Sapnā Roman Hindī Kā

If you’re an English-medium educated urban Indian under 40, 50, or even 60, the chances are that you’re much better at English as a written language than you are at your “mother tongue”, which tends to be Hindi for a large number of Indians. I put “mother tongue” in scare quotes because for a lot of you, your mother speaks both an Indian language as well as English.

It’s possible that Roman Hindi is already the only kind of Hindi you ever write in and are seeing it written in branding, packaging, advertisements, etc. day in and day out. Also, it’s likely that at this point, if someone asks you to read a Hindi novel (in देवनागरी script), the idea is somewhat intimidating and you’d rather read the English version. Because even if your Hindi vocabulary is really good, you probably read the Latin or Roman script (which English is conventionally written in) much faster. So, when you come across an article like Chetan Bhagat’s recent piece entitled “Scripting change: Bhasha bachao, Roman Hindi apnao”, the message thoroughly resonates with you.

I’m not going to tell you that Chetan Bhagat is wrong. However, I do want to tell you what you’re going to lose by tyaag-ing Devanagari in favour of Roman. And I don’t mean all the traditional aspects. Indianness? Culture? Heritage? If you’re like most people I know, you probably don’t give a rat’s ass about that anyway. Also, it’s not like you can’t keep Devanagari around for decorational purposes (that’s already how it’s used a lot these days), similar to how Chinese characters continue to have marginal usage in Vietnam or Arabic script in Turkey.

Let’s just talk about practical matters. Think about how Harappa, Baroda, Arora, and Chabra are pronounced. Have you heard people say them as हरप्पा, बरोदा, अरोरा, and छाबरा? I have. (They are हड़प्पा, बड़ौदा, अरोड़ा, and छाबड़ा resp. by the way.) I’ve also recently met people with the last names Dhiman and Mundada. I naively pronounced the first as धिमन and the second I didn’t even try to guess, though someone else was sure it was मुनदादा. Turns out they are धीमान and मुंदड़ा. So, it turns out at Roman Hindi is great when you already know the word — i.e. you learnt it by ear before you saw it in writing — and pretty bad at conveying the pronunciation accurately when you don’t. So, while you don’t encounter this a lot while texting, when you start writing long form such as books and articles, you’re going to run into this a lot — or, well, your readers are — because even if you know all the Hindi words there are, there will be proper nouns that the author makes up that you won’t know how to pronounce. Of course, most proponents of Roman Hindi (who primarily tend to use English for written communication) don’t generally think this far since they’ve never actually used Roman Hindi for any “serious” writing.

Is this a showstopper though? Definitely not. There are tons of languages in which the script never conveys the pronunciation accurately. You’re reading one of those right now. Other examples are most languages that use the Arabic script like Urdu, Persian, and Arabic, in which the short vowels are never written out and कल (kal), कुल (kul), and किल (kil) are all written the same (کل). Chinese and Japanese are also great examples of writing systems that have multiple possible ways of reading the same written letters. These scripts are technically called “opaque” or having high “orthographically depth”. So, know that switching from Devanagari to Roman (in its current form) means going from a script that is orthographically transparent or “shallow” (other examples are Spanish, Italian, etc.) to one that is much more opaque.

But can’t we have our cake and eat it too? Actually, in this case, you kind of can. However, we’d need to localise the Roman script just like Turkish and Vietnamese did, by introducing diacritical marks or other symbols to unambiguously express the full array of sounds that Hindi has. Of course, it’s not like no one’s thought about this before and there are plenty of schemes out there already. IAST, which was intended for Sanskrit, is the most commonly used one but mainly for academic purposes.

Now, IAST is kind of hardcore and for example, it would transliterate मैं as “maiṃ” and हूँ as “hū̐”. Its design is meant to make it one-to-one mappable to Devanagari. This need not be a requirement for a writing system for Hindi. In fact, a Roman system could even improve upon it. For example, मिलता is pronounced “miltaa” by most and not “milataa”. So, we can dispense with the implicit ‘a’ sounds where they’re elided over in natural speech, such as in ल in मिलता. Also, to most Hindi speakers श and ष are homophones, and so are ऋ and रि (or रु). Lastly, we retain a lot of short ‘i’ at the ends of words to keep the tatsam spelling from Sanskrit, but say them as long ‘i’ in reality. All these written-only distinctions can be dropped when going Roman.

Here’s a quick sample of what a toned down IAST might look like:

Doctor sāhab āp operation kī taiyārī kījiye.

Maiṅ paisoṅ kā intaza़m kartā hūṅ.

Jinke ghar shīshe ke hote haiṅ vo battī bujhā ke kapḍe badalte haiṅ.

Tārīkh pe tārīḳḥ miltī rahī lekin insāf nahīṅ miltā. Miltī hai to sirf tārīḳḥ.

Briefly:

Long vowels are marked with a bar on top: उ → u, ऊ → ū.
Mūrdhanya (retroflex) consonants have a dot at the bottom: ट → ṭ, ढ → ḍh, ड़ → ṛ, ण → ṇ
Anunāsikā (nasal vowel) is written as ṅ, e.g. हूँ → hūṅ, आऊँ → āūṅ. Alternatives include marking nasal vowels with additional diacritics, e.g. हूँ → hū̃, आऊँ → āū̃
For those who care, क़ → q, ग़ → g̣, ख़ → ḳḥ, and the supposed-to-be-silent व can just be ignored completely, e.g. ख़्वाहिश → khāhish
Everything else is the same as the Roman Hindi you’re already familiar with

Do I prefer Devanagari or this sort of unambiguous Roman writing system? I’m a bit whimsical and I do give a shit about the Indianness of the script that I use. So, I’ll probably stick with Devanagari at least until that time when it is no longer possible to communicate with people using it. But, believe me, I do “get” the whole Roman āndolan. It’s a familiar script. It’s easy to type. It makes mixing English words more seamless. So, I just wish that a Roman scheme in which Hindi can be written unambiguously takes off and becomes popular.

By the way, I’ve written a semi-translation of this article “Sapnā Roman Hindī Meṅ” in the Roman Hindī scheme described above.