The Creole Language in Parliament

Opinion

By Paramanund Soobarah

We, of the Brindaban Linguistic and Cultural Genocide Watch Group, wish the nation to know that we have absolutely nothing against the Creole language, or any other language of Mauritius, for that matter, and are not opposed to its being honoured in any way.

We respect Creole as a language. We know how it was forged by the children of living and thriving human beings captured by force from their homes in Africa and Madagascar, shackled and ferried here against their will in the most inhuman conditions, sold here like chattels to the highest bidder, and made to toil at tasks they had never undertaken in their earlier, happy lives and for which they were not even suited, on plantations belonging to other utterly inhuman beings whose only merit was that they had sailed out of France to settle here and had, in consequence, been granted plots of land freely by the then government.

That said, we also wish the nation to know two other matters.

Firstly, we want the mother tongue of our linguistic group, which is larger than the ethnic Creole group, not to be forgotten. Bhojpuri, our mother tongue, is a direct descendant of the ancient Sanskrit language, whose status in world history is unknown only to the most ignorant, uncultured and uneducated. Its grammar, set out in about four thousand terse and rigid, symbolic-logic-type formulae, was written thousands of years ago, predating Aristotle, the grandfather of Western culture, by a large margin.

As a descendant of Sanskrit, Bhojpuri was there before English and French became modern languages, and even before modern Hindi was born in the East India Company’s campus of Fort William College in Calcutta, and before Macaulay wrote his infamous Minute, in which, sadly, he laid bare what the author considers to be his ignorance of the history of human culture and knowledge in India and the Middle East.

To him, Europe, as the successor to the civilisations of the Greeks and Romans, was the only area of the world with education and knowledge – forgetting that much ancient science and knowledge had been pushed aside by Christian monasteries as “superstition” for a thousand years and had only been saved for posterity in translation through the efforts of Arab scholars.

Those who want to learn more will do well to begin by Googling “Fort William College”, “Panini”, the “Islamic Golden Age” and “Al-Biruni”.

Our grandfathers were also brought here in conditions not far removed from those inflicted on the ancestors of ethnic Creoles, nor was the treatment inflicted upon them following their arrival here substantially less harsh. Their sufferings cannot be allowed to be forgotten. It is essential that some token honour be paid to Bhojpuri alongside Creole.

The other equally important matter that we wish the nation to know is that we earnestly wish all children of Mauritius to grow into successful and educated citizens. For that, a command of spoken and written English and French is an inescapable condition.

Therefore, while we honour the Creole language, we oppose with all our might the script for it that the present Government has been trying to impose on our children since it was last in power, about a decade and a half ago.

The well-meaning efforts of the Minister of Education are like the efforts of a man learning to fly by jumping off a cliff. The consequences of that policy are plain for all to see – for all, that is, who care to look.

The public statistics of the Mauritius Examinations Syndicate show that those scoring Credits 1–4 in the French language in 2012, before the Government’s catastrophic experiment with the Kreol script began, represented 46.5% of the cohort. That percentage has since gone down year after year and was down to only 27.75% in 2025.

At this rate, we predict that, with the steady progress being achieved by the script in our education system and the nation as a whole through the efforts of successive Governments, it will not be long before the percentage comes down to zero or thereabouts.

The decline in performance in the English language, where the cohort’s performance has never been particularly bright anyway, is less marked but nevertheless equally steady.

If you disapprove of the attitude of groups that ignore the warnings of statistics in the matter of pension reform, you cannot credibly disapprove of groups that point to the warnings of statistics in the matter of education.

The Minister’s legs have been chained, yet he has been tasked to win the race.

It is perfectly possible to write the Creole language in a French-based script, which would set all our children on the way to success in French and other economically important languages, and put the nation on the road to fame and prosperity. That is a choice that the Government has shunned.

We wish to remind the nation that, way back, before the introduction of that script, all Hindu socio-cultural organisations had huddled together under the aegis of the Hindu Maha Sabha and cautioned the Prime Minister against taking that step. No acknowledgement was ever received.

Now we watch the decline of our nation – impotently and in silence.

Is it too late to react?

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 7 August 2026