India’s First Language Museum Opens In Kolkata—Can Shabdalok Change How We See Our Mother Tongue?
· Free Press Journal
According to the last Census held in 2011, India holds more than 19,500 languages and dialects, of which 22 carry constitutional recognition. In our nation of diversities, Sanskrit, Dravidian, Austro-asiatic and Tibetan families sit side by side, often in the same state, sometimes in the same household. Few countries carry this much linguistic weight without a single language dominating the rest.
Visit sport-newz.biz for more information.
The nine galleries of Shabdalok thus begins with a question every visitor already knows the answer to - “what is your mother tongue?”
A screen asks it in twenty-two scripts, one after another, and waits for your input. Most people answer without thinking, and then the museum spends the next hour trying to make them think about it anyway.
Museum of words
Shabdalok opened on the National Library campus in Kolkata on July 19, formally billed as India's first language museum. Its first phase traces the diversity of Indian languages, scripts and literature through digital displays, holograms, motion-sensor installations and audio-visual walls, built to provide an immersive experience, rather than a conventional walk-through of glass cases. The nine galleries move from the origin of words and mother tongues through the evolution of language, oral traditions, performing arts, the contributions of individual writers and thinkers, public dialogue, and the history of public libraries themselves.
Walk in expecting a shrine to Bengali and you'll find much more. The museum covers the constitutionally recognised languages, following their movement from oral traditions and manuscripts into print and, eventually into electronic text. One of the more effective installations lets a visitor pick a single word and watch its meaning bend across centuries—through a shift in vowel, a borrowed sense, a use that fell out of fashion and came back changed. It's designed to show how one word's pronunciation and meaning can drift over generations. Standing in front of it, a college student traced the same word through three centuries and admitted she hadn't expected a museum to make her rethink something she says every day without noticing.
Iftekhar Ahsan, Founder of Calcutta Walks took his family for a look at the space earlier this week, and while he commended the initiative in terms of the access it now gives the public to the previously closed National Library, he is unconvinced about the real impact the museum may create. “It could have been made more immersive and detailed, but it feels like a rushed job to fulfill an agenda, particularly of the newly appointed government in the state”, he said. “It however dedicates a great space towards the linguistic heritage of our country and opens up the library to more people now”.
The premise
The National Library in Kolkata sits inside the Belvedere Estate in Alipore—a complex with its roots going back to 1836. Housing a museum about the birth and drift of language inside a library that has spent nearly two centuries collecting the printed record of exactly that seems more like convenience than intention. The corridors between galleries still carry the hush of an old reading room, even where the exhibits themselves are lit up brightly.
Shabdalok was inaugurated by Union Home Minister Amit Shah. In his remarks at the launch, Shah spoke about the richness of Bengali language, referenced the Centre's recent decision to grant it classical-language status, and invoked Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in his speech.
What the museum can't yet tell you is what it feels like on an ordinary Tuesday, once the flowers have wilted and the security cordon has gone home. Currently free for the public until August 15th, whether the museum about language lives or dies depends on how the public perceives it.
Ahsan highlights that whether a formal gallery space can hold the kind of oral, street-level language history that he spends his time walking visitors through, will be proven in due course.
For a city that has spent decades being told its golden age is behind it, Shabdalok is a strange rebuttal. It is not a memorial of past glories but a working demonstration that language keeps moving, keeps borrowing, keeps changing shape mid-sentence. Whether it becomes a significant fixture on Kolkata's cultural map or a footnote in a tour itinerary will depend on whether the city decides this is a place worth returning to on its own.