Tamil Language endangered

With the neocolonial invasion on Indian language, it seems that the Tamil languages are getting endangered nowadays. It is the hightime to think if something can be done to save it; otherwise, in 50 years or so, India will turn Anglophone, this time without the physical invasion of the British.

Postcolonialists assert that the colonised, under a traumatic condition, forgets his indigenous heritage and dreams about 'paralleling' the superstrate paradigm of the colonisers. In 1961 Frantz Fanon, in his epoch making book "Les Damnés de la terre" (Translated into English by Constance Farrington as "The Wretched of the Earth) has theorised how this happens. In "Decolonizing the Mind", Ngugi wa Thiong'o has shown how the colonisation with chalk and dusters followed the colonisation with swords and pistols, and this cultural colonisation was even more fatal and long-lasting. While in most cases our collective psyche is still to be decolonised, in the rests, it is being colonised once again by the neo-colonising subjugators.

Thus, even today, we think that foreign languages, especially the European ones, are much better than ours. Competence in English is still measured as the scale of learning. We prefer to say "goodnight" in English to "eravu vanakkam" in Tamil language or "shubho ratri" in Bengali. We are blindly assimilating even the American slangs like "shit", "bullshit", "fuck" and the like; the TV channels present them in such a way as if they are a part of the day to day talks in English but the fact is simply different in reality.

Come to the question of translations. We usually rely more on the English translations of the texts written in other languages than the translations of the same texts in the Indian languages. Since once we were colonised by the British, most of us still look at them with an exalted vision and think that they cannot do anything wrong. Let me share an experience then. We usually know that Maupassant wrote a French short story called "The Necklace", do not we? Unfortunately, Maupassant had written no such short story with the same title. Amazing and funny, but there we go. The closest title of Mauapassant's short story can be translated into English as "The Jewellaery".

When shall we awake?

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