The unease
among Hindi veterans over the brave new world of Internet blogging is
fast being swept aside by young pioneers who view their tongue not as
a burden but as an opportunity. Ravikant explores the
generation gap
DID
YOU KNOW? |
Speaking
In Tongues
Of India’s Internet users, 44% would prefer Hindi to English
on the net.
another 25% want other regional languages. Chinese search engine
Baidu ranks fifth among the world’s most visited sites;
India’s Raftaar.com hopes to catch up |
The Hindi blogosphere,
running into something like 500 blogs today, is reminiscent of the formative
years of the language when it made the transition from the oral and
handwritten mode to the print media. But the similarity between the
two eras and the two technologies ends here. And, given the Hindi language’s
notoriously fraught relationship with technology in general and mass-media
in particular, it is not surprising that the Hindi bloggers on the Internet
are all young — mostly in their twenties and thirties.
It is almost a
given to think of Hindi as an embattled language, but the fact remains
that it has managed to erase its arch-rival Urdu, has almost devoured
‘its’ various dialects and has pretty much made peace with
the status of English as the post-colonial global language of this country.
Hindiwallahs feel let down by the State, but they have always loathed
Commerce equally.
Ironically, it
is the content-hungry and numbers-driven media bazaar, in the form of
print since the early-19th century; films from the 1930s onwards; followed
by the radio; and later still, the television, that has given Hindi
its unassailable contemporary status as potentially one of the world’s
major languages.
 |
| |
The youth today is
still having a tough time trying to convince the wider public
that the Internet is not elitist, that embracing it does not amount
to eating cake while the masses go without bread |
But there is a parallel
world that lives on the fringes of this media market — a fragile
unstable world of little magazines where high closure rates are balanced
by an equally high number of launches. So this world of laghu patrikas
carries on with its missionary zeal and self-proclaimed janpakshdhar
attitude — its content almost exclusively literary and political.
The new mass media,
called the Internet, comes to Hindi in this context.
If we compare those
who created websites in the late-1990s and those who are blogging now,
to those who are still quite satisfied with the print media, the generation
gap is obvious. However, the blogs come at a time when some of the leading
print journals and all the important newspapers are available on the
Web.
Nurtured by those
who glorified Hindi as the language of eternal struggle, the youth today
is still having a tough time trying to convince the wider public that
the Internet is not elitist, that embracing it does not amount to eating
cake while the hungry millions go without bread. This is literally how
the debate went recently when Manisha Kulshreshtha, a pioneer who set
up the webportal, Hindinest, started writing in praise of the Net in
her column in Naya Gyanoday.
Hasan Jamal, the
editor of Shesh and a familiar name in socialist circles, charged her
with elitism. This could have gone unnoticed a couple of years ago,
but not anymore. Jamal saheb got a taste of his own medicine when he
got furious responses from the readers of his magazine. One of the respondents,
Ravi Ratlami, yes, sitting in Ratlam — another pioneer who has
tirelessly worked at translating the free software desktops and other
tools in Hindi under a voluntary effort called Indlinux — told
Jamal to stop being a “frog in the well” and see his own
works reach the far flung corners of the globe via Ratlami’s freewheeling
blogzine, Rachnakar. Shesh might not be available in Chhattisgarh but
his article on Rachnakar certainly is. “Just try typing your name
in Hindi on Google,” Ratlami told Jamal.
So it would seem
that the netters are now in a position to take on the old media, although
they still have some way to go. There is still anxiety in some quarters
about things — including generating unnecessary controversy in
the Hindi blogosphere. This happened recently when discussions on Hindus
and Muslims became too hot to handle for many.
Amidst the accusations
and protestations that followed, the underlying sentiment favoured sheltering
and protecting the new public domain from extreme expressions of identity-oriented
narrow political debates. The creators of spaces like Narad, Sarvagya,
Paricharcha, Hindini and others have invested much effort in providing
the basic tools and healthy initial content for Hindi blogging, and
they do not want anybody to ruin it. They do not want another Partition,
as one blogger said. Sounds familiar.
To sum up, the Hindi
blogosphere at the moment looks like a vibrant, if a bit cautious space.
Bloggers are commenting on a range of things and it has become a space
for innovation, discussion and sharing.
Collectively, they
can be credited with achieving what the various language and technology
departments run by the government have failed to do. And their language
is refreshingly different from sarkari Hindi — like roadside mechanics,
they have invented a whole new jargon to come to terms with a global
technology and tech-inspired spaces that need to be tweaked locally.
Toh aaiye chittha likhein, chtthakaar banein, kachcha chttha kholein,
aur bedharak Tipiyaein.
Ravikant
is a literary historian
