SWAMIJI'S TIME

SWAMIJI'S TIME J.K. SIVAN

NEED FOR A COMMON LANGUAGE

Everyone now needs to know two languages at least. the Language of his town, city, and State. And the other a language one can communicate successfully with others in different parts where they speak different languages. The common language is that which is known and spoken by most comfortably. The English when they ruled the country as a whole, they ensured that they were able to control the people of different parts by educating them in their language the English. Even after 300 years we are speaking that language to communicate with others living in this country, until and unless some other acceptable easy language replaces it to serve the purpose. I stop with this inasmuch as my point is that there should be a language in which all are able to voice their thoughts and understand that of others.

With this I introduce to you what Swamiji Vivekananda once spoke about the common language of people big cities like Kolkata.

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''In our country, owing to all learning being in Sanskrit from the ancient times, there is an immeasurable gulf between the learned and the common folk. All the great personages, from Buddha down to Chaitanya and Ramakrishna, who came for the well-being of the world, taught the common people in the language of the people themselves. They spoke the langue of their village or town to convey their thoughts.

Of course, scholarship is an excellent thing; but cannot scholarship be displayed through any other medium than a language that is stiff and unintelligible, that is unnatural and merely artificial?

Is there no room for art in the spoken language?

What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

Are you lnot thinking of your scholastic researches in the language which you are accustomed to speak at home?

Why then do you introduce such a queer and unwieldy thing when you proceed to put them in black and white?

The language in which you think out philosophy and science in your mind, and argue with others in public — is not that the language for writing philosophy and science?

If it is not, how then do you reason out those truths within yourselves and in company of others in that very language?

The language in which we naturally express ourselves, in which we communicate our anger, grief, or love, etc.— there cannot be a fitter language than that. We must stick to that idea, that manner of expression, that diction and all. No artificial language can ever have that force, and that brevity and expressiveness, or admit of being given any turn you please, as that spoken language. Language must be made like pure steel — turn and twist it any way you like, it is again the same — it cleaves a rock in twain at one stroke, without its edge being turned. Our language is becoming artificial by imitating the slow and pompous movement — and only that — of Sanskrit. And language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

If you say, "It is all right, but there are various kinds of dialects in different parts of Bengal — which of them to accept?" — the answer is: We must accept that which is gaining strength and spreading through natural laws, that is to say, the language of Calcutta. East or west, from wheresoever people may come, once they breathe in the air of Calcutta, they are found to speak the language in vogue there; so nature herself points out which language to write in. The more railroads and facilities of communication there are, the more will the difference of east and west disappear, and from Chittagong to Baidyanath there will be that one language, viz that of Calcutta. It is not the question which district possesses a language most approaching Sanskrit — you must see which language is triumphing. When it is evident that the language of Calcutta will soon become the language of the whole of Bengal, then, if one has to make the written and spoken language the same, one would, if one is intelligent enough certainly make the language of Calcutta one's foundation. Here local jealousies also should be thrown overboard. Where the welfare of the whole province is concerned, you must overlook the claims to superiority of your own district or village.''