Will the Bengali Listen to the “Aayo Gorkhali” Bol?

Bengali or Hindi, cultural and linguistic chauvinism rarely works in multi-ethnic, multi-lingual countries.

One doesn’t know if West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is ruing the day she decided to make the study of Bengali compulsory at all schools in the state. She might well be. For with that one misguided move, Mamata relit the demand for Gorkhaland — a separate state for the Nepali-speaking people of north Bengal.

For more than a month, Darjeeling — West Bengal’s picturesque tourist hotspot — has witnessed violence and arson, protests and strikes. Schools and offices are shut, tourists have fled, Darjeeling’s famous tea gardens have downed shutters and the revenue loss from the stalled tea business alone is said to be upwards of Rs 340 crore.

The current situation in the hills of Bengal is a testament to how impulsive and short-sighted the state’s chief minister can be. And how linguistic chauvinism in a multicultural country like India is bound to reap a bitter harvest.

On 15 May this year, Partha Chatterjee, Bengal’s education minister, announced that the study of Bengali would be mandatory from Class I to X at all schools in the state, irrespective of which board they belonged to or what their medium of instruction was.

Roshan Giri, the party General Secretary, said,

“We are not against any language or learning new languages, but you cannot force a language on us. The state government must keep the Darjeeling hills, Dooars and Terai outside the ambit of the directive.”

Language — and alleged efforts to steamroll one with another — is an emotive issue. It is especially emotive in a region which has long sought to affirm its ethnic and cultural identity as distinct from the rest of Bengal. The GJM had been left gasping after Mamata’s Trinamool Congress won big in the Mirik municipal elections in Darjeeling last May. The chief minister’s Bengali-must policy handed the party a terrific tool to revive itself by mobilising popular outrage against it.

The anger over her government’s linguistic chauvinism had snowballed into a violent renewal of the demand for a separate Gorkha state for the Nepali-speaking people of the region.

To be sure, Mamata’s decision to push her “Bengali-must” gambit is an attempt to counter the BJP’s creeping advancement in the state, and the fear that Bengali culture could be at risk from a growing cult of “Hindi-isation”. It is also a riposte to the Centre’s move earlier this year to make the study of Hindi compulsory in all CBSE schools.

Besides, Mamata may have hoped that her policy would boost the sentiment of Bangla pride and that the brownie points she would win among the Bengali majority in her state would more than make up for some protests in north Bengal. But the fact that she was forced to backtrack and exempt the hills from the policy has put paid to that fond hope as well.

However, answering one kind of linguistic chauvinism with another is hardly the stuff of mature state policy. In an area as volatile as the Darjeeling hills, which has seen repeated demands for separate statehood for the Gorkha people, an attempt to make the study of Bengali compulsory was always going to be akin to showing the proverbial red rag to a bull. Anything that smacks of cultural imperialism by Bengalis from the plains was always going to be fiercely resisted in the hills.

With their desire for territorial self-determination repeatedly thwarted over the years, it is not surprising that the Gorkhas are almost fanatically conscious of real or perceived threats to their language and culture.

English returned to the curriculum in a phased manner from 1992, but it wasn’t until 2003 that the ruinous no-English policy was finally scrapped. Experts feel that it left a whole generation of students with poor English skills, putting them at a serious disadvantage vis-a-vis job seekers from other parts of the country.

The point is, cultural and linguistic chauvinism rarely works in multi-ethnic, multi-lingual countries. The dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971 was also sparked by Islamabad trying to stuff Urdu down the throats of the Bangla-speaking population of East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh).

Mamata is learning that lesson now. Would that the BJP government at the Centre, which has been so keen to extend the hegemony of Hindi in India, also learnt a thing or two from the fires that are raging in Darjeeling?

(We all love to express ourselves, but how often do we do it in our mother tongue?  Here's your chance! This Independence Day, khul ke bol with BOL – Love your Bhasha. Sing, write, perform, spew poetry – whatever you like – in your mother tongue. Send us your BOL at [e-mail] or WhatsApp it to 9910181818.)