Hindi lexicography and Arvind Kumar have become almost synonymous over the past several decades. His is a fascinating story of how the founder-editor of “Madhuri”, a Hindi film magazine became the foremost lexicographer in the Hindi language.
At 85, he continues his search for the right word with the right shade of meaning, thus initiating an intra-language dialogue within Hindi as well as inter-language exchange between Hindi and English.
Early this year, he came out with his 1,350-page magnum opus titled as “Arvind Word Power: English-Hindi”, published by his own company Arvind Linguistics Private Limited. The book has been billed as “a dictionary with a difference” that it truly is.
Like Kumar’s other books, this too aims at enhancing the users’ word power manifold and works as a dictionary, a thesaurus and an encyclopaedia to help users to express their ideas and emotions correctly and comfortably – both in English and Hindi.
Had any other profit-eyeing private Hindi publisher printed such a bulky book, it would have been priced at a minimum of Rs.1,500 and would have been printed on cheap, yellow newsprint.
However, this beautifully produced book printed on good-quality paper has been moderately priced at Rs. 595.
For Arvind Kumar, building word power is clearly a labour of love.
The Hindi world sat up and noticed Arvind Kumar as a formidable lexicographer when the National Book Trust published his two-volume Hindi thesaurus “Samantar Kosh” in 1996 to celebrate the golden jubilee of the country’s independence.
The idea of a thesaurus was completely new to Hindi and within a year, it ran into a reprint.
His wife Kusum Kumar assisted him in this endeavour.
What made his thesaurus and other books very attractive and useful to the readers was their India-centric nature.
Many words and concepts are culture-specific and they cannot be mechanically rendered into another language by coining words on an associative or tentative basis.
‘Rainy day’ to an Englishman does not mean the same thing as it does to Indians who wait for the onset of monsoon and celebrate the rains. Therefore, a user will find ‘heavenly tree’ rendered as ‘kalpvriksh’ in this dictionary-cum-thesaurus-cum-encyclopaedia.
“Arvind Word Power: English-Hindi” contains more than 6,70,000 entries covering 982 subjects ranging form science and technology, law, arts, culture, politics, religion, philosophy, accounts and so on with linkages to nearly 48,000 similar and 10,000 opposite concepts.
It also includes modern colloquialisms and has no hesitation in coining words like ‘spiralakar’ (spiral-shaped).
It offers English meanings for English words and phrases along with their Hindi equivalents, thus becoming very useful to those who are well-versed in English but are often looking for the right Hindi equivalent for an English word or expression.
Enthused by the warm welcome accorded by the Hindi world to his Hindi thesaurus, Kumar embarked upon a new project to create the first bilingual thesaurus “The Penguin English-Hindi / Hindi-English Thesaurus & Dictionary” that was published in 2007 in three volumes.
It is also available online at arvindlexicon.com and can be accessed on smart phones too.
As I said in the beginning, Arvind Kumar’s is a fascinating story. After passing his matriculation examination, he began working at the age of 15 at the Delhi Press to supplement his father’s income.
Starting out as the boy who did odd jobs in the printing press -- replacing the lead typefaces in the compositor’s tray -- he rose to the status of a sub-editor in the English monthly “Caravan” after having gone through the grind as a typesetter, cashier and proof reader.
When he was 22, a friend introduced him to “Rogest’s Thesaurus” and he was soon hooked to the idea of exploring the mysteries of languages.
He also became aware of the unfortunate reality that Hindi had nothing like the “Roget’s” although Sanskrit could boast of a rich tradition in this regard with Kashyap’s “Nighantu”, a thesaurus of a little less than 2,000 Vedic words, as well as Amar Singh’s “Amarkosh”, a thesaurus of nearly 8,000 words.
In 1963, he was asked by The Times of India group to launch its Hindi film magazine “Madhuri” and he moved to Bombay.
It was in 1973 that he started thinking about preparing a Hindi thesaurus. And, as they say, the rest is history.
