Dialect of hope

For nearly a century and a quarter, Esperanto has defied skeptics. It has a presence, even if small, on all continents, and has found a home in Hyderabad, and in Tirupati too, report Majaz Panjatan and GS Subrahmanyam

But the fact is that this language is learnt – whether through contact groups or over the Net – on all continents. And it has ardent advocates: like Dr A Giridhar Rao who teaches English at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, or Prof. PV Ranganayakulu of the Sri Venkateswara Ayurvedic Medical College in Tirupati.
Dr Giridhar Rao – or Giri as he prefers to be called – takes classes in Esperanto at the institute and, on Tuesday evenings, at his home in Somajiguda.
Esperanto was a project born of the hope that a common language would make for greater understanding between peoples across regions and nations. However, it must be noted that the aim was to supplement, and not replace, natural languages. The brainchild of a Russian-Jewish ophthalmologist, Dr Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, it began taking shape in the early 1870s. The fruit of his efforts saw the appearance of the first grammar in 1887, setting out details of the language which the good doctor wished to be known as “La Internacia Lingvo” (the international language). However, it was the moniker “Esperanto” which stuck on because the book was published under the pseudonym of Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hope).
It is an easy language to learn, says Giri, as we look out his seventh-floor balcony with a lovely view, mellowed by the evening light, of Hussainsagar, the Necklace Road and the park which it skirts towards the Begumpet shore. Presently, his daughter, Rahel, a class VII student at Vidyaranya pops into the living room and informs dad – in Esperanto – that she is going over to a friend’s.
Returning to the subject of the ease with which Esperanto can be acquired, the first thing to mention is the small corpus of root words which allow, through easily-deployed rules of prefixing, suffixing and compounding, for an indefinite number of new ones to be made up. And the beauty of it is that, as in the case of Sanskrit, their meanings can be readily gleaned. What’s more, unlike in English in which exceptions to patterns and paradigms trip up the learner, there are few such obstacles in Esperanto. Parts of speech have distinctive suffixes: all common nouns end in “-o”, all adjectives in “-a” and all derived adverbs in “-e”. As for the tenses, the suffixes are: “-as” (present), “-os” (future) and “-is” (past).
From this, one can understand the point that Giri is trying to stress, namely that the structure of the language perceptibly opens out or unfolds before the mind’s eye. One thing leads fairly effortlessly to another, cutting down on the need to memorise. Whereas English has a host of different names for horses to cover gender and age, in Esperanto one root word suffices to name them and also throws up related terms. For instance, from the root “cheval” (horse”) we get “chevalo” (male horse), “chevalino” (female horse), chevalido (baby horse) and so on… In English, we would have to separately learn the words horse, mare, foal, etc. Likewise, the Esperanto words “chevalejo” and “chevala” name what in English again have to be learned separately – “stable” and “horselike” or “equine”.
And the plurals too are straightforward, as the comparison between the following English and Esperanto sets will make clear: child – children, ido – idoj; man – men, viro – viroj. The simple marker “j” identifies the plural.
Even as Giri is telling us that what is not often evident in other languages is almost invariably so in Esperanto, the doorbell rings. The two gentlemen who walk in are introduced to us.
Dr Rajesh Gupta, a gastroenterolgist, and K Nagasiva Kumar, a German language expert with Amazon, have come for their Tuesday evening class. They wait quietly while we take some more of Giri’s time, for we can’t quite finish the session without some more nuggets of information.
To a query as to the lack of a vibrant cultural dimension to Esperanto, we are told that William Auld, Scots by nationality but Esperantist in his incarnation as poet, has thrice been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Giri then goes into a room, emerges with an armful of books and arranges them on the floor. These include a translation of Borges’s The Secret Miracle (La sekreta miraklo) and of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (La Metamorfozo). And popular culture does not go unrepresented – Asterix and Tin Tin have been translated. Another interesting fact is that in Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator, the shop signs in the Jewish Ghetto are in Esperanto.
The language seems to have a left-wing flavour. It has carried a sense of foreign language learning not being limited to the elite. Giri recalls how during the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, fisherfolk from the Maldives and Chile who had spent a few hours at the Esperanto stall were able to communicate with each other in a way they never could have with their rudimentary English.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, Esperanto was in favour with quite a few union activists. Hitler raged against it as a “Jewish conspiracy”. World War II often saw it being used by the Partisans as a way of smuggling in subversive literature or smuggling out sensitive information more easily.
As for the Esperanto scene in India, there are clusters in Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune and Tirupati. Its presence in the last-named is largely due to the drive of Dr PV Ranganayakulu, a professor at the Sri Venkateswara Ayurvedic Medical College. One of the founding-members of the Indian Esperanto Federation (Federacio Esperanto de Barato), he has authored the book Let’s Learn Esperanto. Incidentally, the current president (2010-2013) of the World Esperanto Federation is an Indian, Prof. Probal Dasgupta, who teaches at the Indian Statistical Institute. Prior to this he was professor in the department of applied linguistics at the University of Hyderabad where Giri’s wife, Rekha, was one of his PhD students.
We have now taken up too much of Giri’s time and surely must be trying the patience of his students who make it to class despite their hectic workaday schedules. As we take leave, we are asked to check out the website offering free instruction: www.lernu.net Those who would like to learn through direct classes may contact Giri: agiridhar.rao@gmail.com
So, if your curiosity has been sufficiently whetted, you know where to look and whom to get in touch with. Bon shancon!