Triglossia in Bangla DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHY AY Indian Statistical Institute Prologue This is a rather unusual paper as it attempts to prove Triglossia instead of Diglossia in Bangla avoiding the usual method of sociolinguistic research and using a folktale to understand the state of affairs in the colonial context of 19th C. Bengal. This is a paper on the discursive formation of the linguistic issues perceived by the then Intelligentsia arising out of the Nationalist movement of last phase of 19th Century and the first phase of 20th century. This narration may be called, following Nandy (1983), simply a “mythographical” account of past linguistic situation of Bengal. This paper is also thoroughly revised and updated version of Bandyopadhyay (1991)’s description of Kolkata dialects. 0. A Folktale of Bengal Once upon a time there was a king. He had seven wives. But he had no offsprings. So a hermit prescribed a root to the elder queen as a medicine for childbirth. The hermit also advised her to distribute it equally amongst the seven queens. But out of greed, five out of the seven queens took a major portion and the other two got only a sip of it. Thus the last two gave birth to an owl and a monkey, viz. Bhutum and Buddhu and the other five were fortunate enough to give birth to five princes who were obviously human beings. Though, according to the Bangla folktale terminology, the first five174 Triglossia in Bangla queens are called Suorani (Preferred or good Queen) and last two are Duorani (neglected Queen) at the end of the story the total situation had reversed by the efforts of Buddhu and Bhutum (a -> ~a). When other five princes were in search of Princess Kalavati and faced different types of odds, Buddhu and Bhutum rescued them from those odds though they had serve enemity amongst them. But lastly, after passing through different types of difficult hazards, Buddhu won Kalavati and Bhutum won Hiravati. These two princesses then burnt the guise of monkey and owl and Buddhu and Bhutum had metamorphosed into real beings. (~b -> b) L AMetaphor Rabindranath (1983-1961:456) used an analogy to depict the diglossic situation of Bangla literary language. He used a folk story of a king who has two wives: Suorani (preferred one) and Duorani (neglected one). Bangla Language has also two queens: one is Sadhu Bhasa and another one is Calit Bhasa. At that time, he also predicted that Duorani would dethrone Suorani in due course. The Sadhu bhasa is an archaic high-code used in the literary text and the Calit literary text is based on the colloquial speech of Standard Colloquial Bangla (SCB). Generally this dichotomous relation is referred to as diglossia. (Singh, Maniruzzaman, 1983). But Bandyopadhyay (1991) suggested triglossia instead of diglossia within the Bangla language. Besides these two codes, there was another code improperly called Cockney (meaning, cock’s egg; the term is generally used to refer to the dialect of. the natives of the Eastern part of London.) and is renamed here as Pracalit. Thus the polemic of standardising Bangla literary discourse, was not, however, confined to this bigamy of abstract ‘male’ king ‘Banglaness’ (‘Banglaness’, as Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay, 1950:9 coined it to refer to the Bangla language as a whole, comprising all the variations of Bangla; on the otherhand Kingliness of Bangla was referred both by Rabindranath and Rajsekhar Basu.), the king ‘Bangla’ had another wife, totally neglected by the Westernised Middle Class (the propounder of the Pro-calit) and was mostly spoken by the old-moneyed class living in North Kolkata and is generally referred to as ‘Cockney’. There was an epistemological obstacle to understand the existential status of this dialect and it was categorized as an outcast. Consequently, speakers of this very dialect were engaged in a culture called ‘babu culture’ which was, as it is found in “Hutum PEMcar nakSa”, exclusively related to women and wine. This dialect talked openly about sex, used ‘obscene’ and ‘vulgar’ words. Therefore, the Victorian legacy of the westernised middle class was bound to negate this dialect. They not only denied the Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay 175 existence of this dialect but also negated the discourse by censoring it with their new Calit. This native language of Kolkata was not accepted as a norm for Bangla, antagonised and rejected by the Westernized middle class of 20th century Bengal. An interesting list of such scholars is arranged by Sarkar (1989 : 155-156). Rabindranath mentioned one value-loaded term ‘apabhasa’ (Argot) to denote this language (Tagore in one of his letters to Chittaranjan Bandyopadhyay). Bankim Chandra did not consider it asa medium of literature, and as there is no “wealth” of vocabulary in this language, according to him, it is a ‘poor’ language. He also questioned its vitality. Sivnath Sastri rejected it for its lack of ‘gravity’. According to Rajsekhar Basu this isa colloquial form of Bangla, Bankim Chandra Cautioned leamers (1892) not to use following colloquial usages in writing (cited also by Sarkar, 1989): 1. Grapheme-correction: Though everyone pronounce /pOsTo/, ‘clear’/meg/ ‘cloud’, /SOpot/ ‘oath’, /baMd/ ‘to bind’, /SOT/ ‘fraud’, /dubbOW/ ‘weak’, / netto/ ‘dance’, one should write it as spasta, megh, sapath, badh, sath, durbal, nrtya ete, 2. Condensation: The colloquial usages of /kore/ ‘to do’ kocci/ ‘(I’m) doing’, / korbo/ ‘(I'll d), /kollum/ ‘(I did’ etc. should be replaced by kariya, karitechi, kariba, karilam, karitechilam etc. 3. Provincalism : One should avoid dialectical variants like /kollum/, kollem/, / kollam/, /konnu/ *(I) di’. These forms should be replaced by Sadhu-form “karilam’. 4. Rurality : One must avoid rurality in syntactic construction, e.g. /*kouSOllar po *rarm/ of Kousalya son Ram “Ram is the son of Kousalya” This sentence should be written as: Kousalyar putra Ram, All these prescriptions and hypercorrections of Bankim Chandra was motivated by the Sadhu language and these also show the condition of the then writing system based on the colloquial speech. Generally, Pracalit (Cockney) was recognized as an earlier version of Calit, as if Pracalit is transformed into an. accepted norm and had become Calit. This is almost like that Bangla Folktale, where the deformed child of Duorani has metamorphosed into a prince at the end of the story (~b-> b) In the above mentioned story, this deformed child is an owl, bhutum pEMca. Incidentally, the first Pracalit Writer’s pseudonym was Hutum pEMea. This Hutum pEMca (Kaliprasanna Singh) historically was also saviour of many people. For example he arran; ged for ball when Rev. James176 Triglossia in Bangla Long was accused of (probably) translating a drama “Nil Darpan” (written by Dinabandhu Mitra and probably translated by Michael Madhusudan Dutta) banned by the British Government. Now I shall attempt to decipher the genesis of this so-called Cockney. IL Genesis of Cockney/ Pracalit In fact, Kolkata (Calcutta) dialect is not a single dialect but it is a heterogenious complex (Clark: 1956; Sarkar 1989), In the present state of affairs of Kolkata it is very difficult to pinpoint the original dialect of Kolkata. The city of Kolkata, comprising three villages of Bengal, Sutanuti, Govindapur and Kolkata was officially born some three hundred years ago. (Though, Kolkata emerged as a real centre for trade far back from the official date of foundation, 1690. Perhaps the Armenians were the first to come here, which was sometime before 1630 or in the first half of the seventeenth Cent. cf. Ray, N. 1989:18; Then also came the Seth, Basak, Laha, Dev, Mallik and some other families, who came here before Job Charok. All of them came with the aim of establishing Trade and commerce. Here one must note the break from feudal system to Mercantile Capitalism. These family-founders of Kolkata are Merchant Capitalist or Bankers or “beniya’s) People from different parts of the country migrated to this new city and subsequently settled down. Thus they constituted the heterogenity in the language of Kolkata. However, in the Sutanuti area, the so called “back area” of Kolkata, had gradually become the area of concentration where all the immigrants had settled down, Some scholars of this century recognized (Basu, Roy: 1972) a homogeneous dialect of this area; they termed it COCKNEY (meaning, cock’s egg). The term, as I mentioned earlier is generally used to refer to the dialect of the native of the Eastend part of London. So, why is this term used to refer to a language of Kolkata? Is it really a technical term? In fact, “Cockney” is a derogatory term used by the colonizers to build up an “imaginative geography”, of occupied land in an inclusive way. Lahiri (1978) shows that it is evident from some letters written by some native Englishmen, living in Kolkata, to their relatives and friends that they round some similarity between the Thames and the Bhagirathi. By analysing the demographic structure of London and Kolkata, Lahiri concludes that the British selected this island-like (because Kolkata is surrounded by water and looks like a mini-island) area and metaphorically compared it with London.! In this way one can find more and more similarities. Apart from the standard English of Southern London, there is a language called Cockney. And by imaginative “analogy” one may Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay 177 conclude that there should be a Cockney in Kolkata. Though the Kolkata Cockney, as it is evident from Sarkar (1989) and field work, is mostly spoken by the ‘aristrocrats’; it is still not accepted as anorm for Bangla, Even some earlier writings in colloquial Bangla follows the features of this Cockney (viz. Hutom pancer naksa, Alaler gharer dulal, Ekei ki bale sabhyata? Some letters of Vivekananda and other such novels, satires etc., 19th C.) These attempts to write in the so-called Cockney were in vain as another language developed through literature superseding not only this dialect but also the Sadhubhasa, the then accepted norm for the written discourse. This type of tiglossic situation was no longer stable as the newly invented Calit outstaged both Sadhu and socalled “cockney”, the “lowest” language in the prestige-scale. In fact this new standard of spoken and written Bangla was backed by the Intellectuals, the emerging new class.” Dasgupta (1990:139) has pointed out, “the natural currency of middle-class speech instead of the overtly cultural gold of the archaic literary heritage.” What Dasgupta does not mention is that there was another language beside these two varieties and there were some attempts to write in that language, viz. so called Cockney. Though Dasgupta (1993:87) cited Pramatha Choudhuri’s perception on the issue of SCB, where Choudhuri particularly mentioned the existence of Cockney, Dasgupta did not recognize that dialect and he showed the distinction of only Sadhu and Calit: “Nowadays the spoken language of Bengali gentlemen from all areas of Bengal - northern, southern, eastern, western - is converging. What remains is some minor variation of accent, Just as the form of the written language imitates the spoken language, so also the speech of educated people imitates the written language. Through these processes, the southern variety of Bangla, which has gradually become a literary medium, is also bringing about by its own course a unification of the speech of the educated clas I have said above that in my opinion the colloquial language of Calcutta will be the future medium of literature. For Calcutta, the capital brings together innumerable educated gentlemen from all parts of Bengal. In that single city, all Bengal has found a centre. And the new language which is the representative of the Bengali nation from all areas are building through collective intercourse is an integral Bangla language. The speech of the villages from which Calcutta was based has been restricted to the uneducated classes of the city. The language of modern Calcutta is that of the Bengali nation, which the patois of old Calcutta is merely an urban cockney.” [cockney in English in the original] . (1913/ 1968:254) (translated by Dasgupta, 1993:88) The last few lines of Choudhuri clearly negate the status of Cockney.