The death of Professor Yasmin Shaikh has been a great loss for the Marathi language. Shaikh was among the best Marathi scholars, linguists, and grammarians in the last half century.
One may ask what is so great if a woman from Maharashtra becomes a well-known language and grammar expert, but Shaikh’s greatness lay in the fact that she was not born Marathi.
Born Jerusha Reuben in a small Jewish community in Pune in 1925, Shaikh's schooling and college education took place in Pune, from where her strong attachment to the Marathi language began.
She studied at Pune’s famous Sir Parshurambhau (SP) College. For her postgraduation, she studied under eminent Marathi writers like S.M. Mate and K.N. Vatave. After her education, she even taught Marathi in schools and colleges, as well as to people at large for the next seven decades of her life.
Her father was a government servant, which gave her the opportunity to travel to various parts of Maharashtra, where she grasped how various Marathi dialects are spoken across the state.
It was during her tenure as the Head of Department of Marathi at SIES College in Mumbai that she met the legendary Marathi editor, the late S.P. Bhagwat and the Jnanapeeth-winning Marathi poet and author Vinda Karandikar. She was also associated with Bhagwat’s Mauj Publishing House that brought out many brilliant works of Marathi literature.
She married Aziz Ahmed Ibrahim Shaikh in 1949, whom she met via eminent Marathi playwright Vasant Kanetkar. After marriage, she changed her name to Yasmin Shaikh but did not change her religion, choosing to stay a Jew for the rest of her life.
She had famously said that language has no religion. She has written Marathi Lekhan Margdarshika (Guide to Marathi writing), Marathi Shabdalekhan Kosh (Dictonary of Marathi Orthography), Sugam Marathi Vyakaran Kosh (Dictionary of Marathi Grammar), and many other books which explain in detail the finer nuances of the Marathi language.
She also taught the language to IAS aspirants at the State Institute of Administrative Careers. For seven years, she was the editor of Marathi textbooks published by Balbharati.
Shaikh always asserted that standard language should be used while writing a work of fiction or non-fiction, calling it her mother tongue and something to be proud of.
Eminent Marathi newspaper Loksatta published a beautiful anecdote about her love for the language. Once, it so happened that a municipal corporation worker went to visit her for census-related work.
After writing down her name, he happened to wrote 'Urdu' in the language column, at which point she promptly told him to erase it, and to write 'Marathi' there—a strong assertion that her mother tongue was Marathi. She has also won a number of awards for her dedicated work on the Marathi language.
These days when the Marathi Gen Z finds it difficult to write Shuddha Marathi (pure Marathi with accurate grammar), an expert like Prof Yasmin Shaikh and her views on usage of language and its grammar will be greatly missed.
