Seventy Years On, Malayalam Still Seeks Its Rightful Place. Its Vocabulary Shrinks By The Day, And The State’s New Name, Keralam, Still Points To A Region, Not Its LanguageBy: Kalpetta NarayananSeventy years on, Keralam has still not become the land of Malayalis. Decades after it was formed as a linguistic state, it is named after a region, not its language. Now it has become the more grandiose “Keralam”. What is surprising is that the move has the backing of even the Aikya Malayala Prasthanam.Our neighbours named themselves after their languages. Tamil Nadu takes a pride in its mother tongue that rivals China’s, and it shows in every use of the language. Every signpost and every wall inscription speaks Tamil. Its vocabulary keeps growing. Reference works and foreign terms get regularly rendered into Tamil. Keralam, by contrast, caters to English speakers. After Goa, it is the most comfortable colonial outpost for people who know only English. Malayalam’s vocabulary shrinks by the day. For technical terms, Malayalam simply has no words. Now that the name is Keralam, the malaise has deepened. People who used to write “Kerala state” are no longer sure what is right. Must “Kerala govt” now become “Keralam govt”?In a land whose chief export is its people, perhaps it is unfair to see anything wrong in this. Perhaps, too, lagging behind our neighbours in economic self-reliance gives us an excuse for caring so little about our language. Wherever we turn, the same feeling stares back at us: However hard we row in Malayalam, we will not reach the shore any time soon.But a mother tongue is not just another language. It is more than a means of communication; it is the language in which a community expresses its identity. In every developed country, the mother tongue is the main language. If China astonishes the world today, let us not forget that its achievement springs from soil that Confucius, Lao Tzu and their successors made fertile. Shakespeare’s triumph was also a triumph for English, his mother tongue. It is only when Samuel Beckett wanted to express alienation that he turned to a language not his own. Strength in one’s own language is inner strength.Whoever commands a mother tongue able to express anything he wishes, and to handle the most profound ideas, is the strongest and freest of all. A poet once wrote: “My house burnt down; now I live in my mother tongue.” Malayalam is yet to become a language one can live in. That is not to say it never rose above its limits in the hands of Ezhuthachan, Kumaran Asan, VKN or OV Vijayan. But outside literature, Malayalam has not matured into a language of thought. Apart from a few who write philosophy, such as Ahmed Nissar and TV Madhu, Malayalam’s thinkers admit that they write obscurely because theirs is a weak language. Every good writer strengthens the mother tongue simply by writing in it. What Malayalam’s thinkers fail to grasp is that thought can go only as far as language goes, and that it grows only by reaching for what could not be expressed before.The most powerful language on earth is one’s mother tongue. The creative freedom and political power enjoyed by an Englishman whose native language is English are by no means insignificant. The Malayali must travel the same road the English took to raise their language to the heights it enjoys today. A Frenchman, a German, a Chinese man, even a Tamilian, can admit he doesn’t know English without any guilt or embarrassment. A Malayali admits it with the deepest guilt and shame. He lacks the courage even to call the land he lives in Malayalam.Region and religion are weaker identities than language. A Malayali remains a Malayali wherever he goes. A Christian in Rome and a Christian in Travancore do not share a quarter of what a Malayali Christian shares with a Malayali Muslim. The same is true of a Muslim in Iran and a Muslim in Keralam. ‘Keralite’ comes nowhere near the scope of ‘Malayali’.” For years, from platform after platform, I have pleaded with both hands raised that our land be called Malayalam, not Keralam. It should not even need saying. Somehow, no one listens.Perhaps the difference between the earth and the world is this: The earth lies beyond language, while the world is shaped by it. Whatever has been achieved in the world was achieved on the strength of language: History, science, religion, philosophy, literature, all of it. Without language there is no thought, no mind. It was language that set humans apart from every other living thing. Language is our identity, and the road we travel by. Man, in short, is a creature of language. I have come across nothing as profound as the line “In the beginning was the Word.”(The writer is chairperson, Kerala Sahitya Akademi)
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.