Leave Sentamizh where it belongs- in the museum

Sentamizh is like this elegant candle trying to floodlight an IPL cricket match. It’s not going to work

Chauvinism is the surest sign that a language is in decline. The more desperate a bunch of politicians appear in trying to force ludicrous rules like mandatory Tamil signboards and tax breaks for films with “pure” Tamil names, the more certain it is that the cancer has spread to the brain. And when was the last time politicians saved anything anyway?

If mandatory Tamil signboards wasn’t enough, the DMK upped the ante in the “Just-in-case-you-thought-I-was-only-marginally-silly” stakes by requiring businesses to use only “pure” Tamil words in their signboards. So if you were Kal­yani Radiological Equipment Pvt Ltd, good luck trying to find the “Senthamizh” word for devices that use high-frequency electromagnetic waves for diagnostic purposes. Perhaps the mandarins in the Ministry of Tamizh will set up “Request Word” centres everywhere and invite those flummoxed by the paucity of scientific and technological terms in Tamil to pay bribes and wait six weeks to be notified that they can use “Inayathalam” for “Internet”.

The uncomfortable truth is that in today’s world, if a language is not used in science, technology and pop culture, it’s dead (or dying) and as far as I am concerned, Sentamizh is like this elegant candle trying to floodlight an IPL cricket match. It’s not going to work. Tamil has a problem that many old languages have, a variegated history. There are 3 distinct phases, the earliest being the “Sangam” era which dates back to the 2nd century BC. The language of the Tolkaappiyam is called Sangatthamizh and is mostly unintelligible to Tamil speakers today. In fact, I could walk into the DMK headquarters and insult several party functionaries’ lineages with some of the more choice archaic curses in Sangatthamizh and I am still likely to be lauded as a true Tamizhan.

Moving forward in time, by the 8th century, Tamil (called “Middle Tamil” by academic types and Senthamizh by politicians) had started to borrow heavily from Sanskrit (a fact the DMK would like to sweep under the carpet)

and more importantly had developed multiple sociolects, essentially dialects unique to different castes (“Inga”, “Ingane”, “Ing­uttu” for example). By the 13th century, the Pallavas had replaced the original Tamil Brahmi script with the

Gra­ntham script.

Modern Tamil, like an Iyer boy marrying an atheist hippie girl in a Zen Buddhist wedding, moved away from Senthamizh at an uncomfortably fast pace. The rich patois of an auto driver in Chennai is an order of magnitude different from an impassioned Vaiko speech, in fact so much so that to most non-speakers, these are practically different languages. The urban tongue is really the living language and Sangathamizh and Senthamizh, for all their undoubted elegance and richness of literature and the glory of the past are nothing more than mummies being worshipped at events like the World Classical Tamil Conference in Coimbatore.

Ignoring the obvious colonial influence, a linguistic reason for English’ popularity around the world is its ability to be like this excited teenager experimenting with various mind-altering narcotics instead of being a vibhuti-smeared, temple-going conservative. English never had a bunch of chauvinists forcing businesses to use spellings like Faeries and Queene and instead, simply rode the rollercoaster ride of history, adopted every hot new trend and stayed relevant at every point along the way.

So let’s leave Senthamizh and Sanga­tthamizh where they belong — at the museum of cultural history of mankind, like the works of Chaucer or ancient Greek tragedies and let academics study it like they study Latin. Instead, let’s get our Tamil newsreaders to announce the news in a language that normal people speak. I’d definitely watch Sun news if the headline says “Ashish Nehra eppovumpola aappu kuduthutaaru”.— krishashok@gmail.com