Question

How has the poet brought out her emotional attachment to her mother tongue?

Answer 1

Padma Sachdev is a renowned Dogri poet. She won awards like Sahitya Academy at a young age of 34 for her first collection of Dogri poetry. She is deeply attached to her mother tongue and the poem in question is her tribute to the Dogri language. Due to the evolution many scripts get replaced by other scripts, old scripts are worn out and languages are forgotten. Sharade script of Dogri language also got replaced by Devanagari with the passage of time. The depreciation of the Dogri language is deeply grieved by Padma in her poem Mother Tongue. She bemoans by way of explaining with the example of a reed plant that how a script is replaced by a new script. The scripts get changed, languages wither away and give way to new languages and new scripts (a new quill every time), but the literature still seeks the language to speak and the writers depend on it to write their compositions and let it pass on to the future generations. Padma, who is a poet herself, calls herself a servant of her mother tongue, she contributes to Dogri literature. She bemoans at the loss of the native script, Sharade, of Dogri language and that now she has to use Devanagari to write her compositions.