Author: Aditya Ghosh
Publication: Hindustan Times
Date: September 20, 2008
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=51aeb44c-438a-44b6-979b-baef18b83359
Prem Narayan Chauhan pats his oxen, pushing
them to go a little faster. Ziighrataram, ziighrataram chalanti, he urges
them. The animals respond to their master's call, picking up pace on the muddy
path that leads to his 10-acre cornfield.
Chauhan, 35, dropped out of school early,
after Class II. He does not consider it remarkable that he speaks what is
considered a dying language (or that his oxen respond to it). For him, Sanskrit
is not a devabhasha, the language of the gods, but one rooted in the commonplace,
in the ebb and flow of everyday life in Jhiri, the remote hamlet in Madhya
Pradesh, where he lives.
Mutterings under banyan trees, chit-chat in
verandahs, pleasantries on village paths, disputes in the panchayat - in Jhiri,
it's all in Sanskrit.
And then, a cellphone rings.
The moment of contemporary reality is fleeting.
Anachronism and Amar Chitra Katha take over as the conversation begins: "Namo,
namah. Tvam kutra asi?" (Greetings. Where are you?)
A lost world rediscovered
Jhiri is India's own Jurassic Park. A lost
world that has been recreated carefully and painstakingly, but lives a precarious
existence, cut off from the compelling realities of the world outside.
The 1,000-odd residents of this hamlet, 150
km north of Indore, hardly speak the local dialect, Malwi, any longer. Ten
years have been enough for the Sanskritisation of life here. Minus the Brahminical
pride historically associated with the language - Jhiri has just one Brahmin
family.
The much-admired 24-year-old Vimla Panna who
teaches Sanskrit in the local school belongs to the Oraon tribe, which is
spread over Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. And the village is an eclectic mix
of Kshatriyas, Thakurs, Sondhias, Sutars and the tribal Bhils.
Panna has been key in popularising Sanskrit
with the women of Jhiri. With mothers speaking the language, the children
naturally follow.
Take 16-year-old unlettered Seema Chauhan.
She speaks Sanskrit as fluently as Panna, who studied the language for seven
years for her Master's degree.
Chauhan is a livewire, humouring and abusing
the village girls in Sanskrit. "I just listened to Vimla didi,"
she says. "In fact, I'm often at a loss for words in Malwi." Just
married to a man from a neighbouring village, she says confidently, "My
children will speak in Sanskrit because I will talk to them in it."
As eight-year-old Pinky Chauhan joins us,
she greets me politely: "Namo namaha. Bhavaan kim karoti?" (What
brings you here?) Her father Chander Singh Chauhan laughs and says, "My
wife started speaking to me in this language, so I learnt it to figure out
what she was saying behind my back."
Let's get official
Mukesh Jain, CEO, Janpad Panchayat, Sarangpur
tehsil (which includes Jhiri), recalls, "I could not believe it when
I first came here. It can get difficult during official interactions, but
we encourage them."
All kinds of logistical problems crop up in
Jhiri. This year, 250 students did their school-leaving exams in Sanskrit.
"A Sanskrit teacher had to work along with all the examiners of other
subjects," says Jain.
But there are some positive offshoots too.
Thanks to Sanskrit, Jhiri has re-discovered some lost technologies of irrigation,
conservation and agriculture from the old scriptures. A siphon system of water
recharging, for instance, resulted in uninterrupted water supply through the
year in the fields. Small check-dams, wells and irrigation facilities followed.
"It is matter of pride for us to retrieve
these old techniques from the scriptures. With no help from the government
and without using any artificial systems, we've reaped great benefits,"
says Uday Singh Chauhan, president of the Vidya Gram Vikash Samity, which
runs development programmes in the village.
But Jhiri's pride stops at Sanskrit. The first
doctor, engineer, economist, scientist or linguist is yet to walk out from
it. After finishing school, most village youth join a political party.
Electricity is a matter of luxury, so is sanitation.
Even the school does not have a toilet, which is the single biggest reason
for girls dropping out at the senior secondary level. The average age of marriage
for women is 14. Even Panna, who was thinking of doing her PhD, had to give
in to the wishes of the wise men of Jhiri who got her married to the other
schoolteacher, Balaprasad Tiwari.
There is no public transport; an Internet
connection is unimaginable. Jhiri desperately needs to connect to the rest
of the world, to explore its infinite possibilities, to grow.
But Jhiri is still a success story, especially
when you consider that a similar experiment, started a couple of decades ago
in Muttur village of Karnataka's Shimoga district, failed, because of the
caste factor - it remained caged with Brahmin patrons.
"About 80 per cent people of the village
are Brahmins who know Sanskrit but won't speak it. This is because the carpenters
and blacksmiths would not respond to it," says Dr Mathur Krishnaswami,
head of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bangalore, who was involved with the movement.
"No language in the world can survive
until the common man starts speaking it," he points out.
Muttur failed. Jurassic Park destroyed itself.
Jhiri must not.