Meighoo’s mantra: Hindi, Hindi, Hindi!

The Indian community discovered a newfound support and resource in the person of Dr Kirk Meighoo. Long thought to be publicly neuter on issues of race and religion Meighoo made a bold stand that generated some public debate in the days that followed, especially on the talk-show circuit. Speaking on the topic “The Social, Cultural and Political Challenges for Learning Hindi in the Caribbean” at the three-day International Hindi seminar at the Learning Resource Centre, UWI (April 17-18, 2004) economist and political analyst Dr Kirk Meighoo stated that Hindi — not Spanish — should be made a second language in TT. Meighoo spoke out strongly against Government’s intention to teach Spanish in TT schools. “Today, Government wants to make Spanish a second language and that is absurd,” said Meighoo, drawing applause from members of the audience. “Hindi should be the second language!” he declared.

In his weekly column he further explained, that “The death of Indian languages here coincides with Independence, not with colonialism... I locate the change in my parents’ generation, most likely with the introduction of mass schooling in English in the 1950s.” Meighoo echoed the sentiments of Indo-Trinidadian activists when he appears to cast blame on Dr Eric Williams’ Black Nationalism as he further observed, “This process would have intensified after Eric Williams came to power in 1956, as he denied Hindu and Muslim bodies permission to build any more schools, where the languages would have acquired more space and room to grow… Williams personified the rise of Creole Nationalism, whose inclination was toward an ostensibly “Trinidadian culture,” seeing ancestral cultures (Indian, African, and other) as alien. (Hindi and innocent Creole culture Friday, April 23, 2004) Given the passion that Meighoo has shown for Hindi and things Indian it may come as no surprise that he may be to Hindi in Trinidad as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was to Hebrew in Israel.

Jack Fellman’s Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Revival of Hebrew (1858-1922) perhaps best describes the achievements of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Eretz-Israel, the land of the Jews, contained few Jews in the 19th century, and the language of the Jews, Hebrew, was virtually only a written language and not a spoken tongue. However this is not to say that before Ben-Yehuda, Hebrew was a “dead” language and that he single-handedly and miraculously revived it. The philologist Chaim Rabin noted in 1958, “...it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that at the time of Ben-Yehuda’s first article in 1879, over 50 percent of all male Jews were able to understand the pentateuch, the daily prayers, etc and some 20 percent could read a Hebrew book of average difficulty, allowing for a much higher proportion in eastern Europe, North Africa and Yemen, and a very much lower one in western countries.”

Migrating to his ancestral homeland Ben-Yehuda adopted several plans of action. The main ones were three-fold, and they can be summarised as “Hebrew in the Home,” “Hebrew in the School,” and “Words, Words, Words.” As far as “Hebrew in the Home” was concerned, even before coming to Palestine, as a result of his first successful prolonged Hebrew conversation, Ben-Yehuda had decided to speak only Hebrew with every Jew he met. When his first son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda was born in 1882, Ben-Yehuda made his first wife Deborah promise to raise the boy as the first all-Hebrew speaking child in modern history.

According to Ben-Yehuda, this was a very important symbolic event for the future of the revival, because, with a child in the house, parents and visitors would have to speak naturally to him, and to converse on the most everyday topics, all in Hebrew. And when the child would finally begin to speak on his own, Ben-Yehuda would have living proof that a complete revival of the language was, indeed, possible. Of all the steps Ben-Yehuda took to revive Hebrew, the use of “Hebrew in the School” was clearly the most important, and Ben-Yehuda realised this. Ben-Yehuda preached that rabbis and teachers should use Hebrew as the language of instruction in the Jewish schools in Palestine, and for all subjects, both religious and secular. Ben-Yehuda understood that the revival could succeed especially, and perhaps only, if the younger generation would begin to speak Hebrew freely.

It was clear to Ben-Yehuda that herein lay the very future of the revival. If children could learn Hebrew from a young enough age in school, they would become virtually unilingual in Hebrew when they grew up. In his words: “The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and… become a living language” (Hatzvi, 1886). Besides teaching the youth, Ben-Yehuda also wanted to attract adults to his ideas and he began to publish his own newspaper Hatzvi, in 1884, to serve as an instrument for teaching adults, both via its content and its language. Ben-Yehuda believed that if he published a newspaper at a low price, people would become convinced of their ability to express everything they would want to in Hebrew, and that there would then be more readiness to use the language to convey their ideas. Jews being avid readers, Ben-Yehuda’s paper did much to spread his ideas and his linguistic coinages, both in Palestine and in the Diaspora.

For years Chanka Seetaaram’s Hindi Nidhi Foundation has been championing Hindi in Trinidad and Tobago. Perhaps now in Dr Kirk Meighoo they have found a local Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. In 1966, the American linguist Einar Haugen wrote: “It appears to be almost the rule that such movements can be traced back to a single devoted person, who gave focus to the prevailing dissatisfactions of his people. Having issued from the group whose language was neglected, such reformers often had more than a purely intellectual motivation for establishing the existence of their language. “Theirs became one contribution to the general liberation of the group, a medium of revolt and a symbol of unity.” That person to make Hindi the second national language of Trinidad and Tobago can be Dr Kirk Meighoo.