Monday, March 31, 2008

The relevance of Hindi literature

I feel nearer to our cultural roots when I read the hindi stories, essay, poems and novels written by the legendary hindi writers like Premchand, Sharat Chandra (novels translated in Hindi), Phanishwar Nath 'Renu', Rajendra Yadav, Jainendra Kumar, Mahasweta Devi, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, Sumitranandan Pant, Jaishanker Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', Ramadhari Singh Dinkar to name a few.

Considering the evolution of change sipping slowly and steadily in the Indian society derived from the growth of various private sector corporations, growing job opportunities in MNCs, changing educational trend, growing opportunities of international exposure to the educated youths because of tremendous growth of IT and BPO; it seems somewhere we are missing our cord to the literary interest that take us to a world through its stories and the characters created in it, which infuses in us good principles, high moral, respect for Individual and to our family members and above all it gives deep understanding of our society and its trend and hence to better understand the nerve of our nation.

It is wisely said that literature is the reflection of our society, so apart from the individual view of the author, the literature reflects our prevailing social trend and its cultural happenings. It is also well proven fact that no language than the mother tongue could be the better language to describe and understand individual's and social feeling, be it love or hatred.

Why I want to take your valuable comments on this topic is that, in my viewpoint, with gradually changing Indian society and its trend, which is inevitable, hindi has to change its form of dissemination, so that people have interest to at least read and write in hindi. It is well understood that with the widespread and fast growth of digital and electronic communication media in the form of Internet and Television and its affordable and easy availability, habit of reading books and specially the hindi books has become very rare in the younger generation.

We are well aware of the fact that Sanskrit has almost completely lost its popularity due to lack of individual interest in the Sanskrit literature with less than 50,000 people fluent in speaking Sanskrit in India.

So, share your opinion on this subject about how Hindi literature should change its form so that it survives the change of wind.

If you want to start linking yourself to hindi please go to:
http://www.abhivyakti-hindi.org

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah...You are right...Too good an article...Unforunately my Hindi is also not very good....Hopefully being ignited by this article now I shud start learning it.......

Anonymous said...

Hindi has now become more important of a spoken language of many Indians.

If there are interesting things in Hindi literature , people will give it a try and devote some time.

It needs lot of marketing and public interest on these topics....and masala too!!..

Once upon a time there was Hinglish literture /culture ...people liked it a lot...and were spending like hell on stardust , Movie , Filmfare , Screen etc...Now its dead..Hardly people buy those now in trains ..or talk about it...

Not sure if Internet stuff will change things.....

Anonymous said...

[Niraj]: I agree with the fact that the Hindi language is loosing its ground. The corporates and businesses are crossing cultures and borders which surely demand a need for the common language, English indisputably serves this need and thus the reason for its acceptance among youths in India. However, I think Hindi would remain the language of enthusiasts in practical and not the preferred media of communication even within India in the multitude environment of native languages. There is a great need to save Hindi language from becoming forgotten.