| Has the state become more receptive to the use of languages other than Nepali? A day before the first meeting of Nepal’s second Constituent Assembly (CA), when some newly-elected lawmakers, including the erstwhile CA chairman Subash Chandra Nembang, took the oath of office and secrecy in their respective mother tongues, not a single voice of dissent was heard. Instead, the media, a section of which once criticized the likes of Gajendra Narayan Singh for speaking in Hindi in the Parliament, portrayed the use of mother tongues as Nepal’s uniqueness as a multilingual nation. Two decades ago, when Singh, the iconic leader of Nepal Sadbhawana Parishad, a Tarai-based regional party that struggled for the identity of the Madheshi people, spoke Hindi in the parliament, he was booed by some non-Madhesi lawmakers, literally. Some politicians, along with a section of the media, dubbed Singh anti-nationalist. But Singh, always clad in Dhoti-Kurta, did not relent. He kept fighting for the cultural and linguistic rights of the Madheshi people until his death in 2002.  Dipesh Shrestha Newly elected Constituent Assembly (CA) members during the oath taking ceremony at the CA building in New Baneshwor, Kathmandu on Tuesday Jan 21, 2014. Even in 2008, when Parmananda Jha, after being elected Nepal’s first Vice President, took the oath in Hindi, there was a huge public outcry. Jha was criticized for refusing to take the oath in Nepali – a language that he used throughout his career as a Supreme Court (SC) Judge. Six months later, following an order by the SC, he was forced to retake the oath. In a face-saving exercise, he retook the oath in both Nepali and Maithali languages, discarding Hindi. This time, the language used by as many as 11 lawmakers to take the oath was Hindi. But, unlike in Jha or Singh’s case, no one apparently felt hurt. No one publicly criticized them for ignoring Nepali language. So, do the Nepali-speaking people feel hurt only when big shots like Singh or Jha – no ordinary CA members – speak Hindi? Or, are they now receptive to the use of other languages, including Hindi? Yogendra Yadav, former Chief of the Central Department of Linguistics at the Tribhuvan University (TU), says the people in Nepal are not yet as receptive to Hindi as they are to other languages like Maithali, Avadhi, Rai and Limbu. “The fact that Hindi is India’s national language is the reason why people in Nepal are still unreceptive to it,” says he. “However, after the restoration of multi-party democracy in 1990, they are getting much more receptive to the use of other languages, except for Hindi.” However, Padma Ratna Tuladhar, eminent civil society member, begs to differ slightly. He opines that the people’s receptiveness to the use of other languages has certainly increased but the state is still as obdurate on promoting other languages as it was during the party-less Panchayat or the Rana rule. “The state is yet to treat all languages equally,” says he. In 1995, when Tuladhar was allowed to take the oath in his own mother tongue as minister in Nepal’s first ever Communist government, he had to translate the text by himself. “Even today, if you want to take the oath in your own language, you have to translate the text yourself,” says Tuladhar. “The state is always unmindful of the fact that different people have different mother tongues in Nepal.” Historical injustice Ever since the historically disputed unification of Nepal, which was divided into over four dozen principalities until 250 years ago, the Khas language, now known as Nepali, has been the lingua franca of the nation. Over the last two centuries, Nepali language has been institutionally promoted at the cost of marginalizing other languages. As a result, other languages, particularly those spoken by minority groups, have either already died or fast dying now. In the last two decades, several academicians and researchers have come up with several historical facts that could shed light on how the state has been marginalizing other languages for the sake of promoting Nepali both as the language of the nation and the country’s official language. “Power and language always go parallel,” says Prof Dr Madhav Prasad Pokharel, a linguist. “When Prithvi Narayan Shah launched a campaign to unify Nepal, he had to spread a language that a majority of people would speak. Of course, Nepali was the widely spoken language. Hence, institutional promotion of Nepali and marginalization of other languages began.” Rana Bahadur Shah, Nepal’s king from 1777 to 1806, was one of the first monarchs who issued a royal edict that prohibited the use of languages other than Nepali in writing petitions to the palace, according to a 1992 book published by the then Royal Nepal Academy, now Nepal Academy. In 1921, Chandra Shamsher, the fifth Rana prime minister, issued a decree which stated that all agreements, vouchers or receipts written in other languages than Nepali would be considered illegal from then onward, according to Dr Chaitanya Subba, a vocal supporter of indigenous movement. That decree was a vital move which discouraged ethnic groups to use their own languages in official documents, says he. According to Dr Subba, poets Chittadhar Hridaya and Siddhi Charan Shrestha were jailed for publishing poems in Newar language in 1940. Around the same time, Phatte Bahadur Singh was slapped with a life sentence for publishing a book in Newari (Nepal Bhasha). Tuladhar says there could be several other undocumented incidents that contributed to the marginalization of other languages. “Until 1990, the state was openly intolerant of other languages,” says he. “The policy of a single language and single national attire, perpetuated by the Panchayat system, speaks volumes about it.” In the 1990 Constitution, all mother tongues spoken in Nepal were considered just as national languages while Nepali was both the language of the nation and the country’s official language. In her book, ‘Constitutional Nationalism and Legal Exclusion: Equality, Identity Politics and Democracy in Nepal’, Mara Malagodi, a London School of Economics (LSE) Fellow, has stated that the privileged position of Nepali both as the national and official language of Nepal has shaped patterns of legal exclusions. To show how other tongues have been legally marginalized, Malagodi refers to an SC verdict in 1997 which Nepal’s indigenous communities mark as a black day. Earlier, the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) and the District Development Committee (DDC) of Dhanusha had decided to use Newari and Maithili respectively as additional official languages. But the SC, acting on a writ petition, ordered the KMC and the Dhanusha DDC to scrap their decisions, stating that their decisions would negatively affect national unity and engender communal tensions. The SC overruled the defendants’ arguments that the 1990 Constitution had regarded Nepal as a multilingual kingdom. When the Maoists launched their protracted war against the state in 1996, they fueled indigenous communities’ anger about their mother tongues being marginalized. After some immensely significant political changes, largely caused by the Maoist war, the state was forced to acknowledge all mother tongues as languages of the nation in the Interim Constitution of 2006. It also paved the way for local government bodies or offices to use mother tongues as official languages. But Tuladhar says that constitutional provision would not be sufficient. “We need a national language policy,” says he. “We need to decide which language can be used as official language in which place. We need to invest in equal promotion of all mother tongues.” Why multilingual? According to the 2011 Census Report, only 44.6% of Nepalis say their mother tongue is Nepali. The rest speak over 100 other languages in Nepal, mainly Maithili, Bhojpuri, Tharu, Tamang, Newar, Bajika, Magar, Doteli and Urdu. As a result of the state’s focus on promoting Nepali, the languages of minority groups are fast disappearing. According to linguist Yadav, as many as 10 dialects of the language spoken by several sub-groups of Rai have already died. “If the hegemony of Nepali continues, other languages will also die,” says Yadav. Each language is distinct from the other. Some expressions made in a particular language cannot be made or translated in any of the other languages. For instance, Tamang-speaking people have three unique words to describe Juga (leech) which has no synonyms in Nepali. So, preserving a variety of mother tongues is also an act of preserving diverse cultures. Linguist Pokharel says learning in other languages than a child’s mother tongue may also have negative impacts on his cognitive development. “If children get to learn in their own languages, they could learn faster,” says he. “Sadly, this aspect has been always neglected in our society.” Nearly a decade ago, Ramawatar Yadav, a linguist at the TU, made an interesting remark, which rightly highlighted the problems that the people with different mother tongues would face in Nepal. According to him, a Maithali boy always expresses his feelings with his girlfriend in Maithali but he has to read most books in Nepali in school. Later, when he has to conduct researches, he must turn to English. Then, if he needs to speak up for his rights, he resorts to Hindi. oasura@gmail.co | ||
एक्सन रिसर्च सन् १९०३ पश्चात् कार्यमूलक अनुसन्धानको प्रयोग शैक्षिक क्षेत्रमा सुरुआत भएको हो । अधिकांश शिक्षकहरु स्वयम्मा एक्सन प्लान, एक्सन रिसर्च, प्रोजेक्ट वर्क जस्ता टर्महरुमा अलमलमा परेको वा एकै प्रकारले व्याख्या गर्ने र बुझ्ने गरेको समेत पाइएको छ ।विशेषतः शिक्षण सिकाइ प्रक्रियाको सिलसिलामा शिक्षकले फेस गर्नुपरेका समस्याहरु समाधान गर्नका लागि कार्यमूलक अनुसन्धान गर्ने र उक्त अनुसन्धानबाट शिक्षण सिकाइमा आएको सुधारसहितको प्रतिवेदन प्रस्तुति एक महत्वपूर्ण शैक्षिक पक्षमा हामी शिक्षण पेसाकर्मीहरु जुटिरहेका छौं । शैक्षिक स्तरीयतामा अभिवृद्धि सहितको कक्षाकोठाको क्रियाकलापमा सहजता र सरलता स्थापना गर्दै दैनिक शैक्षिक क्रियाकलाप समस्यामूक्त बनाउने काम नै एक्सन रिसर्चको अभिष्ट हो । यो गरेर सिक्ने विधि हो । एक्सन रिसर्च के हो ? एक्सन रिसर्चको व्यापक परिभाषा र अर्थको सहजीकरण लामो र विस्तृत विषय हो । संक्षिप्तमा त पहिचान हुनु जरुरी छ नै । खासगरी शिक्षकद्वारा गरिने ...