On Bhasa Diwas Thought I It Otherwise

Thought I of my identity And mixing, The languages I spoke Which I learnt and missed, Angika into the rural homes, Hindi into the streets, English as an international language, But missed When I got displaced, dislocated, Met after years, Remembered as the residues of meaning, Given to thought and reflection, Leisurely thinking, Gave I thoughts to Hindi profs. Forbidding to speak in English, ‘May I come in, sir? ' even As for ‘Kya main ander yaa shakata hun, mahashay? ', But I questioning them through my complaint to father, Did they not Richards in M.A. Hindi, Objected to Sahityalankaras from Vidyapeeths Sidetracking M.As. from being headmasters, Lost jhumjurs, Remembered I Vidyapati Being taught in Bengali too In Bengali script, Existence of Vikramshila At Kahalgaon of Angika speakers, Nalanda Univ. in the midst Of Magadhi-speakers, Related I going down the memory lanes Revisiting and restitching Reminiscences and reflections, Romantic Angika songs, Bhojpuri folk theatres, Hiuen Tsang's visit, Sikkkimese land and people, Especially Danny's roles, Bengali comic Kesto Mukherjee's pidgin-Hindi, Thought I of giving nod as for Teaching through Scottish dialect In the local schools of Scotland For small-small children, Father Camille Bulcke's Ramkatha Ka Itihaas, The award of the degree to him And his headship of Sanskrit and Hindi deptts. of the college Brothers separated and reared by Two different region relatives, But speaking two languages Not so intelligible to each other, On coming to know from truck drivers About the South, I enquired them with curiosity At the post-office With regard to their tongue, I mean Telegu, Military personnel telling about The impregnable exotic Northeast And its dense jungles, Far flung Nagaland and the feuds And rebellions Kamrupa Kamakhya And I corroborating as for the intrinsic bond Which but unifies us into a whole Taking me to regional studies, Gandhi studies, Shahid Minar, art and architecture And these in miniature, replica And so many things that come to On the mind's plane With a trail of imagery, Thoughts and ideas. While speaking on Bhasa Diwas, What should I, Before you My friends, boys and girls After offering petals to the martyrs, Language martyrs, Seeing the replica of Shahid Minar In thermocol, You, the audience Whose mother tongue if Bengali, How can this man who knows it not Bengali In the sense that he can understand, But cannot write in it, Can read, I cannot about language movements And the bifurcation of areas On the basis of linguistic groups But can assure you about My happiness in seeing P.V.Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh as P.Ms. Other than general politico nomenclature, And outside the orbit of Bihar and U.P. axis, The Punjabi tongue I used to hear so closely As my next-door neighbour's speech, Bengali I used to falter in as for tonal effects, Marwari and Sindhi were the others Coming to my ears, Santali used to come through drum beats Beaten in the forest homes and hamlets Dotting the hills, But I used to hear about Onam, Pongal and so on From my father While taking lessons in geography. On Bhasa Diwas My mind gets lifted to Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din, Hindustani pidgin-English, English of military barracks, British bungalows Where the sahib, bibi and gulam played the cards, I thought of George Orwell's nondescript house In Bihar's Champaran, Suryakant Tripathy Nirala's birth-place At Mahishadal, But nobody aware of, Bhikshuk, Bharat Ki Vidhwa, Waha Todati Patthar poems, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's Veero Ka Kaisa Ho Vasant, Makhanlal Chaturvedi's Pushpa Ki Abhilasha, Sanskrit line, Janani janmabhunischa jariyashi, Urdu lines so eulogizing, like Brooke's The Soldier ‘ Shahidoke mazaro par lagengei har varash melei, Vatan pe maraneiwallon ka baaki hoga yahi nisha', Wah kya baat hai! , What a thing! , Sometimes it wanders unto Mithila and beyond, Darjeeling, Kalimpong While talking with the fellow from there I wanting to know the ending, Dhupguri, Moynaguri, Siliguri, Sometimes taking time to talk with The rugged Nepali hinga-seller Telling of Viratnagar, Kathmandu And I lost in thinking of Buddha's birthplace, I also meeting the security staff of hotels From far-off Nepal, My mind also remembers it When Mahadevi Varma was given an award And a replica of Saraswati Which she received from Margaret Thatcher's hands Who was on a visit to India then And Indira Gandhi had been the Prime Minister, How could Vinoba Bhave come and ask for lands In visiting the different parts of the country As for Bhoodan movement? In being unknown to the three R's in Bengali Felt I myself an unpadh, an illiterate, An uneducated person Learning in an adult education centre During the night-time Or a labour school girl Which saw I, met I Reading after the household work into the other man's house, A rural, mud-house-girl, Felt i like a man Getting his or her letter dictated, Thought I of Ek Unpadh Ke Naam, In The Name of An Uneducated One, caption As my post-card or letter-writing, Side by side felt i pride In taking the name of Kamraj, How did a South Indian serve Bausi, Bhagalpur Through his love of Gandhian Hindi After founding Mandar Hindi Vidyapeeth?