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7May
PRESENT STATUS OF SIGN LANGUAGE (ISL) IN INDIA

The National Curricular Framework (NCF) gave sign language education some legitimacy in 2005, implying that sign languages may qualify as an optional third language choice for hearing students. NCERT published a chapter on sign language in a class III textbook in March 2006, emphasising that it is a language like any other and “yet another mode of communication.” The goal was to foster positive attitudes toward the disabled.

Deaf communities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), researchers, and other organisations working for people with hearing disabilities, such as the All India Federation of the Deaf (AIFD) and the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), have made significant efforts to promote ISL. There were no formal classes for teaching ISL in India until 2001.

During this time, an ISL cell was established at the Ali Yavar Jung National Institute of Hearing and the Handicapped (AYJNIHH) in Mumbai. It began a programme called “Diploma in India Sign Language Interpreter Course.” The course curriculum aims to develop professional communication in Sign language as well as the ability to interpret professionally. It also covered the fundamentals of the Deaf community and Deaf culture. Later, the course was made available in regional centres.

Aside from AYJNIHH, organisations such as the Mook Badhir Sangathan in Indore and others provide ISL classes. Many NGOs in India use ISL to teach English as well as other academic and vocational courses. Among these non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are ISHARA (Mumbai), Deaf Way Foundation (Delhi), Noida Deaf Society and Leadership Education Empowerment of the Deaf (LEED) (Pune), Speaking Hands Institute for the Deaf (Punjab), and others (Randhawa, 2014). The Association of Sign Language Interpreters (ASLI) and the Indian Sign Language Interpreters Association (ISLIA) were founded in 2006 and 2008, respectively, for the professional development of interpreters in India.

Two schools in India have been established to teach deaf students using a bilingual approach.The schools are Dehradun’s Bajaj Institute of Learning (BIL) and Indore’s Mook Badhir Sangathan. Aside from the establishment of organisations that serve Deaf people, there has been a surge in sign language research in India. Recent research developments include studies by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and University of Delhi research scholars such as Wallang, 2007; Sinha, 2003, 2008/2013; Hidam, 2010; and Kulsheshtra, 2013.

Aside from these, scholars have continued to work on linguistic aspects of ISL varieties (Zeshan and Panda 2011, Panda 2011, Panda 2012). The establishment of the ISLRTC is among the steps taken by the Government of India to promote sign language. However, the autonomy of the Research Center is currently a contentious issue that has yet to be resolved.

7May
HISTORY OF SIGN LANGUAGE IN INDIA

In the history of Indian literature, the discussion of sign languages and the lives of deaf people is extremely rare but we do find few references to deaf people and gestural communication in texts dating from antiquity. Religious contexts in Hinduism and Buddhism for many centuries, have been employed symbolic hand gestures known as mudras. In addition, Kathak & Bharatanatyam are few forms of classical Indian dance and theatre which employs stylised hand gestures with particular meanings.

In India, from the 1830s many mission schools and orphanages started deaf education as welfare services which is documented, and “they initially worked with locally-devised gestural or signed communication, sometimes with simultaneous speech ( a technique sometimes used by deaf, hard-of-hearing or hearing sign language users in which both a spoken language and a manual variant of that language are used simultaneously).” Residential deaf schools (schools with dormitory facilities) were founded later in the 19th century, although they tended (increasingly) to favour an oralist approach over the use of sign language in the classroom.

The Bombay Institution for Deaf-Mutes, founded by Bishop Leo Meurin in the 1880s, was one of these schools, as were schools in Madras and Calcutta in the 1890s.

Other residential schools quickly followed, including the “School for Deaf and Dumb Boys” in Mysore, which opened in 1902, a school in Dehiwala, Sri Lanka, which opened in 1913, and in 1923 “The Ida Rieu School for Blind, Deaf, Dumb, and Children with Other Disabilities,” opened in Karachi, which is now in Pakistan.

While many students who find it hard to learn via the oralist method were assisted and taught with signs, but the frustrating part for their teachers was students preferred to communicate with each other via sign language as it was easy to learn for them and serves as a important medium of communication. In 1928, British teacher H. C. Banerjee conducted the first study of these children’s sign language, which is very certainly related to modern ISL.

She went to three residential schools for deaf children in Dacca, Barisal, and Calcutta, noting that “the teachers in all these schools have discouraged the growth of the sign language, which has thrived and prospered despite this official rejection.”

Deaf schools in India still continue to be highly Oralistic in their approach. Deaf communities are still fighting for sign language to be recognised as a minority language. It is also not officially used in schools for educational purposes.