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.