Who invented shorthand in tamil

Download PDF. Translate PDF. When police officers took cognisance of these kinds of political communicative practice that accompanied it. Though there were some shifts to the vernacular in the mid- applications in many other spheres of life. It was only during the Swadeshi movement that the elites began to system- atically address political audiences in Bengali. Sarkar puts this vividly in his discussion of the twinned innovations in the press and the platform.

In contrast to the press, which was read only by literate classes, the platform had potentially much greater appeal, though this was limited for a long time by the unfortunate habit Indians had developed of public speaking in English. From the middle of the 19th century onwards, Bengal had produced a considerable number of great orators — Ramgopal Ghosh, Keshabchandra Sen, Anandamohan Bose, Lalmohan Ghosh, Surendranath Banerji — but the fame of all of them rested mainly on their English speeches.

Even at the Bengali provincial conferences, the Tagores had to fight a hard battle in before the mother tongue could obtain a hearing; and not before was the presidential address itself delivered by Rabindranath in Bengali Sarkar Vernacular political oratory in the Madras Presidency was a direct response to the events in Bengal, and inspired by visits to Madras by leaders such as Bipen Chandra Pal and others in The Marina Beach meetings, often headed by the young nationalist poet and newspaperman, C Subramania Bharati, mostly involved students and vaikils, the educated classes of Indians to which the British had become accustomed as their most articulate challengers.

Crowds of a similar though some- Bernard Bate bernard. It was used as a mode of disciplining with Telugu speeches by an enigmatic young man named and punishing that also became an ordinary mode of everyday Ethiraj Surendranath Arya, who addressed not only students life for those ruled. In Tutukkudi typewriting, cultivated by would-be government and quasi- and the Andhra deltas, too, the speakers were from the usual government employees in thousands of training centres, large classes and castes, but the audiences were entirely different.

A mode of political surveil- In Tutukkudi, activists such as Swadeshi Steam Navigation lance and discipline produced by the police became a mode of Company founder V O Chidambaram Pillai and his peripatetic bodily comportment, a skill like playing an instrument, to co-orator Subramania Siva addressed workers in the local which hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of young mills and began organising work stoppages.

Young political actors earliest organised labour agitations, which anticipated what began to speak against the state, authorities responded, new would come to define the political in another decade,1 they surveillance techniques were created, new disciplines enforced appeared to be preparing not only for economic and cultural — and a new life-way was formed.

This was something entirely new. And it was that newness I am directed to draw your attention to the efforts which are being which prompted a second innovation — vernacular shorthand. The Government of India find that there is an initial tor sermons by their vernacular preachers and catechists.

Textual faction of a court of law the exact words used, and he cannot, there- fore, be prosecuted with a reasonable prospect of success. Newspapers reported some to textual take-up by the student, re-performance, and so on. Shorthand was one of sible, less established, actors. In a larger Tutukkudi followed by a riot , the authorities came down very sense, though, the development of shorthand was a response hard on swadeshi activists; by the middle of they had to an epistemological uncertainty evoked by the vernacular either jailed or forced into exile almost all of the leaders.

But that is another story. The trolled. Both vande mataram shouted at a passing carriage by a record also indicates that this was a moment of great uncer- nameless schoolboy from a crowd and the vernacular orator tainty and fear for colonial officials.

And that uncertainty whose words are fleeting, unknowable and dangerous shared probably pushed the authorities more than anything else to this same demonic spectrality.

Light had to dicial means, but also of figuring out ways of knowing what be thrown on the darkness of an impenetrable mob, of crowds was happening in them. The swadeshi in the interior, or even the frustration aroused by a little boy. In , authorities were receiving That shorthand would not merely be a technical problem, but more and more reports of Europeans suffering the indignity of a political one was well understood at the time by government having young boys shout vande mataram as they passed by, officials and by those engaging the government.

By the sum- especially if the Europeans happened to encounter the boys in mer of , government officials were coming to understand a group after an evening swadeshi meeting. While it was that no such system had been perfected in any of the Indian ostensibly a cry of unity and solidarity — the swadeshi motto, languages as far as they could tell.

Madras city and the deltas were sites of system- problems. There would be problems, though. The former sentence required only four simple strokes, ones. As Miyako Inoue has noted , the system was based whereas the latter required some six complicated strokes to on a perceived iconicity between sound and the shape drawn transcribe it unambiguously.

Those proficient in Eng- the same, but are, so to speak, thin in the first, and thick in the second. The government authorised such a the benefits of the use of soundhand for everything from set of examinations.

His sense of the political nature of the problem is writ large in Krishnamachari latched onto this understanding of the his letter of August in which he writes that while he was larger benefits of shorthand to Indian society. I have purposely The discovery that Sanskrit was related to Persian, Greek not published this system in a book form and before doing so I think it and Latin — that Indian and European languages were a part of my bounded duty to inform Government of this, so that in case they one family — eventually produced what Thomas Trautman see fit, they may utilise the art for their purposes.

With this object I am has called the racial theory of Indian civilisation, the keeping the matter strictly confidential. In , he developed the most widely used form of shorthand, a system of strokes, hooks, dots and squiggles, based on phonetics, which enabled stenographers to transcribe speeches with great speed and accuracy.

Since its founding in , the guild has been training people in Pitman shorthand; at one time, no secretary or journalist could hope to work without mastering it. The guild's graduates went on to work in the private sector and in India's vast, intricate state bureaucracy, where large rooms would be set aside for them to transcribe their jottings into formal script.

A star graduate of the guild could take dictation at more than words a minute. But as the use of computers has spread and as the practice of dictation has declined, the demand for stenographers in India has faded, particularly in business. SR Sivasubramanian, the guild's young treasurer, said: "When I was studying here in , 75 people from the guild sat for the higher-grade exam. Now I don't even think that many people take the exam all across the state.

Mr Sivasubramanian's life is bound inextricably with the history of the guild. His father, SV Ramaswamy, held official posts within the guild, and his sacred-thread ceremony, a coming-of-age ritual for young Hindu boys, was conducted on the first floor of the guild's premises. Between him and E Krishnamurthy, a retired stenographer in his late 70s, the glory days of shorthand are well remembered. Mr Krishnamurthy, whose personal speed record is an explosive words a minute, worked with Siemens in Bangalore for nearly 30 years as a stenographer.

Before he retired in the early s, some demand for shorthand skills still existed. The guild has survived, however, by pluckily reinventing itself and diversifying its activities. Only one guild student out of every five now chooses to study shorthand.

The others attend typewriting or computer classes, which have been offered since the mids. Not surprisingly, these classrooms are far more crowded than the shorthand seminars. On a recent, sticky evening in a first-floor classroom that can hold 50 people, S Parasuraman was teaching only five students. With one eye on a watch to measure the pace of his words, Mr Parasuraman enunciated passages from an old technical examination paper.

His wards scribbled furiously as he started to read: "Friends, we are meeting here today, to discuss the food situation.

For a couple of these students, proficiency at shorthand could improve their prospects for promotion in their government jobs. I Thangaswamy, a year-old employee at the Tamil Nadu government's Directorate of Collegiate Education, learnt shorthand a decade ago.

In Mr Thangaswamy's present job, though, passing an intermediate shorthand exam could convert his temporary position into a permanent one. Similarly, Vimal Singh, a clerk in the Madras High Court, could become a judge's assistant by passing his higher-grade exam. The real rarity in Mr Parasuraman's small class is S Raja, a slender, bright-eyed high-school student who has chosen to learn shorthand instead of computer science. One consequence of India's information technology boom is that computer skills have become the most popular vocational training option in the cities.

Stenographers' salaries start at between 5, and 7, rupees Dh to Dh a month, Mr Sivasubramanian estimated, "and these days, even a bad driver can make that much. Mr Raja admitted that he would like to take computer classes, "but between school and shorthand, there's really no time.

When E Balaji started his career as a headhunter, around , he still got occasional requests for stenographers. That trickle dried up by or