“Just imagine. Imagine a world one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now, a world in which not only the best-educated people but also the brightest minds and the deepest souls express themselves only in English. Imagine a world in which all other languages have been reduced to silliness. Imagine the world subjected to the tyranny of a singular “Logos.” What a narrow, pitiful, and horrid world that would be! To live in such a world would be infinitely sadder, I am sure, than to be confined to the asymmetry we have now.” — Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English, tr. Mari Yoshihara & Juliet Winters Carpenter
I am most fluent in a language that is not my own. This is both a disturbing discovery and an inquiry into my existence. As somebody who understands several languages and struggles to speak in some others, the only language that I could imbibe in my brain is of the colonizer. It took me 25 years to understand that it did not matter how well I spoke or wrote in English. It shouldn’t. The purpose of any language is to be understood and as long as I am able to do that, it is enough. But yet, I feel I betray the better part of myself. Hindi was the first language I picked up but I was never good at it. The way I spoke Hindi when I was younger often suffered debasement, considering my parents were constantly moving every couple of years. In North India, I was perceived as rude since having moved from Western India, my Hindi was short of the obligatory pronouns. In Western India, I used more pronouns than were needed. Considering the depth of ridicule faced because of the manner I spoke Hindi in both Northern and Western India, I felt more settled in North East India. I could switch easy between English and the version of Hindi I had adapted.
Having studied in over 10 different schools, I was told I had an accent. Now I find the use of the term accent problematic since every individual has an accent. That is sort of the nonchalant accompaniment of the language which is spoken. However, some choose to adopt an ‘accent’ while some grow into the one that is spoken around them. I relate to the latter, considering I was switching schools from public to convents and also places and regions growing up. I pronounce certain words in a certain way and that is just how I know how to get around things. I occasionally slip in a Gujarati or Assamese pronunciation into certain English words cause I’m a product of a culture I consciously and subconsciously witnessed?!!
The way I speak Hindi suffers still. It is how E. Valentine Daniel writes in Charred Lullabies, about shifting between the Tamil dialect spoken in Jaffna and the one spoken down south in the hills in Sri Lanka. He says, “dialect and dialect switching have more to do with social relations than with linguistics,” and subconsciously, I do realize this switch when I am amongst different groups of people from any of the aforementioned Indian regions.
I do still find the rhetoric of language troubling though. I have internally sneered whenever I was told how badly my manner of speaking Hindi was affected during my time in the North East or Western India by people I know in North India. It was not something that occurred consciously and even then, it made me realize that to have been understood should have been enough. The politicization of a language makes sense only when it concerns a language of self-determination, not when you have forcefully imposed it across an entire country. That is a colonial move and nothing can convince me otherwise. However, to this note I do frown upon the realization how easily English was fostered into my existence. And I notice this more often amongst parents of the last two decades, the way they push their children into learning to speak English before they learn their own tongue. It is an exercise into alienation of one’s own culture and maybe I am a fostered product of it, or did I do it unto myself?
However, I love when I can slip in a few phrases I picked up in Assamese. It is the most exciting of exercises concerning a language for me. To be understood in a language that is both very distant from my being (ref. Heidegger, I would never use being in another context, unless stated otherwise haha), and yet is becoming of me is such a beautiful feeling. At the same time, I like the fact that I can understand a couple of other languages like Bengali or Gujarati because I spent a significant time with people from the two regions in my formative years. But the question of Urdu concerns another interesting paradigm. I understand there is Hindustani which is what most of us are fluent in (not Hindi as is) and there is Urdu. Subconsciously, there persists a switch between Hindi, Hindustani and Urdu. I realized it mostly in my writings of 2016-2020. I also noticed that I had matured in my use of Urdu while writing over the years. It did require me to study the language, the script of which I am struggling to learn now (but I shall brave it!). However, mentioning the paradigm shift in language to ardent, self-proclaimed parochial scholars of Hindi has always proven to be futile. These saviors of Hindi language, of whom I will undoubtedly remain an enemy; lest I do not care anymore.
Now to the language of love (or at least my proclamation of it), is Punjabi. I call it the language of love since it was the language of my grandmother who I treat as the epitome of love. The language she carried from Pakistan to India and the language she traded for falling in love with my grandfather. I try to understand it as much as I can. However, sometimes I have to listen to certain things really slow to make sense of the words and phrases. But I do enjoy the effort and treat it as sort of an enlightenment of its own kind that keeps me closer to her, now that she has passed.
It was a decade or more ago when I first read and heard Amrita Pritam’s Main tainu phir milangi. Her poetry almost turns a kafir like myself into a believer. And then there was Surinder Kaur’s song Akhian ch tu vasda, dedicated to me by the first person I ever fell in love and of course, the song made more sense! Inconsequentially, it has stayed with me in his absence and I seem to enjoy it even more now as I mature with it. And this is precisely what should accompany and serve to the understanding of any language. Its culture, its poetry. For without good poetry, how can we reflect on our da-sein (being)?
Listen: Words are Silent — Oleg Chubykin
"Now to the language of love (or at least my proclamation of it), is Punjabi. I call it the language of love since it was the language of my grandmother who I treat as the epitome of love." this is just beautiful hard hitting writing zoyi! Beautiful work!
Beautiful expressions. Coming from a Hindi background and writing mostly in English language, I find myself sometimes in what you have written in such a beautiful manner including the part of Amrita pritam's poetry and your grandmother story upon which a separate post can be written.