Thiruvananthapuram: A piqued Kerala will approach the Centre again to obtain the classical language tag for Malayalam. A meeting convened by Chief Minister Oommen Chandy here on Friday decided to ask the Centre to review the decision of an expert committee which trashed Kerala’s request. The state will also supplement its first report to the Centre with a second report bolstering Malayalam’s claims of antiquity. Chandy also plans to take up the matter with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Minister Kumari Selja during his forthcoming trip to New Delhi.
Malayalam is more than 1,500 years old and can claim an antiquity equal to any of the other South Indian languages. Even the Expert Committee admits that Malayalam fulfills three of the four criteria required for getting a classical language tag. But the Committee concluded that Malayalam was not between 1,500 and 2,000 years old, and thus was ineligible. This was not true, according to the participants of Friday’s meeting.
A statement issued by the government quoted Poet O N V Kurup as saying that nothing more was expected of a Committee which has among its members Dr Subramaniam and Dr Krishnamoorthi who had written theses rubbishing Malayalam’s claims to antiquity. Poet Puthussery Ramachandran said that strong political pressure was required to win the status for Malayalam. “Tamil was accorded the status as per the old norms which required an antiquity of merely 1,000 years,” Prof Naduvattam Gopalakrishnan said.
“The Expert Committee’s was not the last word on the issue,” CPM politburo member M A Baby said, demanding political pressure to ensure Malayalam the status. Cultural Affairs Minister K C Joseph, Palode Ravi MLA, Chief Secretary K Jayakumar, writers Sugathakumari, Perumbadavam Sreedharan, K L Mohana Varma and Dr George Onakkoor were also present.
Comments
0 comment