Earlier this month, a Mumbai city official stood up to make a presentation on water meters only to be heckled and jeered into silence by his colleagues. He had tried to make his presentation in English. India's capital of commerce speaks in many tongues but from this month, when it comes to official communications within the municipal authority, English will no longer be one of them. The decision to ditch English, the global language of business, in favour of Marathi, a language largely restricted to the surrounding state of Maharashtra, has left some officials struggling to express themselves.
"I love Marathi. I am Marathi," said Ashish Shelar, an elected official. "But Mumbai city has become a global city now. The language of Mumbai city has changed."
India has long grappled with the problem of Babel. Its constitution recognises 22 official languages, including English. Mumbai in particular, a cosmopolitan harbour city and a magnet for Indians across the country, is helplessly polyglot. The move was pushed through without debate by Shubha Raul, the mayor, who is a member of Shiv Sena, a political party that encourages the nativist pride of Marathis and chastises Indian immigrants who fail to behave like good guests in the city.
No city official is against Marathi communication - although Marathis make up less than half of Mumbai's population the language is understood to some degree by many long-term residents. But some officials say that while the Marathi of the bazaars is easy to understand, the officialese version of the language is confusing, and a poor substitute for English. Like the Academie Francaise in Paris, city bureaucrats are increasingly on guard against English loanwords, even when they are more widely understood than the Marathi equivalent. |