SAVARKAR AND BHASHA SHUDDHI

 

SAVARKAR AND BHASHA SHUDDHI

Dr Vivek Arya

One of Savarkar's important contributions to Marathi language during this time was the movement of Bhasha Shuddhi or language purification that he commenced. Though he had begun working on this since his incarceration in the Cellular Jail, his first article on the subject came up in the Kesari on 21 April 1925. It was the occasion of the birth centenary of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj. In another article on the same day, in the Mahratta, Savarkar urged the Hindu youth of Punjab to draw inspiration from Swamiji's life and avoid the usage of the Arabic script, but rather use Devanagari or Gurmukhi. It was shameful that in the year of Swamiji's centenary, Hindu poets and writers were writing their poems in an alien script, he argued.

The key elements of this 'language purification' project were as follows:

1. Resurrect the usage of old, Sanskritised words in all languages including the Dravidian languages.

2. Create a national corpus of such indigenous words from various languages and eschew the usage of words from foreign languages such as English, Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Create words for scientific terminologies in Sanskrit and Indian languages if they do not exist.

3. If those words from foreign languages that have crept into our linguistic usage because those objects did not hitherto exist in India (e.g. Coat, Suit, Jacket, Tennis etc.) then they can be co-opted into the national linguistic pool.

4. If the style and usage of any foreign language seems easy and interesting, there should be no objection to its adoption.

A significant part of his work on language purification consists of debunking claims of an indigenous or original language of the Muslim community. He documents the tussle between Arabic and Persian in the regions where Islam originated and how they kept fighting with one another for linguistic supremacy. Urdu for him was a language that grew from the intermixing of Muslim invaders into India and their Hindu slaves who spoke Hindi or Punjabi.Urdu was merely a distorted version of Hindi, according to him—this despite his proficiency in the language to compose patriotic ghazals in it during his incarceration in the Cellular Jail. He noted with alarm the increasing usage of Arabic and Persian words in north Indian languages and feared that in times to come these languages would completely dry out their indigenous vocabulary. The shuddhi that was propagated in religious reconversion to Hinduism was extended to linguistic purification too, to reclaim those original words and create a sense of cultural identity and ownership.

[Based on book Savarkar by Vikram Sampath]