Tale Behind Changing Script of Our language

Punchline

Thieving My Language

By Z. G. Muhammad 

The whole story is about the “hegemony”. It is all about cultural and political dominance.  The concept of political and “cultural hegemony” as theorized by Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci’s, in fact, explains the situation that we are more intensely caught up in during past sixteen months. There is all out effort by the powers that be, to ‘manipulate the cultural of our society, change our beliefs, perception, values, customs, and traditions. So that the world view of hegemonic forces becomes our world view – that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm and an ideology that justifies political status quo as natural and inevitable.’

To the long list of the ‘dominant discourses’ and hideous moves aimed at changing the demography of the Muslim majority state, conjuring communal divide and sectarian divide one more ugly item has been added that of stealing language and literature of people by changing script of their language.  This hideous move intended at stripping people known as  Kaisher, whose land is called as Kasheer and  the language  spoken by them as  Kosher  of their identity  sent shockwaves even down the spine of the ‘fence sitters.’   New Delhi’s this move, for changing script of the Kosher in which our entire poetry and literature exist found some isolated ‘compulsive’ supporters on the social media.

This move aimed at snatching personality of the language spoken and understood by overwhelming majority across the dividing line all over the state has a bait- a price tagged to it. The price tag is grouping it with six   Indian classical languages, including Tamil, Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Odia. This status would entitle language for some grants provided Devanagari is accepted as an alternative script for the language- a funny proposition no language in the world has two scripts. True, Kosher belongs to the great tribe of Indo-Aryan languages. Nonetheless, it is a fact that it belongs to the Dard group of the Dardic language and not to the Sanskrit.

It is not a question of declaring the Kashmiri language as a classical language for getting more funds for benefiting some individual writers and organizations. The move to have an alternative script or change the established script is just an alibi for executing a sinister design of establishing the cultural and linguistic hegemony.   There is need to go into its genesis   for understanding the design behind the move.

It is an old battle that dates back, to the period when the Shuddhi Movement now renamed Ghar Wapsi was started by some Hindutva zealots from outside in the early 1920s in the State then known as a country.  Notwithstanding, these groups enjoying the support of the Maharaja’s Durbar, it was resisted resolutely by the Muslims both in Jammu and Srinagar. The move was followed by yet another move of whipping up disputes over some religious place like Hara Masjid, Nagabal and attack on Khanqah-i-Mulla on 24 August 1924. These moves were resisted but these zealots succeeded in dividing the people culturally and linguistically. In this column, it may not be possible to encapsulate entire gamut of change that the small but powerful minority of Kashmiri Pandit underwent during the period. The influences from outside widened the linguistic and cultural divide between the minority and majority community. The community endeavoured to add more and more words from Sanskrit to their    lingua franca as against vocabulary in vogue

These machinations and moves, energised the subjugated Muslim of the State to rise against the bigoted and discriminatory feudal autocracy. Moreover, gave birth to a couple of Anjumans that subsequently had an important role to play in the awakening of the Muslims for persevering their identity and fighting for their rights. The Shuddhi movement lost its steam after 1924, Silk Factory Movement. Notwithstanding, Kosher not enjoying the status of an official language it was the whole crop of poets and religious sermonizers who promoted not only this language but also preserved its script.  The books in Kashmiri whether on Folk Music, Sazi-i-Kashmir, literature or any other genera was known as Kaisher kitabi.

Notwithstanding, the entire existing literature being in the kosher script a section of people that for their faith had started identifying with the  Hindus in other parts of India nursed bias against  Kosher script for its using Nastaleeqi alphabets. This hatred against Nastaleeqi alphabets, which they identified with the Muslim culture found its first major manifestation in 1939. Sheikh Abdullah with the help of Jawaharlal Nehru after strenuous efforts had succeeded in making five Pandit leaders to join his National Conference. To the disappointment of Sheikh Abdullah in the first meeting of the party working committee objected writing proceeding in the established and state recognized Nastaleeqi Script and wanted to record proceedings in the Devanagari script. This caused first split in the NC. Abdullah refused to agree to their communal proposal resulting all the five members quitting the party. To join back some years after on the advice of Nehru. The catcalls for changing the script were echoed by some members of this community even after the state had recognized the kosher script officially in the fifties.

The objective behind giving this historical background was to place the whole game plan in a perspective. It sounds puerile of some people supporting the move of the alternate script for the Kashmiri language on the alibi that Kashmiri literature in earlier times was written in this script. Now coming to another point raised by an old friend- interestingly once we were on the same page on this subject.   Our researcher so far has not found the existence of Kashmiri literature before Lal Ded. Though some do believe about the Mayheena Prakash written by a Sanskrit scholar Shashi Kanth before 14^th century was written in Devanagari script. This work of which only a few couplets are available was written in 15^th century. Most of Kashmiri scholars including Prof. Pushp, A K Rehbir and Prof. Hajani have agreed with George Grierson’s assertion that he lived during the period of Sultan Shah.  So it is just a surmise that Kashmiri has written literature has thousand year old history.

The script in which our entire literature exists is the script of the language – so the kosher script is the only script that should continue. In the world there is no history of changing or introducing alternative script for the Diaspora settled outside their birth place. They must learn the script of the language if they love to read and write in it.

Published in Greater Kashmir on 6-6-2016