Former PCC president Niranjan Patnaik on Monday sent an appeal to eminent Odia writers, academics, former civil servants, jurists and artists to take a clear public stand on Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s “refusal to learn Odia” after 14 long years in power.
“Saving Odia is not the responsibility of politicians and political parties alone. It is a national duty and far too important to be left to the vagaries of the political realm,” he said.
Among those to whom Niranjan Patnaik has written are Jnanpith awardees Sitakanta Mohapatra and Pratibha Ray, writers Bibhuti Patnaik and Satakadi Hota, film personalities AK Bir and Prashant Nanda, former diplomat lalit Mansingh, artist Padmabibhusan Raghunath Mohapatra, Padmashree Chaturbhuja Meher, activist Padmashree Tulasi Munda, musician Prafulla Kar and a virtual who’s who among the State’s cultural and
academic icons.
“We today face a situation akin to the period prior to 1936 when the very survival of Odia language had become an important concern of the Odia nation. One shudders to think of the future of our language and literature. Undoubtedly, Odia is no longer the language of choice of the aristocratic and upper segment of society and much of the middle class. The use of the language is beginning to decline rapidly,” Patnaik observed.
“The entire middle class sends their children to English medium schools. Our children should develop excellent skills in the English language, but a generation not respecting the mother tongue does not augur well for the future of the language. I can clearly see a dark future for Odia language and culture that a previous generation of intelligentsia had struggled to save prior to 1936,” he lamented.
The Odisha Chief Minister does not know Odia despite the fact that Odisha was the first State to be created on linguistic basis. There seems to be an impression that no one is hurt if the CM does not know Odia or reads out a distorted version of the language in a rather
comical tone. A situation where the head of a democratically-elected Government does not know the language of the State has not been seen anywhere in the world, Patnaik averred.
“Silence or private criticism will not be a good enough response to such a situation,”
he added.