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Need for a Bihari Renaissance
By Manoj Kumar
Mar. 28, 2008 |
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Biharis
stand out in the rest of India. While Biharis
feel they have Indian blood in them, there are
others who feel, they have Marathi, Bengali,
Punjabi and Tamil blood in them. Biharis
willingly share their history with India and
love to be identified with India, but you have
Marathis, Bengalis, Punjabis, and Tamils who
prefer their own separate version of history and
like to be identified with them. This is where
the differences arise. Biharis stand out, they
feel out of place. A Bihari in Delhi doesn't say
he is from Bihar, but he says he is from Delhi
because Bihar doesn't have a regional identity.
How do we take pride in a land and feel
identified with it, which itself doesn’t have a
regional identity? While the rest of India takes
pride in our history calling it Indian legacy,
we are left with nothing special to have any
regional pride. Our language (Bihari) is mocked
through out India. Why? Indian government, till
recently, identified Bihari languages as
dialects of Hindi. A Bihari speaking Bihari
accent of Hindi in the rest of India is
frequently reminded of that he is speaking
incorrect/distorted Hindi, which he willingly
accepts and feels guilty of, unaware of the fact
that Bihari is all together different language.
And this stereotype has been created mostly by
the Sanskritized Hindi speakers of western UP
and our own people who believe in them. Don’t we
have American accent of English? We also have
Indian accent of English. We perhaps don’t know
that Bihari languages (Magadhi, Bhojpuri,
Maithili) are descendants of ancient
Magadhi-prakrit language spoken in the ancient
kingdom of Magadh, while Hindi is a descendant
of Sanskrit. Hindi has derived many of its words
and trends from these popular Bihari languages.
When will we understand that majority of Biharis
speaks Bihari and not Hindi.
Some of us might believe that English education
can change the fate Bihar, as it appears in
southern states, which is actually not true.
India even if it was just South India, would
have been still called developing country. We
must adopt western knowledge. But if we use
English, it will be a long time before western
knowledge reaches the mass. Let the creativity
of our people come out in whatever language they
are most comfortable with. Original innovations
and progress will come from the mass, if they
are exposed to the vast knowledge available in
this world through proper education system. If
we concentrate on just learning English we might
end up becoming, just one more coolie in an MNC,
far from our home (of course there is nothing
wrong in it). We should learn from Japanese.
They adopted western knowledge, but in there own
context. We are suppressing ourselves, killing
ourselves slowly, our traditions. Nobody
bothered to teach us our own language and so we
don’t know it well. But still there are those
majorities of Biharis in villages, who speak
just Bihari. Poor Mohammed Saidullah, a resident
of Motihari, invented an amphibious bicycle to
tackle the floodwater, when the boatman refused
to give him free space. Today he earns 1500
rupee a month by selling honey, so that he could
feed his family of 16. We have crippled our own
society, suppressed our own creativity by
keeping ourselves dependent on a language, which
majority of us are really not very comfortable
at. We need to create our own institutions, and
bend the existing institutions to meet our local
needs. The sooner we understand this, the better
it is, else the day is not far when Biharis
would feel out of place in their own land. Why
have we created the stereotype that only
eloquent English can make us reach places? This
reminds me of the child in the recent movie –
‘Taare Zameen Pe’. We need to protect our people
for a better future.
We protected India from Greek invasion. We were
not able to protect ourselves from Muslim
invaders and not just us, but the whole of India
suffered. We sparked the rebellion of 1857 and
the feeling of nationalism spread across like a
fire. A Bihari renaissance, if it starts,
wouldn’t be just Bihari, but an Indian
renaissance. Biharis have a big role to play, to
protect India from divisive forces and take it
to great heights. But to reach there, we must
first see the bigger picture and protect
ourselves from internal and external enemies.
Let us adopt the ideology of Bihari
sub-nationalism to unite Biharis for the common
cause of development, both social and economic.
However, while doing so, let us also not forget
that a corrupt nationalism or sub-nationalism is
no better then the rigid Indian casteism.
We can’t be Japan. We can’t be China. We will be
India, a country of many languages. Let us for a
moment understand the needs of Biharis,
forgetting the rest of the Indians, in the
interest of India.
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