Got this interesting email from Suvarna (an office colleague) that highlights how Marathi Manoos himself is responsible for the state of Marathi Language in Mumbai... I have included some of the views from the email...
3M fails to understand why most Marathi Mumbaikar hide their origins in public?
14 comments:
yeah, its an unfortunate thing...
I have some (very few classmates) who do that. They talk to maharashtrians in hindi, despite being a maharashtrian.
For this i have a simple but effective solution...
I keep replying in marathi to them, they talk in hindi, but always get a reply in maharthi, so after a while they start talking in marathi :)
also to my non maharashtrian friends, i speak in english..
mission accomplished :D
I too know a lot of Marathis who converse with each other in Hindi.
Also, I have observed one sad thing about marathi-nonmarathi marriages. When a non-marathi girl enters a marathi family, the entire family starts speaking in Hindi at home, instead of making her speak marathi. Children too are made to speak hindi.
On the contrary, when a marathi girl marries into a non-marathi family, she is given no choice but to learn that language. Children by default pick up father's language in such families. They may be taught marathi and hindi, but that's always in addition to their father's language and not as an option to that.
The increasing trend of marathi men choosing non-marathi girls is causing unique problems such as creation of families with marathi surnames but no marathi-ness, young kids confused and at times ashamed of their father's identity and a growing pool of marathi girls past marriageable age unable to get hitched due to scarcity of grooms!
my personal opinion is that if someone doesn't feel the need to speak in his/her mother tongue, he simply does not deserves the language.
In some or the other way we all are running away from our roots , some may call it a colonial hangover, others up-biharisation and some may term it as cultural genocide.
@ pritish
so u prefer english to hindi. out of contempt to hindi or need for better communication skills?
@anonymous
great you gave us the root cause of all the problems. Inter-caste marriages........wat say shouldnt we ban them?
@thelonewanderer
yeah, I have many fresh memories of hindi wallahs saying, that marathi is useless and we should talk in our 'rashtriya bhasha' hindi (as if we care).
Also English is faaar more useful than hindi can every be...
so you are right, both contempt and better communication skills
u need not hate hindi to love marathi... All I am saying is that you should not be apologetic about ur mother tongue
@Lone Wanderer-
I am not talking about 'intercaste' marriages. I am talking about 'inter-community' marriages, where husband and wife come from communities speaking different language and having different culture.
In such cases, the girls coming into the community are supposed to learn the language and culture of their husband's family, but that does not happen in cases where a non-marathi girl marries a marathi boy. Their children are also not taught marathi.
This is further contributing to the overall decline of marathi culture and number of marathi speakers.
Increasing number of migrants means increase in such migrant-marathi marriages.Marathi girls are generally not accepted in migrant families, so number of such girls is insignificant. But these migrant non-marathi families are very glad if their daughters find marathi grooms.
Thus, in-flux of non-maharashtrians is not just limited to land of maharashtra but now it's happening in homes of Maharashtrians in the form of these girls, and it will have adverse effects on marathi culture and language.
It's happening..and it's upto each individual whether to consider it a good event or a bad event.
@pritish
well i guess by that logic you shud be contemptuous of those hindiwallah's who said that rather than being contemptuous of the language itself. wat say?
@3M
u are absolutely right. but sadly in India we have people believing that two wrongs make one right.
@anonymous
i meant inter community marriages only. Sorry for the typo
btw i am just curious to know how did u form such a consolidated opinion about things you mentioned in ur previous comment. Is it by observation, by research study or by plain conjecture.
@Lone Warrior
It's observation (my own as well as by many others) + inferences by people who are doing this type of demographic studies and who have access to this type of information at a large scale and can apply statistical measures.
There has been no disparity among observations and opinions given by all these different sources-be it a marathi activist or a marathi marriage bureau owner or a sociologist working with a premier research institute. There is strong unanimity in these observations.
@ The Lone Wanderer
haha..
but you must remember, I never said anything about hindi, right?
@ Anon... this blog respects facts and figures... please quote a researcher or give an url of some article...
3M feels kids whose both parents are Marathi also converse in Hindi... why blame those who are half Marathi?
i completely agree with pritesh desai's view. Its high time we maharashtrians dump other languages and adopt Marathi. speaking marathi with maharashtrians and english with all others is the proper way to do. again i dont have contempt or love for hindi, rather i would ignore it completely and dont really care. Bhargo and others shouldnt complain if ppl like pritesh are promoting Marathi.
Well, the more chauvinist the Marathi Manoos becomes, the more he shall fall behind in all parameters. The Marathi community is slowly getting closer and closer to the Islamic community in articulation of the problems it faces, denial and the solutions it applies.
This serves well for everyone else in Mumbai - make more money on the back of the Marathi Manoos.
I know this thread in 3 years old but I'll pitch in my anecdotal 2 cents.
I am a Marathi guy from Kalyan/Thane area with immaculate spoken Marathi - now living in the US. On my visits to Mumbai, whenever I tried to talk to some older person in Marathi in a CR/WR locals(the person obviously a Marathi reading MaTa or Loksatta), almost every time the person would respond back to me in Hindi!
I think a Mumbai Marathi guy defaults to Hindi unless he knows for sure that the other person is Marathi from his friend circle and that is a tragedy.
All this hyper ventilation and jingoism by Shivsena and MNS is useless unless and until average Marathi person changes his attitude and sticks to Marathi in everyday speech with even non-Marathis.
Can't agree more with the guy above!
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