NEW DELHI // By training, K Bijay Kumar is a botanist and a plant biotechnologist. But of late, he said ruefully, the closest he has come to botany was to mull over a Hindi word for "reticulum", a protoplasmic network in living cells.
"I suggested 'jaalika', which evokes those honeycombed lattices in windows," Mr Kumar said. "I was told it was absurd, but really, it was difficult to come up with other ideas."
For the last six years, Mr Kumar has been the chairman of the Commission for Scientific & Technical Terminology (CSTT), a 50-year-old government body that tries to find or create words in Hindi and other Indian languages that capture the meanings of the exploding glossary of new technical terms in English.
The CSTT is charged with ensuring "the progressive use of… Hindi… for the official purposes" of government machinery, and with gradually restricting the use of English. "It was felt," Mr Kumar said, "that if you want to replace English and protect Hindi, you need to keep updating these technical terms."
But while Hindi - a language with more than 200 million native speakers - is hardly in danger of dying, English has become the most common language in business, science and industry in India.
This divide between "the English-speaking elite and others", Mr Kumar said, is precisely the point. "Of course we can accept English, but we shouldn't ignore the other languages." In Japan and China, he noted, scientists often write papers using scientific terminology in the native languages. "Then they have their papers translated for English publication. Why shouldn't we do the same?"
The commission has an established routine. Terms are selected from technical English for which Hindi equivalents are needed. Academics send in suggestions, and then a panel of experts reviews them, often tweaking the words or replacing them with entirely new ones.
When a word is finally approved, it finds a place in the relevant CSTT dictionary. The whole process, Mr Kumar said, can take as long as a year.
In this manner, the commission adds "thousands of words every year" to the Hindi vocabulary, Mr Kumar said. State governments have been setting up similar panels for other vernacular languages. "Earlier, we didn't co-ordinate so much with state governments, but now work in other languages is in full swing too," said Mr Kumar. For the commission's panels of experts, the choice often lies between translation and transliteration. SC Saxena, a former deputy director of the CSTT who still serves on some panels, estimated that roughly a quarter of the words in a Hindi glossary will be transliterated: English words written in the Hindi script.
"Computer" and "hard disk", for instance, remain "computer" and "hard disk" even in Hindi. Similarly, the names of chemical elements, as well as weights and measures, are retained in Hindi.
The chosen terms go into subject-specific dictionaries, with names such as Glossary of Steel and Non-Ferrous Metallurgy, which Mr Saxena once helped compile. These dictionaries are revised every five years, but the demand for them is feeble. In 1993, 5,000 copies of a glossary of science terminology were published, and 500 of them still lie in the commission's storerooms.
Then too, the CSTT's ever-widening vocabulary is rarely used outside the academic world. "It's a hopeless cause," said one editor of a Hindi newspaper, who didn't want himself or his publication to be named, for fear of appearing anti-Hindi. "If we use these words that the CSTT experts come up with, our readers won't understand a thing we write. Ultimately, we need our readers to understand us, and that means writing the word 'fertiliser' in Hindi script, for instance, rather than using the Hindi equivalent 'urvarak'. "
Even the various arms of the central government, required to conduct official business in both English and Hindi, have had to become more flexible.
The Department of Official Language is a body within the home ministry that enforces the government's bilingual operations. But DK Pandey, the department's joint secretary, admitted that it was often not feasible to keep up with the CSTT's efforts. Now, he said, "We are flexible. We allow more English words."
This tension between the commission's mission and its perceived impracticality reached a peak in a 2004 Supreme Court decision. In that verdict, the court instructed the National Council of Education Research and Training to use the CSTT's terms in its Hindi-language textbooks.
Setting up the CSTT "and the expenditure incurred…would be meaningless if the terminology… were not in fact used by the Government and bodies under its control," the verdict stated.
This can often complicate the work of textbook creation, said RJ Sharma, head of the national council's department of language. "Teachers sometimes complain that the Hindi words are too difficult to teach," Mr Sharma said. "So we have to explain a word further, in two or three other words. We have to simplify where possible."
It is telling, for example, that even Mr Sharma, a Hindi teacher by training, must look to the CSTT dictionary to find out that the Hindi word for "semiconductor" is "ardhchalak".
Mr Kumar, however, saw in the Supreme Court's decision a reason for optimism, and a method of protecting the Hindi language. "Just imagine - all these millions of children in Hindi-medium schools are learning these terms, and growing up with them," Mr Kumar said. "I don't think it's a losing battle at all."
