BD Sharma
Early schooling in child’s mother tongue is a tremendous idea. It needs no emphasis that mother tongue is the best medium for imparting education to the children. Mother tongue plays a crucial role in our lives for a wide array of reasons. Studies have shown that cognitive development as well as intellectual development is comparatively faster in those who are fluent in their mother tongue. It has also been seen that if a student is educated in mother tongue then the rate of educational success is higher than those who are taught in a medium other than their mother tongue. Mother tongue helps to know about one’s culture thoroughly. If one has a firm grip over one’s mother tongue, then it becomes easy to acquire literacy skills in other languages. One gets to perform one’s duties as government employee or as entrepreneur better if one is well versed in the local language. Last but not the least mother tongue has a huge positive influence in defining and constructing the personality of an individual. Knowing one’s mother tongue well is a matter of pride. It boosts one’s confidence and creates awareness of the environment in which one is growing.
It is in this background that UNESCO has recommended that children be taught in the community’s mother tongue during the early years of primary school because it will improve their educational outcome. That is why our National Education Policy of 2020 also lays emphasis on the home/local/ regional language as the children learn and grasp non-trivial concepts more quickly in it. It should, as such, be the medium of instruction at least till Grade five.
In the light of the provisions of NEP, our mother tongue, Dogri must also be attracting attention of the administrators, educationists and litterateurs to operationalize this important ingredient of the NEP. Dogri is being already taught as a subject but a lot of efforts are required to be made to introduce it as a medium of instruction even up to 5th primary. It should pose no problem because we are blessed with a lot of resource persons who can rise to the occasion to meet this challenge. There is no doubt that Dogri is comparatively a young language so far as its written literature is concerned. But the cultural base and folklore tradition of Dogri is hugely rich. Our forefathers didn’t leave any subject under the sky upon which they had not reflected their thoughts. Thus our folk tales travel widely through mythology to mystery and adventure to humour and satire to social and domestic problems to the lives of local deities, saints and heroes. The large repertoire of idioms, phrases and proverbs coined by our ancestors are simply marvelous. The folk songs have been made up for any conceivable occasion. We have folk songs sung on the occasion of child births (Bihaayian), the marriage(Korhian, Suhaag, Sithnian, Chhand etc), festivals and seasons (Hirna on Lohri, Mata ki Bhaintain during Navratri, Bolian on Baisakhi), folk ballads(Karkaan and Baaraan). In addition there are plenty of songs on the most common subject in the world literature, the love, on its amusements as well as on its vicissitudes. Lullabies for the children, play songs for the grownups and songs for the workers were also composed. So much so that we have drawn up expressions even for venting our grief over the death of our nears and dears in the form of Lohaanian and Palla.
Though Dogri is rich in folk literature yet it started to make strides in the written literature from 1940s only. We had some nice writings from few earlier authors such as Manak Chand, Kavi Dattu, Hakam Jat, Sant Ram Shastri, Ram Dhan, Pt Hardatt Shastri etc. also but the real written literature started to outpour in the 1940s through the efforts of a dedicated group of litterateurs such as Sansar Chand Baru, Prof Ram Nath Shastri, Dinu Bhai Pant, BP Sathe, DC Parsant and a host of others.
Dogri couldn’t make strides in the way as it should have because neither history nor geography did justice with it. History tells us that languages normally grow and flourish fast only when they get patronage from Governments/Kings, apart from the love from its users. Urdu language comes to mind in this regard. But for the interest shown by the Mughal Kings Shah Alam Saani, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Nizams of Hyderabad and Nawabs of Lucknow, Urdu language would not have attained the heights which it did. Dogra land remained almost always under the rule of Dogras, sometimes as sovereigns and sometimes under the suzerainty of Delhi or Lahore Durbars. But Dogri language couldn’t progress much. It was Maharaja Ranbir Singh who made sincere efforts for the promotion of Dogri. He had introduced it along with Persian as the official language of the State. It was written in Dogra Akhars. However this script could not become popular among the masses and perhaps didn’t meet the requirements of governance of an evolving State. The Dogri litterateurs of that time didn’t have the vision to realize it. One of the solutions could perhaps have been to adopt the Nagari script. This was subsequently done but many decades later. Much water had flown in the Tawi by then and the powerful Punjabi lobby in the Durbar under Pt Bhag Ram,the Law minister of Maharaja Partap Singh, had been able to bring round the Maharaja to adopt Urdu as the official language.
History had been made by Dogras under the stewardship of Maharaja Gulab Singh and General Zorawar Singh in North India. Formation of the State of J&K was a boon to the national cause as it resulted in the extension of our boundaries in the Himalayas. Formation of the State, however, resulted in its possession areas in which three distinct languages; Dogri, Kashmiri and Ladakhi were spoken. The three languages had not much of a commonality and there was hardly any chance of their merging and evolving into a single language, nor could any one of the three languages be introduced in the whole of State for obvious reasons. Dogras were thus constrained to introduce their own language in the State which they had so assiduously set up. Dogri in the circumstances got deprived of enjoying the royal patronage to grow and flourish.
In the somewhat similar vein it may be stated that it is easier for a language to thrive and prosper if it has its own well defined territory preferably knit in a single administrative unit. Dogri speaking people got scattered by the forces of history and geography. Dogra territory of Chamba, Kangra, Pathankot and Hoshiarpur were destined to fall in a separate administrative entity. Expanses of other Dogra land, including the Manhas villages around Darmaan Garmola, Charak villages around Chaarba and number of Salaria villages falling in Sialkot and Shakargarh were taken away from us by the vagaries of history. This fragmentation of Dogra land retarded the smooth development of its language.
Another handicap experienced by the Dogri language is its being sandwiched between two very rich and vibrant languages namely Punjabi and Kashmiri. On the one hand Kashmir valley has had very rich literary traditions since the heydays of Sanskrit. Kashmiri was fortunate to have evolved from it and be blessed with such keen minds as Habba Khatoon, Lall Ded, Rehman Rahi and Zinda Kaul etc. On the other hand Kashmir valley became the centre of attraction for the Union and State governments after independence. In the circumstances Kashmiri got a preferential treatment and it stole a march over Dogri. Thus Kashmiri got promotional avenues and was included in the eighth schedule of the Constitution in 1950 and was recognized by the Sahitya Academy in 1954. Dogri had to wait for decades for the same honour.
Punjabi, the other language in the neighbourhood can easily boast to be one of the leading languages of the subcontinent. Baba Farid, Bulle Shah, Shah Hussain Madho, Waris Shah in the years gone by and Puran Singh, Amrita Pritam, Shiv Kumar Batalvi in the recent past have enriched it so profusely that any other language would feel envious of it. Guru Granth Saheb and other religious literature of a very vibrant community was also written in this language which laid its foundations very deep. The rich culture and happy go lucky attitude of the people of Punjab did also play a role to add to its liveliness and vibrancy. It will not be an exaggeration if it is said that the literature on Sufism and humour is simply world class in Punjabi language.
Growing under the shadow of these two powerful neighbours proved arduous for growth of Dogri. Influence of particularly Punjabi was so overwhelming that many people carried the impression that it was a dialect of Punjabi. So much so that Grierson, in his famous Survey was carried away to believe as such and he didn’t give the treatment and recognition to Dogri which it deserved. Other linguists like Gill and Gleasson, Ujjal Singh Bahri etc followed Grierson’s opinion regarding Dogri. It was Dr Siddheshwar Verma, the renowned scholar of Indian linguistics, who in his authoritative paper entitled “The place of Dogri in the languages of India”, described Dogri as an independent language of the Indo-Aryan family. His views were later strengthened by Acharya Kishori Dass Vajpeyi, whose paper entitled “Dogri Bhasha ki ek Jhalak” reasoned that the Duggar region had its own Prakrit in fully developed form known popularly as Dogri.
These assertions by renowned linguists triggered renaissance in Dogri. As a result many Dogras who were writing in Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit shifted to Dogri in 1930s. Though they had fire in their bellies yet they were bereft of any resources. They would gather in public parks, tea shops or some Dharamshala for carrying out their incipient literary activities. Maharaja Hari Singh was known for his liberal and progressive views but his attention was not drawn towards Dogri. Since mood in the Dogri literary circles was upbeat after the Visheshwar Verma paper, a little push by His Highness would have proved a boon to the language. Maharaja was a proud Dogra and would certainly have rendered help to the Dogri cause if any lover of the language had approached him or any one of his Dogra advisors had put up a proposal in this regard. In fact Maharaja took keen interest in the field of education and made primary education free. In furtherance of the cause of education a committee consisting of leading educationists of the country like KG Saiyidin and Dr Zakir Hussain was formed by him. Recommendations of the committee, however, gave a raw deal to the vernaculars. Had Dogri somehow come in the scheme of these developments then it would have certainly seen a swift takeoff as there was a lot of gusto for it. But a Dogra always does what the famous Pakistani poet Munir Niazi said,”Hamesha Der kar deta hoon mein”. It remained for Maharaja’s son Dr Karan Singh to give a push to Dogri by not only enriching the language through his writings but also to provide a piece of land to Dogri Sanstha, the premier organization engaged in promotion of the language, for establishing Dogri Bhawan.
Despite many constraints Dogri made strides through the efforts of a dedicated band of writers and many of its lovers and it grew up as a modern standard language. It got recognition from the Sahitya Academy in 1970 and by 2002 it came to be included in the eighth schedule of the Constitution. Its fame started spreading far and wide with Lata Mangeshkar giving her voice to some of its sweet songs, Mallika Pukhraj and her talented daughter Tahira Syed rendering Dogri songs in the prestigious studios of Lahore TV Station, Padma Sachdev reciting Dogri poems from BBC London, Dogra Akhars providing insight to the themes and background of world famous Basholi paintings and when plays like Baba Jitto, a product of high quality born out of the joint efforts of Prof Ram Nath Shastri and Balwant Thakur, getting recognition and applause from the international audience.
All these encouraging trends have infused a lot of interest in many people working in different fields to take up writing in Dogri. Recently I had an opportunity to attend two literary functions for the release of books by two illustrious sons of Jammu, Ashok Angurana Ji- retired Secretary to Govt of India and Col Raaz Manawari(retired). A person with a little acumen in literature could sense that the two outpourings were of high literary standard. While hearing the extracts from the two books along with the commentaries on them, one could feel that products of high literary quality are being produced in the language. Presentations on the two occasions were not only laced with Dogri Khoaans(proverbs) but were profusely illustrated with references from the Upanishads, Kautilya’s Arth Shastra, renowned English, Hindi and Urdu writers. Hearing all of this was a treat to the ears. It was gratifying to see that Dogri language is in the safe hands of such literary geniuses. In the background of these advancements, one becomes confident that Dogri is firmly in position to function as a medium of instruction in different subjects as has been envisaged in the NEP.
Along with the efforts of the government and the litterateurs, the role of common man does also come into play in the operationalizing of this policy. Challenge in this respect incidentally is likely to come from Dogras themselves particularly of the neo rich and the upstart type who feel shy of using their mother tongue as the medium of instruction as also to use it in their day to day discourse. I may, however, point out to them that knowledge and usage of Dogri can prove to be an asset to us in various fields of life. I experienced it a number of times as a field officer when it helped me a lot in the successful discharge of my duties. It will be a pleasure to share some of these experiences with the readers in my next write-up.
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