Indigenous Cultural Groups of Tripura Miffed By Govt Promotion of Bengali

Kokborok language users seek policy

- Cultural groups miffed with Tripura govt’s promotion of Bengali

By Sekhar Datta

Agartala, May 24 : A conglomerate of indigenous cultural groups of Tripura has demanded a clear-cut policy for the development of their language — Kokborok.

The conglomerate — Movement for Kokborok — raised the demand on Thursday after the Left Front government organized a string of programs to commemorate the martyrdom of 11 people at Silchar railway station on May 19, 1961, to press for the recognition of Bengali as the second state language of Assam.

Expressing the resentment of Kokborok-speaking people, veteran poet Nanda Kumar Debbarma said: “We welcome such programs but the over-enthusiastic functionaries of the Left Front government should remember that their activities, especially their failure to resolve the tangled script issue is sounding the death knell for our language.”

Demanding a clear-cut government policy on the development of Kokborok language he said, because of the government’s apathy and failure to develop the language even indigenous students were losing interest in studying their own language.

At the time of princely Tripura’s merger with the Indian union on October 15, 1949, Kokborok had no script of it’s own and used to be written in Bengali script, Debbarma said.

While passing the Tripura Official Language Act in 1964 the then Congress government, he added, had recognised only Bengali and English as the official languages of Tripura.

In 1967, two linguists from Calcutta — Kumud Kundu Chowdhury and Shyam Sundar Banerjee — arrived in Tripura to work on Kokborok language.

Working in the interior areas of the state, dominated by indigenous people, Chowdhury and Banerjee devised a grammar and “modified Bengali” script for Kokborok, sparking a controversy.

The issue of studying Kokborok and its script got highly politicised with the ruling CPM advocating the “modified Bengali” script and the regional parties rooting for Roman script.

In 1990, Roman script was introduced by the Congress-TUJS combine that was in power then.

In 1995, the Left Front reintroduced the “modified Bengali” script.

Official sources in the administration refused to comment on the sensitive script issue but senior CPM leader Barun Adhikari said the majority of the indigenous people were in favour of “modified Bengali” script.

“The demand for Roman script itself is motivated. Former chief minister and legendary leader of the indigenous people, the late Dasharath Deb, himself had authored a booklet explaining in detail why the ‘modified Bengali’ script would be most suitable for bilingual Tripura. It will be wrong to assume that we are closed to another script or that we are trying to impose anything on the indigenous people. If they feel that a change is required, we will never stand in the way,” Adhikari said.