Mumbai, a modern Babel, downgrades English

By Jonathan Allen

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Earlier this month, a Mumbai city official stood up to make a presentation on water meters only to be heckled and jeered into silence by his colleagues.

He had tried to make his presentation in English.

India's capital of commerce speaks in many tongues but from this month, when it comes to official communications within the municipal authority, English will no longer be one of them.

The decision to ditch English, the global language of business, in favor of Marathi, a language largely restricted to the surrounding state of Maharashtra, has left some officials struggling to express themselves.

"I love Marathi. I am Marathi," said Ashish Shelar, an elected official. "But Mumbai city has become a global city now. The language of Mumbai city has changed."

He recalls being briefly dumbstruck when, in the middle of a Marathi speech, he wanted to urge colleagues not to "cherry-pick" his ideas.

"Converting this idea of cherry-picking into Marathi is not an easy thing," he said.

India has long grappled with the problem of Babel. Its constitution recognizes 22 official languages, including English. Mumbai in particular, a cosmopolitan harbor city and a magnet for Indians across the country, is helplessly polyglot.

Movie stars film in Hindi by day, and party in English by night. Diamond dealers and stock traders swap tips in Gujarati. Politicians send their children to English-medium schools, but whip up rallies with speeches in Marathi about the erosion of Maharashtrian culture.

NATIVIST PRIDE

The move was pushed through without debate by Shubha Raul, the mayor, who is a member of Shiv Sena, a political party that encourages the nativist pride of Marathis and chastises Indian immigrants who fail to behave like good guests in the city.

No city official is against Marathi communication -- although Marathis make up less than half of Mumbai's population the language is understood to some degree by many long-term residents.

But some officials say that while the Marathi of the bazaars is easy to understand, the officialese version of the language is confusing, and a poor substitute for English.

Like the Academie Francaise in Paris, city bureaucrats are increasingly on guard against English loanwords, even when they are more widely understood than the Marathi equivalent.

Many Mumbaikars will know what the Internet is; fewer will immediately grasp the meaning of "sanganakiya jaali", which translates as "computer-based net".