not fully free, if it is not culturally and economically free, despite political freedom gained.

Hope Indian and African languages will be revived in Trinidad & Tobago to get country freed from colonial cultural impact and Trinidad & Tobago will hold the flag of Hindi high as world language. Ameen!