Inside a hexagonal building in Bandra, Sagar Bagade is pressing both thumbs on the edge of his wooden desk. A boy runs out of the office room and reappears with an Aadhaar card. Bagade copies the details on to a form but stops midway to stroke his imaginary beard.The boy responds by holding up two fingers. Twenty, writes Bagade, a vocational counsellor, against the column 'age'. He stamps the railway concession form thrice and blows on it like it were a birthday cake.
His fingers hover over the form as if sprinkling toppings, and then lift something invisible from his right shoulder. "Let the ink dry. I won't be responsible if it smudges," is what Bagade has silently told the boy, one of many hearing-impaired people entering Mumbai's Ali Yavar Jung National Institute of Speech and Hearing Disabilities (AYJNISHD) to seek a railway concession form.
At this autonomous government institute, Indian Sign Language (ISL), evolved by the deaf community in India, is a way of life. Not only does it get paperwork done but also makes those who can't hear feel heard by those who can. Recently, a mosque in Kerala made news for offering sign language interpretation of Friday prayers.
Not too long ago, the ministry of social justice and empowerment asked the autonomous Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC) to come out with an ISL dictionary of which 1,000 words were released in video format this year and 5,000 more are on the way. In a month, Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Institute in Coimbatore will launch a mobile app for the dictionary in 11 Indian languages. Surely, these are all good signs for ISL, which was born decades ago yet remains, like India's deaf population, largely invisible.
In 1977, Madan Vasishta of Gallaudet University in the US had visited four cities to find out if India had an exclusive sign language. They discovered one language with four regional variations, whose grammar and syntax were the same. He and his colleagues created ISL's first dictionary in 1981 but ISL's growth has been stunted by perceptions.
For one, there is the widespread belief that learning signs will hamper speech development even though experts have found that sign language helps achieve oral expression. "Many schools and even parents of kids with profound hearing loss push for the use of oral language instead," says Vijaykumar Subramani, a sign language trainer.
Other myths abound. "Some think there is a universal sign language used worldwide," says Asmita Huddar of Mumbai's Hashu Advani College of Special Education, adding that American Sign Language would be as different from ISL as Tamil and Mandarin.On many occasions, she has had to explain that ISL -which even allows for poems and puns -has its own grammar. In such a scenario, a comprehensive ISL dictionary is a good start. "It will help not just the deaf community but also researchers, linguists, educators and general public," says Vasishta.
Harish Soni, one of five assistant professors listing words, consulting with deaf people and seeking out line drawings for the ISLRTC dictionary, says they want to especially target parents and special educators. In the dictionary that spans day-to-day communication, academics, technology, medicine and law, abstract words such as' democracy' are suffixed with explanations in English and Hindi and are used in a sentence for better understanding of whether it is a noun or verb. Sonia, who is handling technical words, is wondering how they are going to depict each of the nine types of hammers and 14 hacksaws she has identified for the benefit of students in vocational courses. "Some daily-use words will inevitably have two signs," says Sonia.
In this scenario, uniformity would prove crucial to formal education.Standardisation was what drove Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Institute not only to come out with sign dictionaries spanning 1,000 words each on banking and physics but also bilingual English-Tamil and EnglishHindi sign dictionaries, says Ramakrishna Pettala, head, department of hearing impaired. "To pursue higher education, the hearing impaired must know English. But in our education system, there is language exemption for the hearing impaired. So if the child has opted to study in Kannada medium, for instance, he is exempted from English and Hindi, which restricts his opportunities," says Pettala, whose multicultural students are helping translate terms into 11 Indian languages for a sign language mobile app.
Bagade says he has even come across parents unable to toilet train their deaf kids. "They need subtitles and ISL can help," he says.
Source: The Times of India May 31 edition