When I entered law school, the curriculum and discourse started with me and many of my peers not being able to understand a lot of discussions of socio-legal issues in complex English. It felt like the idea of discourse and knowledge of laws and jurisprudence around it came naturally to people hailing from a better socio-economic background, the one some of us lacked in our initial years.
During our IDIA and SAMA work in Kolkata, we found that there were shopkeepers in Bengal who could not understand what mediation is or how the GST would impact them as they could just understand Bengali and rarely understood how laws affect their livelihood.
I also met a lot of readers in my hometown Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, who hoped that quality policy analysis would come into their language to understand how it would impact their lives.
In my final year of law school, I got a chance to be an editorial head of the Journal of Indian Law and Society Blog, a reputed journal cited by the Supreme Court in its decriminalising homosexuality judgment.
I saw this as an opportunity to start a regional language blog initiative which was kickstarted on 21st Feb 2020.
Every year 21st of February is celebrated as International Mother Language Day, which recognises that languages and multilingualism can advance inclusion, leaving no one behind. We celebrated International Mother Language Day and published pieces in 6 languages that year.
In law school, my objective behind celebrating this day was to imagine a culture within law schools where people see law and the power of knowledge beyond the language English, a language which is spoken by less than 10% of Indians.
We hoped to have a platform wherein we could access knowledge in a medium we understood. However, the discourse and creation of knowledge in law school were largely restricted to English.
Even after law school, I have met plenty of people who wanted to express themselves on various laws, policies and socio-economic issues in the country in their own languages. However, there have been very few platforms assisting them in bringing out their stories.
Sole reliance on a few languages can play an important role in otherisation. This leads to exclusivity on what stories come to the forefront. If there are inadequate platforms for these expressions, we are otherising a major chunk of these stories and communities. Hence, I came up with Awaaz.
Under the Awaaz initiative, we have created a citation compendium in 12 languages which is a small step to start documenting the lack of legal material available for anyone to publish outside English.
For the people involved in this initiative, this is not just an end in itself; it is the beginning of the dream wherein we can imagine a legal fraternity that doesn’t start its discourse with the exclusion of language, power and privilege.
The recent announcement of judgments being made available in a regional language is a welcoming step, but it will take more from the legal fraternity to make the knowledge of laws as accessible as possible to laymen.
We hope that more regional writers will come together to create a community where there will be a free flow of information and knowledge creation will be possible in the languages they understand completely.
Creating this knowledge system and its documentation is not just a legal issue but a more significant accessibility issue. It is about recognising the value and richness of our diverse languages and cultures and ensuring that everyone has access to legal knowledge and can participate in the discourse that affects them.
While working on Awaaz, we realised that the challenge is not just to democratise the knowledge system but also to support all those who want to express themselves in their language.
It was heartwarming to receive support from legal stalwarts as in the first edition of the Awaaz initiative itself and to see people believing in the idea. I am incredibly grateful to all the participants of this upcoming movement.
The support from Anshul and Simran from Youth Ki Awaaz, Sachin from Agami, Tanuj from Lawctopus, Priyanka from Manupatra and Sumit Sir from SCCOnline reminded me that the future of discourse is going to be collaborative and not competitive.
This effort would not have been possible by all the authors who participated in the creation of the Regional Language Citation Standards.
Everyone in this ecosystem believed that we could take a small step towards the movement of making the understanding of laws accessible.
This effort is also a small tribute to my guru Shamnad Basheer, an Indian legal scholar and pioneer who worked on making legal education accessible for underprivileged students, who dreamt that in upcoming years law schools will become a place where people from any background can flourish and express their stories.
A thank you to my friend, Raju Ram from NLUO, who has been my supporter since day 1, and helped me throughout this project in making Awaaz more impactful.
This effort is also a request to get the support of all the students and dreamers from any background, regardless of gender, class, caste, language, sexual orientation, city, financial background, or college.
A request that maybe we, as members of this fraternity, can take the ideals of Professor Basheer to all the places, and the first step can start with democratising knowledge.