Are our local languages good for our Courts?

Dear Friends
Bored with English in our Courts? How about Hindi? A serious effort to seek Hindi in arguments is underway at the Delhi High Court. And Tamil is not far behind. But the real problem comes here: What are the equivalents for 'pledge' and 'bailment'. 'Insurance' and 'vicarious liability'? The truth is, we do not have the equivalents for nearly 50% of the words in a legal dictionary. And, we have no consensus over the equivalents we already have. It takes more than a few hundred years to cultivate a language for legal use. Urdu became the only Indian language that received enough nourishment to merit the status of a 'court language' in a handful of provinces. Unfortunately, due to sheer political reasons, it was shelved. Good luck with Hindi this time. But the fact remains that there are 8 Division Benches in the Delhi High Court and half of the Judges who sit in those Benches are persons from non-Hindi speaking States.

And nobody should suggest that street-Hindi or street-Tamil is good for our Courts. A refined Hindi is quite beyond the comprehension of many Hindi speaking Judges. It is like this, the Kannada that most lawyers speak in Karnataka is not good enough for our Courts. So, if our aim is to merely localise our Courts, we might not be doing a great service to ourselves. The fact remains that we do not speak good Kannada or good Hindi or good Tamil most of the time.

If only we could speak good Kannada or good Hindi or good Tamil or a good local language, many of our Courts would have switched over to regional languages long ago. It is that simple. Resistance to a local language in Courts is not so much a resistance to any given Indian language but to the degree of care people generally adopt in speaking it.


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Regards,

K.V. Dhananjay.
Advocate, Supreme Court of India
+91-99029-0939