How shorthand in Marathi made accurate writing possible in newspapers amid colonial surveillance

How shorthand writing in Marathi made accurate writing possible in the age of newspapers, colonial surveillance

The use of English shorthand and typewriters expanded towards the end of the 19th century in clerical work in the major cities of the subcontinent. The use of shorthand in Indian languages, however, developed not in the context of office work but to meet the requirements of the new public sphere, particularly the quick notation of public speeches for reporting in newspapers. This led to the invention of new speed scripts, atitvarene lihiṇyāchī paddhatī (very speedy writing) or laghulekhan (shorthand) in Marathi, which relied heavily on Pitman and Munson’s English shorthand.

Arguably the first use was in 1874 by RB Gunjikar, who declared, “Everyone wishes to listen to a speech by famous people, and if it be available in writing, newspapers too are ready to publish it. But this often does not happen because it is not possible to speedily write down that speaker’s scholarship verbatim, right then and there. It is keeping this in mind that I have created this new smooth [lāghavī] or secretarial [chiṭnisī] script.”

Gajananbhau Vaijya, an English shorthand writer and reporter with the Indian Statesman, invented another speed script expressly for the quick notation of speeches in his book Laghulekhanpaddhatī. He declared the “permanent securing of orations of thoughtful and eloquent speakers” the ultimate value of such speedy notation and assured his readers in an English preface that a year’s practice would enable them to report speeches and sermons delivered at the speed of 120 words a minute. His text is much more extensive than Gunjikar’s.

He explains how to correctly distinguish the multiple cases and suffixes and emphasises the importance of noting punctuation, especially periods, in shorthand writing. Gunjikar, for his part, emphasised the need for word separation. These speedy innovations, therefore, were also embedded in the ascendant idea of the age of print that good, legible writing must be as phonemically distinct and visually complete as possible.

Notably, Indian-language shorthand remained in the sphere of handwriting, as typewriters for non-Latin scripts did not become widespread in the subcontinent until the mid 20th century. Moreover, although women, most of them from Eurasian backgrounds, trained in English shorthand and typing and began to gradually find employment in private firms, Indian-language shorthand usage appears to have been a male preserve for several decades.

These scripts were actively “tested” for their efficacy in public gatherings organised to promote public-speaking skills. Indeed, this public performance of writing was in step with the parallel, emergent discourse of vaktritva, or public speaking. These two innovators aside, it is actually Bhujangrao Mankar, inventor of a third shorthand script with the book Laghulekhankalā (1897), who announced himself on the title page as the creator of Marathi and Gujarati shorthand. Mankar was a well-known English shorthand reporter for the press and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Bombay for all manner of political meetings in the early 20th century. His book contained several testimonials by prominent speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, and English of his ability to speedily and accurately note down their speeches “word for word.”

As Bernard Bate noted, Tamil shorthand came into its own when the colonial government attempted to acquire written transcripts of possibly seditious speeches during the Swadeshi movement. In Bombay, too, shorthand found widespread application in CID surveillance with the growth in nationalist meetings and activity in the 1920s. Sub-inspectors could learn Marathi shorthand as an optional subject in the Central Police Training School; the usual practice was to pass a test in the office and regularly test for speed.

In the trial of the Ali brothers in Karachi following the Khilafat movement, speeches by Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali were entered as evidence of their seditious activity. Similarly, charges against Communist leaders SA Dange, RS Nimbkar, and others in the Meerut conspiracy case (1929–33) were also based on their public speeches. The cross-examination of witnesses turned on the accuracy of the transcripts and the methods used to obtain them and provides a rich window into the work of memory, notation, and translation involved in producing a speedy verbatim transcript of a public speech, and the issues of legibility, authenticity, and transparency that linked scribe, script, and language to state surveillance.

Police reporters usually translated the shorthand transcripts of speeches in various languages into English longhand as soon as possible. In Karachi the Ali brothers’ Urdu speeches were recorded in Urdu shorthand. In Belgaum in June 1921, however, sub-inspectors of the Pune CID took down their Urdu and English speeches in Marathi shorthand. During a meeting in Bagalkot, also in northern Karnataka, Shaukat Ali’s speech in Urdu was orally translated sentence by sentence into Kannada as he spoke; this gave Joshi ample time to record the speech into first Marathi shorthand, and longhand as well. There was thus much processing of sound, meaning, and sign across languages, scripts, memories, and individuals, all at high speed.

These reporters often had to perform their speedy notation in court and re-read their own shorthand or their translation of technical words. In the Meerut trial, Bhujangrao Mankar testified that he took down the Marathi speeches directly into English shorthand, translating on the spot. However, when asked in court for the original Marathi words that he had reproduced in English, he faltered and found his own shorthand illegible. He protested that poor lighting in the meeting halls and the places where reporters sat, out of view of the speakers, with their notebooks on their thighs instead of at a table, often made it difficult to take notes quickly and accurately. Not surprisingly, SA Dange’s rebuttal dismissed the evidence against him on the argument that the reporters were not well versed in either Marathi or Communist terminology.

The inspector SS Deshpande mentioned a critical aspect of Pitman-based shorthand writing: since the signs matched specific sounds, he did not pay much attention to the content of the speech; he just noted down the sounds as best he could, even if he didn’t know the meanings of words. Gaps between sounds and meaning, it would appear, were filled in either during transcription through memory recall or by the CID itself. The scrutiny of original notes also revealed that when the speech was relatively slow, the reporters preferred to write in Modi instead of shorthand, since it was easier to re read and transcribe later. These practices of notation, translation, and judicial discourse grappled with a spectrum of textual reproduction of oral utterances, from gist to verbatim.

Although verbatim was the quality most desired in the presentation of evidence, the many stages of processing between utterance, notation, transcription, and cross-examination show that it was much less easily achieved. Modern lekhanpaddhatī, or writing practices in Marathi, thus came to encompass many different activities and aspects: the business of types and fonts, punctuation and orthographic rules, institutional regulations and linguistic politics, epistolary norms, and speedy shorthand.

Print not only increased the rate at which books could be reproduced but also influenced the rate at which words could be written down by hand and how. It also enhanced the expectation of how fleeting an utterance could be captured accurately in text. These possibilities brought an amplified concern with authenticity and expectation of its fulfilment. The various scripts to write Marathi came to be invested with different meanings of authenticity in modernity: phonemic accuracy in Balbodh, clerical transparency in Modi, and verbatim transcription in shorthand.

Excerpted with permission from Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India, Prachi Deshpande, Permanent Black and Ashoka University.